A. 風邪　B. 結核　C. 天然痘　D. 破傷風　E. 水疱瘡　F. 流感

Life has a funny sense of humor sometimes.  Last weekend I created a challenge about diseases.  Based on this, the universe decided that I am extremely interested in diseases and would like to learn more about them, preferably by experiencing them firsthand.  So, this week, when I am responding to a challenge about diseases, I have caught a kaze, one of the six sicknesses featured.

Dragon started off by assuming that kanji are nothing more than a funny way of writing the Latin alphabet.  To be fair, for someone who has no actual knowledge of kanji, this is probably as good a strategy as any.  Unfortunately, she didn’t read it quite right.  That last “letter” there may look like a B, but in fact it is a dented D, representing the fact that people are not in tip-top shape when they are sick.  Then, moving to the left, you can clearly see a large, somewhat angular letter C that has been rotated clockwise, and inside it is the letter O with an L running through it.  So you see that A is obviously a COLD, which is my current predicament.

Shirley engaged in a comparison study, with sadly predictable results (based on the general helpfulness of kanji in KYPC).  F may look somewhat out of the ordinary, but it is the all-too-common influenza virus.  And while A and D share a character, they have little in common, other than both being illnesses.  A, as already mentioned, is the common cold, and D is tetanus.

Theoman started off by assuming that a disease that can be caused by more than 200 different types of viruses can be accurately labeled as “simple.”  But he got it right anyway, coming up with the only successful diagnosis of the week, proving true the age-old trope of medical TV shows, in which first you have to make a mistake in order to eventually get things right.  His second guess, however, was off the mark.  We’ll assume that he meant to write “D” rather than “C” because of his reference to matching characters, though it doesn’t really matter, as neither one is the flu.  C and E are our two poxes, small and chicken, respectively, who have decided most unhelpfully to not look anything like each other.  And B is TB, so it’s a shame that A Fan chose not to ring in this time.

Now, I know some of you might think this challenge is unfair, given that one regular participant knows some Japanese and the rest do not.  So I’ve decided to even the odds a bit this week.  I also believe that those regular participants who do not know Japanese consider themselves fairly knowledgeable about literature.  Thus, this week’s challenge is about Japanese literature, and that way everyone will be familiar with half of it.  Specifically, the options will all be things that I studied this quarter in school, covering primarily works of the medieval and early modern periods.

Since I’m guessing you won’t be familiar with most of the titles, I’ll give you summaries to go on instead.  One is the first imperially-commissioned poetry anthology.  One is the memoir of a hermit who decided to abandon life in the capital and live in a hut in the mountains.  One is an epic war tale depicting the rise and fall of a mighty warrior clan.  One is a series of seemingly random and often contradictory observations written down by a monk.  One is the autobiographical tale of a woman forced into service as an imperial concubine.  And one is a combination travel log and poetry collection composed by a haiku master as he journeyed through northeastern Japan (a region that is very much in our thoughts and hearts this week).  So use either your knowledge of Japanese or your knowledge of literature and pick out whichever of those you would most want to read.

A. 奥の細道　B. 古今集　C. 徒然草　D. 問わず語り　E. 平家物語　F. 方丈記