I’ve had two new stories out in May and June, so to celebrate their publication I’m here with yet another blog post about things that interest me and probably nobody else!
First off, the stories!
Two New Short Stories
Debuting in May over at Haven Speculative, I’m pleased to present “The Calligrapher’s Granddaughter,” a short story set in early modern Japan. It’s got magic, calligraphy, snotty samurai, probably too much detail about kanji radicals, and found family feels. (Content notes for off-screen child abandonment and child endangerment, plus animal use.)
Next, appropriately published in June, is “The Nature of Stones” in All Worlds Wayfarer’s delightful Prismatic Dreams anthology. Billing itself as a “kaleidoscope of queer speculative fiction,” the anthology has 30 stories featuring queer characters in a variety of genres. My story is about childbirth, mythic astronomy (???), and unhealthy relationships. All set in a world with no concept of gender.
Please consider purchasing a copy of either or both of these great publications if you can afford it, and thank you for supporting small publishers! :)
What is Early Modern Japan?
Early Modern Japan roughly coincides with the period between 1580 and 1868. The Edo Period, with its strong central rule, relative peace, and cultural unification, is emblematic of Japan’s early modern period, to the extent that most historians do not use the term “early modern.”
Myths and Realities of Early Modern Japan
Only one of my new stories is set in early modern Japan, but it’s certainly a time and a place that I return to again and again for inspiration and as a setting for my short stories.
Even if you don’t know much about Japan, you’ve probably seen some kind of popular media set in this time period. Seven Samurai, anybody? Naruto? Shogun?
In fact, early modern Japan is so popular a destination for popular media—both domestically and abroad—that people unfamiliar with Japanese history often claim that Japan has always been a closed-off land of honor-obsessed samurai where nothing ever changed, the social class you were born into was inescapable, and rich lords sat in their tea houses as the shogun plotted against them.
That’s actually not true at all. Like most nations, Japan has a long and fascinating existence with many changes. The early modern period (generally dated between the late 1500s to the late 1800s) amounts to a decent but not outsized portion of its roughly 1400-year recorded history.
For instance, there was no shogun in the Heian period (794-1185) and samurai didn’t even exist as a class or a concept until sometime in the 12th century. Likewise, Japan certainly wasn’t a “closed” country until the Tokugawa shogunate enacted a policy limiting contact with the outside world in the 1630s, and even then it was impossible to totally block out foreign influences.
By the early modern period, however, genre movie staples like samurai and ninja were very much on stage (if only in the popular imagination), and rigid social structures with a powerful centralized government were well entrenched. Despite the somewhat tyrannical rule of the Tokugawa, though–or perhaps because of it–early modern Japan was also a fairly peaceful period in Japanese history, with less outright militancy than some other periods.
All of this is a very oversimplified description of Japanese history, probably to the point where it’s almost as inaccurate as American movies about samurai. (Okay, hopefully it’s not that inaccurate.)
If you’re interested in learning more about Japan during the rule of the Tokugawa, The Tokugawa World is a recent collection of scholarly essays exploring everything from the military to comic books in the time period. (That link will take you to WorldCat, where you can find it in a library near you. Yay, libraries!)
If a whole scholarly book sounds exhausting, the Wikipedia article on Edo period Japan isn’t terrible, either–just don’t tell anybody I suggested it or my librarian street cred will be shot!