Long Weekend…

…and I don’t know when we’ll get to post; possibly not until Monday. So, in case we can’t get back to it until then, Happy Easter Weekend, everyone!

A Happy Undead Review!

Michael’s story, “Red Blues”, gets the special mention it deserves in the Innsmouth Free Press’s review of Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead.  I encourage you to check it out, and get a copy of the book.  Whether you’re just slightly interested in vampires or a long-time fan of the genre, you’ll like this collection of stories, which pushes the old blood-sucking envelope in remarkably innovative directions.

Hope you have a great Wednesday… and fangs for reading our blog.  (Yeah, I know… but it’s that kind of day.)

Another Kind of Monday

And Monday it is.  We open our eyes and groan.  We crawl out of bed at the last possible moment, drag ourselves to the coffee pot and brew a hot cup of consciousness, trying to wake up enough to remember our own names.  We had a pretty decent weekend, but now it’s back to the grind.

And in seven more days, we’ll be doing this again.  Oh, yuck; another Monday.

In ancient Japan, though, the week didn’t have seven days.  In the time period when our novel takes place, the Japanese went by a calendar that gave them a 30-day month, consisting of three 10-day weeks.  There were compensation days put in periodically, to keep the 365-day year from being knocked cockeyed by the 30-day month.  But when you thought of a week in the Sengoku Jidai, you were thinking of a string of days named One, Two, Three, Four, and so on, up to Ten.

So, I encourage you to enliven your Monday by imagining yourself opening your eyes and groaning, rolling off your straw sleeping-mat — it’s too early for futons to have been invented — dragging yourself to the fire and brewing a pot of green tea, trying to get properly conscious, because it’s so hard to wake up on Day One after the weekend…

Hang on.  Weekend?

Your Turn!

Michael’s previous post has made me wonder about you, our readers.  Our blog hasn’t really been active for very long, and yet we do have people looking into it, presumably for all sorts of reasons.  It makes us feel good (and somewhat amazed!) that people are reading us, perhaps even on a somewhat-regular basis.  And the previous post got more hits than almost anything else we’ve put up here.  The previous post about infusing shochu with umeboshi, and how delicious the results are.

So… we’d love it if you would post your favourite drinkable innovations in the comments, so that we and all the other readers could try them.  Have you a favourite cocktail?  One you discovered, were introduced to, or invented yourself?  How about a delicious and unusual non-alcoholic drink?  Something you put in your tea or coffee that turns the ordinary into a treat?  Something you put in your hot chocolate that really goes well with it?  It’d be great to hear from you, and read your ideas!

Here are two to begin with.  A glass of soda water with ice is just sublime with a splash or two of yuzu juice added, especially on a hot day.  And so is a generous ounce of golden rum, enriched with a scant ounce of Calvados and an ice cube, sipped slowly as the sun goes down.

What about you?  What do you like to drink?

Peter Watts convicted

Our friend, esteemed colleague, and fellow workshop-member Peter Watts is now a convicted felon, for having committed the crime of asking a U.S. border guard a question.  He faces the possibility of up to three years in jail, and may never be allowed into the United States again.

Michael and I currently share the problem of being incapable of coherent speech regarding this matter — at least, coherent speech whose main content is not a long string of bad language.  So let me simply observe that it would appear the Land of the Free only grants that freedom to those who guard its borders — and that it’s the freedom to take out their frustrations on innocent citizens, freedom to take advantage of badly-written laws in order to make themselves feel important by beating up random strangers and throwing them into jail.  In other words, not freedom.  License.

We mourn for you, America.  All that freedom you keep talking about… it’s a ghost.

A cocktail, ’cause it’s that kind of week

Michael’s working on another post about collaboration, but it’s not quite ready to put up yet, Work having intervened.  So in the meantime, I’d like to introduce you to a cocktail that uses two ingredients I first tried when staying at the Hirota Guest House in Kyoto:  shochu, and yuzu.

Shochu is a distilled spirit, not a brewed product like sake.  We have a few — a pitiful few — varieties of shochu available to us in Canada, and one or two types of Korean sochu which, while pleasant, is not quite the same thing.  So visiting the liquor shop near our guest house in Kyoto was a revelation.  They stocked dozens of different types of shochu, made from all kinds of ingredients.  Michael, Lorna and I tried a different one every evening and barely scratched the surface of what was available.  The variations in flavour were remarkable, as distinctive as those in different kinds of single-malt Scotch.

Earlier in the week, hunting up a hostess gift for Hirota-san — the lady who ran the guest house — we visited the nearest department store.  That was an experience in itself, and one that deserves its own blog entry at some future date.  Just seeing the food floor of that department store made me feel as though I had come from a backward and somewhat uncivilized nation.  Among the many thousands of delights on display was a section of liqueurs, presided over by a politely-smiling lady who was giving out free samples.  (Free samples of alcohol, in a department store.  See?  Intensely civilized.)  Noticing us as obviously being From Away, she offered us a taste of liqueur made from yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit.  It tasted like an orange, a lemon, a lime, and a tangerine, with little hints of grapefruit in the background.  We were delighted, and bought a bottle of it.  Hirota-san herself was so pleased with it that she told us she was going to place it on her family’s altar for a while before drinking it herself.  It was pretty gratifying to know we’d given her something that would even make her ancestors happy.

The recipe below uses yuzu juice, which is available at many Japanese and Asian grocery stores.  Don’t know if your ancestors will like this cocktail, but I hope you will.

Kyoto Guest House

1.5  – 2 oz. vodka
1/2 oz. shochu
2 good dashes yuzu juice

Mix ingredients in a glass over ice cubes.  Fill with soda water.

Apologies…

…too madly busy to post. Though if the clouds of Stuff thin out, it still might happen today. Otherwise, see you tomorrow!

Heat that’s Up Your Nose

I’m getting a great kick out of trying to figure out what people ate during the Sengoku Jidai.  Sometimes we’ve had to work at that problem backhandedly.  I’m thinking of wasabi right now — that tasty green root, whose effect, a wave of brain-displacing fumes up the back of your nose, so resembles that of horseradish.

Wasabi roots, in a Tokyo restaurant

Most wasabi you get in Canadian restaurants is horseradish — powdered, mixed with water and coloured green — because wasabi roots are difficult to cultivate.  (The plants only grow in or beside mountain streams, for one thing.)  Real wasabi, though, has layers of delicate flavour that transcend standard horseradish.  Much as I love horseradish, this could give it a run for its money.

Our friend Hicaru took us to his favourite Tokyo restaurant when we visited, and for the first time we got to eat real wasabi.  It was used in the way we’re used to, with sushi and sashimi, and Hicaru also showed Michael and Lorna how to use it as a garnish for their soba noodles, which was new to all of us from Canada.  He grated it on a traditional grater, which I now know, after some research, is made of sharkskin.  The flavour — of the wasabi, not the sharkskin — was lively, bright, and intense.

Grating wasabi root on a sharkskin grater

So, you ask, what’s this got to do with the Sengoku period?  Well, we were hoping to have our characters enjoy wasabi in some way.  Not being able to find a handy menu of Sengoku Jidai condiments, we decided the way to work it was to try and learn just when wasabi was first cultivated in Japan.  We’re still working on the details, but apparently written record has been found of its being grown as early as the year 685.  That means our characters will likely be able to enjoy some with their suppers.

Wasabi has antibacterial qualities as well, so maybe it was used medicinally, too — even before people knew what bacteria were, they knew that some plants seemed to help fight infections, so maybe wasabi was used in poultices for wounds.  I’ll have to look into that.  I’ll bet it would sting like crazy.

In the meantime, one or the other of us will see you tomorrow, all going well!

Blood and Gunpowder

TCM is running a festival of films by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa every Tuesday evening this month.  Last night, being interested for various reasons in Japanese history, I turned it on and watched ‘Throne of Blood’ for the first time.

Even if Japanese history isn’t your thing, this film is a treat.  Openly based on William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, it takes place in feudal Japan… and though I have been so far unable to verify this, it looks to be set in the same part of the Sengoku period as our novel.

It’s Kurosawa, so it’s wonderful — I’m a big fan, and I’m by no means alone.  But quite apart from the quality of the film-making and the acting, it was so much fun to see people as they would appear in our book, particularly samurai mounted on horseback, fighting with bows and arrows and spears, and not a gun in sight.  Our book is like that, being set before the Portuguese introduced firearms to Japan.

There seems a more attractive, imagination-inspiring quality to the idea of battles fought before gunpowder.  Weapons were hand-made, and their mechanical function was basic — plain physics, without the involvement of chemistry.  The weapon did nothing automatically, so that the man wielding it had to have training and a great deal of practiced skill to use it properly.  And tactics had to be different from today’s fighting methods, and the differences are fascinating.  Dornford Yates says “gunpowder killed the romance of the battlefield”, and I know what he means — even though I believe the only good war is either virtual or fictional.

But I digress.  Watching ‘Throne of Blood’ improved my visualization of what kind of world the characters in Demon Gate inhabit, and how they relate to that world and do each other.  And besides that, it’s a great movie, impossible not to recommend.

Some Things Don’t Change…

Humans have always been humans.  Throughout history and across cultures, though we may have had have different levels of technology, different knowledge-bases, different toys, we’ve still been people.  And people in pretty much every country on Earth have been enjoying the company of cats for thousands of years.

Japan is no exception.  These models are set up behind a barrier in the Vanity Tower in Himeji Castle, to provide visitors a glimpse of what life must have been like there for Princess Sen, who married into the Honda family about 100 years after our novel Demon Gate takes place.  You can see it better by clicking on the picture.  Princess Sen had companions; she had hobbies and amusements; and in this interpretation, she had a cat.

The Japanese word for “cat” is neko.  An approximation of “kitty” would be neko-chan.  You just know that this particular neko is about to lash its tail, spring forward, and bat one of the shells across the mat as though it were a mouse.  The cat demands attention.  The cat wants to play.  The can enjoys hanging around with its humans, and wants to be included in their activity.  And possibly the cat is about to remind its humans that now is the time for fish, because the cat is a good mouser and has taken care of most of the rodents available for munching in the Vanity Tower, and the cat is now hungry and must be fed.

Princess Sen may be a princess… but the cat is, after all, a Cat.