Lesley Downer's Blog - Posts Tagged "concubine"
No word for love ...
'The Last Concubine' is set in old Japan, in the mid nineteenth century, when there was no specific word for romantic love. One of the most fascinating things about Japan is the way in which it makes you question everything you’ve taken for granted and assumed was human nature. Is love, for example, ‘human nature’? Or is it a cultural concept?
The concept of romantic love was not developed here in the west until the middle ages, when troubadours sang the stories of knights in armour fighting for the favour of a beautiful lady.
In nineteenth century Japan when western novels were first introduced, translators struggled to find the right word for this strange concept ‘love’. Initially they phoneticised the word as ra-bu. (Say it fast and you get ‘love’ in a Japanese accent.) Eventually they put together old words to make one new one: re-ai. To this day when you say to someone in Japanese ‘I love you’, you usually say ‘suki desu’, 'I like you', the same word as if you said ‘I like ... toast’.
It’s not that people in old Japan never had that mad feeling, but they regarded it as just that - madness, to be avoided at all costs. They didn’t hope to fall in love or expect to fall in love and it certainly wasn’t a condition for marriage. It was nothing to do with marriage.
'The Last Concubine’ is a love story, but I’ve tried to write it without ever using the word ‘love’. When the characters fall in love they don’t know what’s happened to them! Writing the book made me too think about love. People talk about it so glibly; but what is it?
The concept of romantic love was not developed here in the west until the middle ages, when troubadours sang the stories of knights in armour fighting for the favour of a beautiful lady.
In nineteenth century Japan when western novels were first introduced, translators struggled to find the right word for this strange concept ‘love’. Initially they phoneticised the word as ra-bu. (Say it fast and you get ‘love’ in a Japanese accent.) Eventually they put together old words to make one new one: re-ai. To this day when you say to someone in Japanese ‘I love you’, you usually say ‘suki desu’, 'I like you', the same word as if you said ‘I like ... toast’.
It’s not that people in old Japan never had that mad feeling, but they regarded it as just that - madness, to be avoided at all costs. They didn’t hope to fall in love or expect to fall in love and it certainly wasn’t a condition for marriage. It was nothing to do with marriage.
'The Last Concubine’ is a love story, but I’ve tried to write it without ever using the word ‘love’. When the characters fall in love they don’t know what’s happened to them! Writing the book made me too think about love. People talk about it so glibly; but what is it?
