SRFL News

 DUAN Yucai and WANG Guowei

For the memory of Book shop streets at Kanda, Tokyo

From Author;
This essay is translated by Google.
So ambiguous sentences are seen.
I humbly beg your pardon.
Original text is Japanese.
Refer to the next please.
https://hillswest.blogspot.com/2024/04/duan-yucai-and-wang-guowei.html

It was a sunny Sunday, so I took the tram and went to the used bookstore district. After walking along the wide main road for ten minutes, you will enter a used bookstore district. The ginkgo trees on the street are still a little early in their leaves turning yellow. The brown brick buildings on either side blend in with the old cobblestone sidewalks. Once upon a time, I took the City Line, got off at the old D station, and headed south along the cobblestone pavement into the used bookstore district. So it's easier now. Just south of the tram stop is N Bookstore, a Chinese book store that I often go to. I find it easiest to walk as a routine, so before I knew it, I ended up stopping at the same bookstore often. N Bookstore is customary for bookstores around here, with a narrow frontage and a long back. There are two aisles and four rows of bookshelves. There is a clerk at the very back. Once before, he came across a book that he vaguely remembered and asked what it had in stock. Then, a thick catalogue was handed to me without a word, which caused me some trouble. Since then, I have not asked questions carelessly. I've looked all around the entrance, so today I'm going to go inside. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. A large, old, bespectacled clerk continues to work silently on the package, probably to be shipped to the library. The slips that were left there are listed with unknown book titles. A moved out of the way and decided to look at the bookshelf right in front of it. I reached for the oracle bone dictionary on the pale grey cover of a large volume that was easily visible in the middle row. It feels heavy when you pick it up. It has a unique oil smell. There may not be many true oil-sealed books like those of olden days, but Chinese books have a unique sense of him. Inside, there is a black frame with vertical ruled lines, and handwritten letters are printed on them. The lettering is not that bad. Many handwritten letters are so skilful that they are difficult to read, but this one is manageable. The preface is long, so if you look at the end, it says that it took eight years to create this dictionary. In the catalogue after the preface, there are oracle bone characters for headings. Looking at the text, there are quite a few that are written as ``the shape of the letters is quite unknown'' or ``the meaning is unknown.'' He decided to buy her because she was honest and likable. It was inconvenient to walk if it was this heavy, but I didn't want to stop by again on the way home, so I just bought it. If you go a little south on the opposite sidewalk, you'll find an old two-story coffee shop. The first floor is like an office, and going up the stairs is a store. Since I left without having lunch, I decided to take it easy. There are always very few customers. I think this is okay, but he's still here. I look down from the window and see people rushing along the sidewalk. Perhaps he is from a bookstore, as he pedals a sturdy bicycle with a large bamboo carrier attached. he asked as the tram passed by. This scenery has not changed for a long time. He has wandered here alone like a rhinoceros. He became interested in oracle bone script a long time ago. The origin of anything is fascinating. This is where writing began, and that alone was enough evidence. After that, I spent some time reading introductory books and explanations. A certain concept, the shape that represents it, and its deformed depiction change with the times. But soon I wondered what lay before the beginning. Nothing. What happens when you go to a place where there is nothing? Concepts become increasingly simple and childish, and there is nothing beyond them. Once I thought about it, I didn't feel like continuing. Then I moved, and some of the books I had collected were lost. However, recently I have become concerned about oracle bone characters again because of the fireworks prints. As I was thinking about the flow of the screen, I realized that time was inherent in the shapes, and the oracle bone characters showed this. In the print, fireworks are launched and opened one after another. This is repeated in infinitely small prints. You could say that it happened within a closed period of time. I thought that this kind of closed time might exist in the written word as well. He was once looking at Guantang jilin in the Kingdom of Wei, and he came across a sentence. It was written about the character ”``gen''``（亙）. This character has the meaning of "to cross'' or "to last forever". WANG Guowei says that in the oracle bone script, the two horizontal lines drawn up and down are the banks of the river, and between them is a small crescent-shaped boat, which goes back and forth between the two banks. SO the meaning became "to be repeated.'' When he felt that WANG Guowei had clearly demonstrated the immanence of time in kanji as a structure, he was struck by her precise reasoning, but at that time he was completely lost. Now, with the prints of fireworks, it has been brought back to light. When he returned to Guantang jilin during his wandering days, he could barely understand a part of it, but there was a feeling of hope shining like a ray of straw for him. . That has now become a reality. In the Guantang jilin, the character ``west'' indicates a bird's nest, and in the another paper, the character ``chu'' indicates that the flag is waving in the same direction in the wind. . That is, the birds return to their nests at sunset, and the flag flutters in the wind at the centre of the group. Time truly flowed through the words. In particular, the character shape for "zhong" (中), in which the flag flutters from side to side, is a phenomenon that cannot occur in the same wind, and the character form is said to have been erroneously copied and to be a ”wei” （譌）character. All of the texts in WANG Guowei are relatively short, but each piece of information in the small annotation is filled with dazzling and sharp insights that evoke a vast historical reality behind them. Even in literature, we can say in fine detail in human speech, the sounds in the air, the colons in the sky, the shadows in the water, the image in the mirror, the will is limitless because words are exhausted. It touches on the finiteness of language and the infinity of meaning. He also says that the five characters in the phrase "drifting light to moisten the light"' capture the spirit of Spring grass. He was born in 1877 and died in 1927. Did he live in the modern era with his honed talent, or did he himself create the modern era? When he returned to his room, he read through the dictionary he had picked up, and was drawn to the oracle bone character for　"yu"（育）. It is clear that the upper part of this character represents a woman giving birth, and the lower part represents a child being born. In the old form, the child is therefore written upside down. Some documents clearly show amniotic fluid at the time of birth. In other words, the original meaning of this character is childbirth itself, but care begins immediately after birth. Therefore, it was written that the meaning of "to grow"' appears. Considering the concept of time inherent in this character, we can understand him from preparation for childbirth to childbirth itself to child rearing. I was curious about this character, so I took a look at the explanatory annotations for the Duan Yucai, which WANG Guowei taught most in elementary school, and found that since an upside-down child is not good, it has the meaning of making it good. It was written that. Although the explanation retains some traces of the original material in the ``upside-down child'' part, it is abstract as a whole, and combines the original material's figures showing the specific process of childbirth with the idea that there is something inherent in it. It had become quite distant from the time when it was revealed. Duan Yucai, a rare scholar, died in 1815. The oracle bone script discovered in 1899 had never been seen before.

April 04, 2024 Reprint