To Winter
LI Kohr
2015
From Author;
This tale version has some ambiguity by auto-translation.
Original text is Japanese.
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It was a fine day on Sunday, so I took the tram to the second-hand bookshop district. After about ten minutes on the wide main road, I entered the second-hand bookshop district. The ginkgo trees along the road are still a little early to turn yellow. The brown brick buildings on both sides blend in with the old stone pavement. I used to come here on the city line, get off at the old D station, walk south along the stone pavement, and enter the second-hand bookshop district. Now it's easier. Just south of the tram stop is N Bookshop, a Chinese bookshop I often visit. It's easiest to just walk around as a routine, so before I knew it, I'd often stop by the same bookstore. N Bookshop is narrow and long, as is the norm for bookstores around here. There are two aisles and four rows of bookshelves. There is a clerk at the very back. I once asked about the stock of a book I vaguely remembered. Then, I was handed a thick catalogue without any words, which put me in a difficult position. Since then, A hasn't bothered to ask around so carelessly. He's already had a look around the entrance area, so today he goes further in. It takes a while for his eyes to get used to the dimness. A large, elderly clerk wearing glasses is working silently, as if he is handling parcels to be sent to libraries. There are unknown book titles lined up on the shipping slips that are placed on the shelves. A tries not to get in the way,
I decided to look at the bookshelf just in front of it. I reached for a large dictionary of oracle bone script with a light gray cover that was in a place in the middle where it was easy to see. It was heavy when I picked it up. It had a distinctive oily smell. There may not be many real oil-stamp books like in the past, but Chinese books have a unique smell. Inside, there is a black frame with vertical lines, and handwritten characters are printed on it. The characters are not very cursive. Many handwritten characters are too beautiful to read, but this one is manageable. The preface is long, so I looked at the very end of it and saw that it took eight years to create this dictionary. The table of contents after the preface has a list of oracle bone script headings. Looking at the main text, there are many that say "The shape of the characters is unknown" and "The meaning is unknown." It seems honest and appealing, so I decided to buy it. It was so heavy that it would have been inconvenient for me to walk from then on, but I didn't want to have to stop by again on the way home, so I went ahead and bought it.
A little further south on the opposite sidewalk there is an old two-story coffee shop. The first floor is like an office, and up the stairs is the shop. I left without having lunch so decided to have a quick meal. There are hardly any customers at all. I wonder if this is okay, but it's still going on. Looking down from the window, I see people hurrying across the sidewalk. Someone, perhaps a bookstore worker, is pedaling a sturdy bicycle with a large bamboo carrier. Occasionally a tram passes by. The scene has not changed for a long time. Here he has been wandering alone, like a rhinoceros.
It's been a long time since he became interested in oracle bone script. The origin of anything is fascinating. "This is where writing began," was enough evidence. After that, he spent some time reading introductory books and explanations. A certain concept and the figure that represents it, its deformed depiction changes with the times. But soon he wondered what was before the origin. There was nothing. What would happen if you went to a place where there was nothing? The concept became more and more simplified and childish, and at the tip of it there was nothing. Thinking like that, he lost interest in continuing.
Then I moved house and some of the books I had collected were scattered at some point. But recently I started to think about oracle bone script again because of the fireworks prints. As I was thinking about the flow of the screen, I realized that time is inherent in the shapes, and that is what the oracle bone script shows. In the prints, the fireworks are launched one after another and explode. This is repeated in the infinitely small prints. You could say it is an event that occurs in a closed time. I thought that such a closed time may be inherent in letters as well.
Once, while looking at Wang Guowei's Guandang Collection, I came across a passage. It was about the character "亙". This character means "cross" or "endure". Wang Guowei said that in the oracle bone script, the two horizontal lines drawn up and down represent the riverbanks, and between them is a crescent-shaped boat that travels between the two banks, so "crossing" or "repeatedly going back and forth" is the meaning. When I felt that Wang Guowei had made it clear that time is inherent in the Chinese characters as a structure, I was struck by his precise reasoning, but at the time, I left it at that. Now, it has been brought back to light by the fireworks prints.
When I searched for the Kandō Collection in my wandering days, I could only understand a part of it, but I had a premonition that hope would shine there like a ray of straw. Now that has become a reality. In the Kandō Collection's commentary on the west, the character "west" is shown to be a bird's nest, and in the Shi Lao Pian Commentary, the character "中" is shown to be a state in which flags are blowing in the same direction in the wind. In other words, birds return to their nests at sunset, and flags are blowing in the wind in the centre of the group. Time truly flows within the characters. In particular, he claims that the character "中" (中) where flags are blowing left and right is a phenomenon that cannot occur with the same wind, and that the character is a transcription error and a pseudo-character. Wang Wang's sentences are all relatively short, but each and every piece of information in the annotations is full of dazzling and sharp insights that evoke vast historical facts behind them.
In literature, too, human words speak minutely and precisely: sounds in the air, colors in the air, shadows in the water, images in the mirror; words are exhausted and meanings are infinite. He touches on the finiteness of language and the infinity of meaning. He also says that the five characters "a light rain moistens the light" all capture the soul of spring grass. Wang Wang was born in 1877 and died in 1927. Did he live in modern times with his sharpened natural talent, or did he build modern times himself?
Returning to my room and reading through the dictionary I had requested, I was drawn to the oracle bone inscription for "育" (raise). It is clear that the top of this character represents a woman giving birth, and the bottom represents a baby being born. In ancient times, therefore, the character for baby is written upside down. Some sources explicitly indicate the amniotic fluid at the time of birth. In other words, the original meaning of this character is childbirth itself, but after birth, child-rearing begins immediately. It was written that therefore the meaning of "raise" emerges. Given the idea of time inherent in this character, it can be interpreted as representing the preparations for childbirth, the birth itself, and then child-rearing.
Curious, I looked up this character again in the Shuowen Jiezi notes by Duan Yucai, which Wang Wang studied most in primary school, and found that it said that an upside-down baby is not good, so the meaning is to make it good. The explanation retained some of the original source material in the part about "upside-down baby", but overall it was abstract, and quite far removed from the diagram showing the specific process of childbirth and the time thought to be inherent in it in the original source material. Duan Yucai, a rare scholar, passed away in 1815. The oracle bone inscriptions discovered in 1899 had never been seen before.
9 March 2025
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