Hi friends!

It’s the end of the week! I’ve got two weekends this coming weekend, so the next time you’ll hear from me will be Sunday night (or Monday night, depending on how intense translating is!). So between last night and today, I have:

• Finished The Meaning of Night: The fourth section more or less proved that Edward has been wronged and since I knew what was going to happen, I flew through the fifth part to get to the sixth. It’s pretty amazing how my feelings have changed since the first section, where I was a bit dubious about his ability to be a sympathetic protagonist. I’m going to start the sequel: The Glass of Time* straight after this.
• Read one more chapter of The Tale of Genji: Interestingly, this chapter (Yomogiu) shows Genji in a pretty good light. One of his lovers, the Princess Safflower, started off as one of Genji’s many lovers. She is poor, un-graceful, and has a red nose. Genji pretty much makes her his lover because he mistook her inability to answer as aloofness and saw it as alluring. Well, since Genji went into exile, the little money that she had was spent and all her servents has deserted her in a crumbling house (so terrible that, as the book puts it, “even the most pitiless, ruthless thieves ignored the place on the assumption that the villa was so desolate and deserted-looking that there couldn’t possibly be anything of value to steal”). One night, Genji passes by the palace and remembers her (previously he was just spending time with Murasaki) and seeing her dire straits, takes it upon himself to support her financially. He fixes the house, gets servants for her, and basically builds one house for his lovers in financially bad situations to live in comfort. While the book is clear that Genji isn’t attracted to her, it does also say that “in no way did he treat her lightly or with disrespect”. It’s a nice thing for him to do, especially when he never needed to do such a thing.

In other news, I have also collected a book that I ordered from Littered with Books, an indie bookstore in Singapore! It’s a bit painful to think that these two books (Pride & Pudding + a Candace Robb book because I haven’t read her mysteries in ages) cost me $64 dollars because almost the same amount, I managed to buy 10 books from BookXcess (ok, two were children’s books but one was a cookbook too!). But I’m telling myself that it’s good to support indie bookstores and I shouldn’t begrudge them the money.

I’m actually not very sure if I’ll be able to make any of the recipes in Pride and Pudding (no mould and I’m not sure if there’s suet in Singapore), but I am looking forward to learning about this aspect of food history!

*For some reason, my copy of The Glass of Time got attached by something and there are holes in the cover! It looks like bookworm damage but I’ve checked the other books in the shelves and they seem fine.

P.s. I uploaded a new video about the Japanese tea instructor on Youtube.