sasoi

Bother it. I've hit a new character type in my yaoi which I've never seen drawn in quite that way before, and want to use him, but -- fiddly. I suspect one could call him a very sasoi uke.

The character is one of the two principals in Minami Megumu's Usotsukina Koibito -- um, Deceitful Lover? Deceitful Friend? -- the lazy dark ultra-civilised uke as opposed to the blond, less polished, devoted seme. It seems to be set somewhere in the twenties, and the two are private detectives, or reformed jewel thieves, or private agents, or spies, or something. There is high society and travelling and locked briefcases and stolen jewellery. In any case, our hero manages to get abused by the villain/s of the episode in a panting sort of way, as ukes do, and then comes out of it in a sort of graceful satiated sprawl which is utterly Minami Megumu (looking at the rest of her work) and without a single emotional scratch, and -- dammit. I can't even work out precisely what it is about him that's nagging at me about him as something that I want to borrow for later use. But there is something, and it's not something I've generally seen before, and I want to be able to do it again.

Oh well. Definitely not a wasted day.

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"Blessed is the man who having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact."
-- George Eliot

ghosts are apt to invert

I was grating ginger earlier, for a marinade (with soy sauce and mirin and sake) for some pork, to stirfry with courgettes and onions and mushrooms. My hands still smell of ginger; oh well, better than chilis or mushrooms or similar.

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There is another point to be made of the legless ghost: by binding people to the soil, legs stress what part is on top and what is on bottom; they advertise a right way up and a wrong one. To be without legs is to be devoid of this proper standard. Ghosts are likely to come at night, not only because they relish the dark, but because people sleep lying down, their feet on the same level as their heads. At funerals, Japanese corpses were buried seated (although cremation is common today) so that they entered the next life still in the correct posture, mind firmly at the top. Ghosts are apt to invert.
-- Tim Screech, http://www.mangajin.com/mangajin/samplemj/ghosts/ghosts.htm