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Episode 446 - In Days of Old, There Was a Man
🕑 Added 2022-07-15 16:33:31 +0000 UTCI read snippets of the Tales of Ise back in college in one of my Japanese literature classes, but this is my first time returning to them in well over a decade. So, first, it's nice to come back--and if you're at all interested in the subject I highly recommend the translation cited in the show notes, which is excellent and has a lot of wonderful explanatory notes.
One challenge with this particular episode that I hadn't expected was how much poetry to include--I had planned for it to be a fairly poem-heavy episode, because that's what Ariwara no Narihira is best known for (well, that and his prolific love life). But those poems are so laden with allusion and metaphor that it proved incredibly difficult to find room to explain many of them; striking the balance between the poems and everything else was, in the end, what I spent the most time on in compiling this script.
Finally, in relation to the bit at the beginning: I'm still undecided as to my approach, and would love some feedback from my patrons on what you'd like to see in relation to the Abe assassination? A newsletter? A full episode? Something else? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
