“The verb for beheading, in this context, retains a visceral sense of the battlefield – it is not the stark, slashing kiru of a ritual execution, but the unpleasant, gritty kubinejikiru, literally, ‘head twisting off and cutting’, wrenching the head from the neck with the aid of a dagger or butcher’s knife.”
The Rest is History podcast gets to grips with medieval Japan, including a reading from my Brief History of the Samurai.
Sorry if it’s a bit quiet on the blog at the moment, but I am literally all at sea, onboard the MS Westerdam on a two-week circumnavigation of Japan. I’m this voyage’s designated expert with Road Scholar, a company that “enriches” travellers’ experiences by forcing them to spend time with me, something that readers of this blog get for free. I’ve been lecturing about the samurai and the history of Japanese food, and squiring people around castles and tea farms, sake breweries and museums. This week alone, I’ve soaked in the hot springs at Arima, shouted myself hoarse at a sumo wrestling match, and joined in the celebrations in Kochi when the locals discovered they’d struck the tourist jackpot by becoming the subject of the just-announced 2028 NHK taiga drama.
“Nobly deciding to film in the location where the original novel was set, Zhang Yimou was disappointed to discover that the locals had stopped growing sorghum altogether, instead preferring more lucrative cash crops like peanuts. In order to match the novel’s descriptions of tall, waving gaoliang grass, he would have to pay the locals to actually plant some, and so as the script was being written, farmers in Shandong were being paid to sow sorghum seeds on sixteen acres of waste ground.
“Shooting was delayed by almost a month, when Zhang and his crew returned to the area to find that the farmers had neglected to water the fields – sorghum can be a fast-growing crop, but it is thirsty, and the crew had to spend several weeks tending to it, while the production money bled on a daily basis.
“Mo Yan’s original novel ends in the present day of its composition – the 1980s – with the narrator visiting his family graves, and fuming at the sight of a new, modern form of sorghum. He angrily berates the locals for bringing in ugly, squat hybrid sorghum from Hainan far to the south.
“Hybrid sorghum is a high-yield crop, but tastes awful, causes constipation and, most importantly isn’t red. To Zhang Yimou’s great horror, his tame farmers had sown eight acres with the wrong kind of grass…”
From my video essay in the new Blu-ray of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, coming in July from Whole Grain Pictures (US).
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 