This blog is about calligraphy, but there's a limit to how interesting successive postings of what is essentially black ink on white paper can be, especially if what's written in black ink isn't immediately comprehensible to the reader.
So today here's a picture of a flower from our balcony: a hosta that a kindly gentleman who has a part-time position at the company I work at gave me a couple of years ago.
A hosta, a native of north-east Asia, is a very generic office plant—there for the touch of green that it faithfully provides with very little maintenance indeed.
I once wrote a haiku about my hosta that actually features the plant's lack of flamboyance:
The wan hosta
I watered at dawn
Is now in blazing heat
Well, it turns out that while the "blazing heat" of this year's summer has yet to make itself fully felt in Tokyo, what heat we have had so far has made the formerly frumpy little hosta bloom - and gorgeously!
And it's on the topic of "blazing heat" this week's shodo offering comes in. My teacher set me it a couple of weeks ago, perhaps imagining that by the time I got it right summer would have made itself felt.
It means "the blazing day, raked by the sun's brilliance."
The first character 赫 is the character for the verb "shine brightly," kagayaku, and is made up of the character for red, or aka, repeated left and right. You'll see that although the form is essentially the same, the way I have written them are different. The left hand one is bolder than the right hand one, at least in its upper half, whereas the right hand one has a more delicate upper half and a bolder lower half.
Simple as it may look, it was one of the most challenging characters I have ever encountered in my shodo career to date. Getting it looking good enough was exceptionally difficult and time-consuming, but this morning I finally got it to the point where I considered it fit to introduce to the world.
