A. 駆逐艦　B. 航空母艦　C. 巡洋艦　D. 戦艦　E. 潜水艦

Theoman led off this time, and he did a fine job, sinking the battleship at D in the first shot.  He used actual knowledge of the language to guide him, which is unofficially frowned upon, but the knowledge was vague, and his source amusing, so all is forgiven.  Actually, I believe the song he is referring to is about not simply a battleship but a space battleship, which would presumably require a three-dimensional board and make the game even more excruciatingly long than it already is.

Next came Dragon, who seems to think that children are not supposed to have fun when they play games.  Perhaps this is a reflection on her own childhood, a bleak, soulless period of time in which board games were inflected upon her as a source of torment while she hovered in that featureless void.  Or it could be that her problem is simply with children getting excited over what is, at heart, an extremely violent event: the sinking of a ship.  Call me a cynic, but trying to get kids to stop thinking that blowing things up is cool sounds like a lost cause to me.  Her targeting strategy, however, was not a lost cause, at least not entirely.  She correctly identified that the Carrier, the only 5-hole ship in the game, is the longest kanji compound at B.  After that, though . . . Miss, Miss, Miss, Miss.

A Fan’s guess was brief, and thus our response is brief: Miss.

Just as in the real game, the Carrier turned out to be the easiest to get a hit on; after Dragon, both Shirley and Theoman on his second pass lodged red pegs in its dull gray hull.  The other ships ended up being considerably more elusive, except for E, the submarine, which Theoman sank through clandestine, undisclosed methods (we suspect Jack Ryan may have been involved).  But the destroyer (A) and the cruiser (C) live to fight another day.

I would like to apologize again for the lack of an entry last Monday; my computer was inflicted with a virus.  Rather than get down about it, however, I have decided to make the event into the theme for this week’s puzzle: diseases.  We’ve got the common cold, the slightly less common flu, TB, tetanus, and a couple of kinds of pox.  Grab your canes and your whiteboards, folks: it’s time for differential diagnosis.

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

A. アイロン　B. 靴　C. 乗馬者　D. シルクハット　E. 指貫　F. 榴弾砲

In Monopoly, cheating is a way of life (and often the only way to make the game end).  Anyone who says, “I’ll be the banker” is as trustworthy as someone who proclaims, “I am not a crook!”  This being the case, I half-expected contestants this week to be looking up answers left and right, but it appears for the most part that people remained honest, or at least were skilled enough to be subtle about it as they slipped handfuls of $500 bills into their money piles.  Let’s see if that honesty paid off for you.

Theoman is correct in saying that both “horse” and “shoe” are one character (and “horseshoe” is two, but that’s a subject for a later puzzle).  So his kanji knowledge holds up.  Unfortunately, his Monopoly knowledge let him down.  The playing piece is not a horse but a man on horseback, which can be found at C.  Still, he was close; B is the shoe.  So we’ll say he had the right pair but put them on the wrong feet.

Shirley, however, spotted the shoe fairly easily, and she nearly pulled off the hat trick.  She correctly identified A and D as our two most stylish transportation options, but she picked D, the shirukuhatto (from “silk hat”), as the iron when it is in fact the top hat.  A is the iron.  These, by the way, are once again katakana rather than hiragana.  In the context of this game, if it’s used in conjunction with kanji, it’s probably hiragana, but if it stands on its own it’s probably katakana (that’s four correct uses of “its/it’s” in one sentence!  A new internet record!)

A Fan thought that A might be the boot because boots are old, and I suppose that’s true–the boot in Monopoly isn’t exactly shiny and new.  And iron is pretty old as well (call it 3,000 years or so).  The iron, however, is pretty new, and that’s the only thing that airon here can refer to.  Misfits this week include the poor, neglected thimble (E) and the Howitzer (F), which was perhaps too intimidating for its own good.

People may be wondering why I left the battleship, another classic Monopoly piece, out of last week’s challenge.  As a matter of fact, it was because I was saving it for this week.  It’s time for open warfare on the high seas, which, as my childhood taught me, consists primarily of random guessing.  So really, it’s the perfect topic for KYPC, which returns this week to its original all-kanji all-the-time format.  Can you sink my battleship?

A. 駆逐艦　B. 航空母艦　C. 巡洋艦　D. 戦艦　E. 潜水艦

A. 鉛管　B. 小刀　C. 燭台　D. 縄　E. レンチ　F. 連発拳銃

Now that we have all gathered again in the Accusing Parlor, it is time for me to produce a startling series of revelations that will, with any luck, lead to a veritable storm of fainting and monocle dropping.

I aim my first J’accuse! at A Fan, for attempting to distract people from the matter at hand with unrelated information.  I do not recall mentioning a game called “Clue,” or even one called “Cluedo,” and I certainly did not reference any viridian clergymen.  I must also accuse him of being a less-than-stellar plumber, as he seems to think that the best tool to use is B, the knife.  Still, he’s probably better than the maintenance people in my building, who have chosen to address the problem of my leaky sink by wielding the twin guns of apathy and indifference.

Dragon is a little bit further along the road to master plumberdom, but she still has a long way to go, for while she seems to have correctly identified that the wrench and the pipe are key items to be concerned with, she cannot tell the difference between them.  She spotted E as the non-kanji outsider in this week’s lineup, but she called it the lead pipe when it is clearly the wrench.  Or, to humor A Fan, we can also refer to it as the スパナ (supana).  Dragon raises a good point, however: why would a language develop characters specifically designed to represent a lead pipe?  I mean, it’s not like pipes were made out of lead for centuries, nor is it even remotely true that lead’s atomic symbol Pb derives from the Latin word plumbum, also the source of the word “plumber.”  I mean, maybe if you had two characters, one that meant “lead” and another that meant “pipe,” but . . . oh wait, there they are.  They’re at A.  A is the lead pipe.

Finally, we accuse Shirley of actually being right about something.  Her “weapon of choice,” the revolver, is indeed found at F.  Her other shots were a little bit more off the mark, but hey, that’s why a revolver has six chambers.  We already know that A is not the candlestick, which is in fact found at C.  And while she correctly spotted that E is not written in kanji, it is katakana rather than hiragana.  To compare, the same sequence of sounds (renchi) would look like this in hiragana: れんち.  But if you wrote it in hiragana, it wouldn’t mean wrench.  Funny how that works.

But, unfortunately for you all, the crime was actually committed with D, the rope, by 紅さん in the 廊下.  Better luck next time.

Now that A Fan has insisted on introducing the theme of board games, I see no reason not to stick with it.  This week’s challenge concerns transportation: what is the best means by which to travel around a board?  Riding a horse is a popular traditional choice, but why not strike fear into your opponents cruising around on a Howitzer?  If money is a concern, you can always go with the beat-up old shoe or the thimble, and if you want to travel in style, don’t forget your top hat or your iron (to keep your tux wrinkle-free).  Note that this challenge features not one but two non-kanji entries!  That’s right: the title of this game is growing more meaningless by the week!

A. アイロン　B. 靴　C. 乗馬者　D. シルクハット　E. 指貫　F. 榴弾砲

A. 浮世絵　B. 歌舞伎　C. 狂言　D. 短歌　E. 能　F. 文楽

Dragon has returned to her old role of first into the fray this week, and she does it with style.  She correctly identified B as kabuki by noting that it had a lot of boxes in it and was therefore flashy.  Her logic may seem difficult to follow, but I will attempt to lead you through it: when you hear the word “box,” the first thing that naturally jumps to mind is a cardboard box.  Now cardboard, as we well know, is not one of the flashiest substances on Earth.  It is, however, something that is stored in large quantities in warehouses.  And what else was stored in a large warehouse?  That’s right: the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  That thing was pretty flashy when they opened it up.  Ergo: kabuki.

Theoman was tricksy in his response.  He correctly spotted the noh at E on the basis of shortness (I so desperately wanted to find a counterexample of a word with the same pronunciation that was two characters long, but I could not).  However, he failed to properly follow the instructions, which clearly stated that the object of the puzzle was to identify whichever art form sounded the most interesting, and there is noh way that noh could have been the most interesting-sounding thing on that list.  But he did stoop to making the obligatory pun, so all is forgiven . . . for now (for noh?).

Our newest contestant fell prey to one of the oldest pitfalls of KYPC: assuming that kanji are meant to help rather than to mislead you.  The shared character she identified in B and D can mean either “poetry” or “song” depending on where it is used.  In kabuki it refers to singing, but D is actually the classic tanka or “short poem.”  At 31 syllables, the tanka is almost twice as long as the early modern/modern haiku; the name comes out of comparison to the chouka or “long poem,” which had no set limit on length and was already dying out by the time major poetry collections were starting to be recorded.

A Fan took a clever approach.  And he’s right–the second character in F does look an awful lot like singer/songwriter Paul Anka, recognizable by the beams of light shining off his face and the single hair standing up at an angle on his head.  But, as we have already discovered, the elusive tanka was hiding out at D.  F is the puppet theatre of bunraku, made up of two characters that, sadly, have nothing to do with puppets.  And by way of explanation to TCGU: for reasons that cannot be explained, I have always thought it more fitting to refer to live theatre with the British spelling and to a movie theater with the American one.  It may have something to do with perceptions of classiness.

Shirley’s typically accurate shotgun misfired this week.  Even her last-ditch guess failed to pull through.  That wacky bunch in A is the ukiyoe, or “pictures of the floating world.”  I guess if everything were floating you might convulse in a strange manner, but I don’t think it would be with laughter.  The “crazy words” of kyogen can be found at C.

And now for something completely different.  A murder has been committed!  Who did it?  Where was it done?  And, most importantly of all, what was the murder weapon?  Was it the candlestick?  The knife?  The lead pipe?  The revolver?  The rope?  Or the wrench?  See if you can spot the deadly implement and help solve this heinous crime.  Clever detectives may also note that one of these items is not written with kanji.  Some may chose to ignore it, figuring that they have no chance of identifying something written with characters that aren’t even intended to represent meaning.  Others may be sick of all this kanji business and figure they have as good a shot with that as they do with anything else.  Theoman, however, is banned from guessing about that particular entry, because that’s just the kind of discriminatory jerk I am.

A. 鉛管　B. 小刀　C. 燭台　D. 縄　E. レンチ　F. 連発拳銃

A. 巨蟹宮　B. 金牛宮　C. 獅子宮　D. 処女宮　E. 人馬宮　F. 双魚宮

G. 双児宮　H. 天蠍宮　I. 天秤宮　J. 白羊宮　K. 宝瓶宮　L. 磨羯宮

This week featured a plethora of multiple-guess entries.  Those familiar with KYPC, however, would probably assume that this did not in any way lead to a greater quantity of correct answers.  And you would be dead wrong.  Clearly my readers are well-attuned to the heavens, because there were more things guessed right this week than any I can remember in recent memory.

Theoman, of course, outdid everyone else in his typical shameless manner by getting not one but two correct answers.  Despite it not having anything to do with his own signs, his eyes leapt immediately to Virgo the Virgin at D (we will refrain from making any comments related to personality regarding this choice).  Then, looking inward, he sought out one of his own signs, and he decided that J was Aries the Ram because rams are white.  It would be great to make a joke about it, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s really anything else on this list that is usually thought of as white.  Goats, maybe.  Anyway, he was correct, though he could have made it a lot easier on himself by remembering that the second character means sheep.

As usual, A Fan picked out a seemingly meaningless method of guessing and, also as usual, it earned him an undeserved right answer (not that there’s such a thing as a “deserved” answer in this game).  He slipped up with his former sign, misidentifying C, which is in fact Leo the Lion (though, as misidentifications go, you could do worse than mistaking a lion for a crab.  I wouldn’t recommend getting especially close to either).  But he came through with his new sign, picking out G as Gemini, his favorite baseball team.  Out with the old and in with the new, as they say.

Shirley came up with a correct answer as well, and she came so close to the difecta.  Perhaps because of years of harsh treatment at the hands of her offspring (of whom at least one and probably two were the same sign as her), she was able to spot Cancer the Crab at A.  Actually, the first character has nothing to do with claws; it simply means “giant.”  The crab is the second one.  As for her new sign, Gemini, she had it narrowed down to two but, sadly, picked the wrong one.  However, perhaps more impressively from a kanji standpoint, she picked up on the fact that the first character in both G and F (which is Pisces) refers to there being two of something.

But one participant this week was entirely out of alignment.  First she ran away from F, the fish, because they’re pretty horrifying, I guess.  Then she attempted to measure things with B, Taurus the Bull, and I have no idea how that would work, other than that it wouldn’t.  One possibility is that Dragon’s confusion (as her name might suggest) stems from the decision to exclude Ophiuchus the Serpent-Bearer from the list.  And there is a reason: Japanese, unlike English, has different words to distinguish between Cancer the zodiac sign and Cancer the constellation.  Those listed here are for the signs, and, as far as I am aware, Ophiuchus only has a word for the constellation.  So apologies to Dragon for upsetting her heavens and knocking her out of her house, but if she has complaints, she can take them up with the dictionary.

Oh, and I still have to identify the rest of this lot.  First I will horribly confuse half my readership by saying thing that mean nothing to them: E is Equius, H is Vriska, I is Terezi, K is Eridan and L is Gamzee.  Then I will (hopefully) placate them by explaining that E is Sagittarius the Archer, H is Scorpio (do I really have to explain what that is?), I is Libra the Scales, K is Aquarius the Water Carrier, and L is Capricorn the Goat.

Anyway . . . let’s get it arted in here!  The next puzzle will be about identifying important Japanese art forms.  And, just in case you’re not familiar with Japanese art forms for some strange reason, I will briefly describe them.  From the world of theatre we are featuring the flashy, fast-paced kabuki, the steady, stylistic noh, the slap-stick comedy of kyogen and the puppet theatre of bunraku.  From the world of poetry we present the classical tanka, and representing the visual arts is the ukiyoe woodblock print.  Pick out whatever sounds the most interesting.

A. 浮世絵　B. 歌舞伎　C. 狂言　D. 短歌　E. 能　F. 文楽

A. 神無月　B. 霜月　C. 師走　D. 長月　E. 葉月　F. 文月

Not a lot of responses this week.  I guess nobody gets excited about calendars anymore.  That is, assuming that people ever got excited about calendars in the first place.

Theoman, on his first guess, was right about a part and wrong about the whole.  The first character in E means “leaf.”  Unfortunately, the month that’s associated with leaves is not one where they’re on the trees but the one when they come off.  E, hazuki, is the 8th month (remember, they used to be later in the year).  On the other hand, whether it was due to his vague memories or his sharp ones, his backup guess was correct.  C, shiwasu, is the last month of the year.  The characters represent a Running of the Priests, as it were, referring to the frantic activity of holy folk trying to get everything done before the end of the year.  Nowadays, of course, things are completely different; nowadays it’s not just priests.

Shirley’s “one lonely fellow” in F is actually a character representing writing, and this is therefore fumizuki, the “book month,” number seven on the year.  And, as we already know, no matter how busy A is, it is not December.  This is the 10th month kannazuki.  Similar to the 6th month that we went over last time, depending on how you interpret the middle character this is either the gods’ month or the month without gods.  As for the rest, B, the frost month, falls appropriately enough in November, and D, the long month, is September.  That one’s never felt particularly long to me, but maybe in the old days it was longer.

Now, there’s been a lot of talk lately about zodiac signs shifting and what-not.  Whether or not you agree with any of it, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at the signs in Japanese.  So pick out your old sign, or your new one, or the one that you think fits you the best even though it has nothing to do with when you were born.  (And don’t look for that poser, Ophiuchus.  He’s not in here.)

A. 巨蟹宮　B. 金牛宮　C. 獅子宮　D. 処女宮　E. 人馬宮　F. 双魚宮

G. 双児宮　H. 天蠍宮　I. 天秤宮　J. 白羊宮　K. 宝瓶宮　L. 磨羯宮

A. 卯月　B. 如月　C. 皐月　D. 水無月　E. 睦月　F. 弥生

I’ll say this: I’d let you folks be my calendar makers any day.  True, you don’t have a great track record of knowing which month is which, but it seems like you would be entirely likely to “accidentally” leave out February, and that’s okay by me.

I’m not sure why F doesn’t have the character meaning moon/month; it’s one of two in the year that doesn’t.  It is not, however, because it is the crummiest month.  That distinction belongs to B, kisaragi, which refers to changing clothes, especially when you write it like this: 衣更着.  I’m not sure what that’s about, because I don’t recall February being a month with enough climatic variation to allow clothes changing.  F is yayoi, the month of new life, which for simplicity’s sake we will call March.  Sound familiar?  That’s because it’s also the Yayoi Era from the quiz two weeks ago.  Check it out: choice F is exactly the same as last time.  Whoa.

Theoman had an interesting strategy.  April showers bring May flowers, and since he couldn’t find the character for rain he went for water instead.  Curiously, D can have two possible meanings depending on how you interpret the middle character.  If you read it for its sound, na, then this is the water month.  If you read it for its meaning, “nothingness,” then this is the month of no water.  Either way, Theoman’s plan is somewhat spoiled by the fact that the rainy season falls later in Japan than it does here.  Minazuki is the sixth month.

Now let’s check on Shirley.  She attempted to up her odds by making four guesses, but so far three of them have already been eliminated from possible correctness.  Fortunately, her last one comes in to save the day: A is April (typical Wordsman mind games at work?), the fourth month uzuki, referring to a flower of the genus Deutzia.  We’ll just assume that when you said A and B are April and May that you meant A to be April because it comes first.  Her “most attractive character” in C belongs to the fifth month, satsuki, which if you go by the old lunisolar calendar is closer to June than May, but that’s not how we’ve been grading things thus far, so it hardly seems fair to switch it up now.

The misfit this week is E (first month, mutsuki).

Same deal, second half of the year.  You know the drill.

A. 神無月　B. 霜月　C. 師走　D. 長月　E. 葉月　F. 文月

A. 飛鳥　B. 安土桃山　C. 古墳　D. 戦国　E. 南北朝　F. 弥生

C was a popular guess this week, and while everyone seemed to agree that it was something, no one could agree on what it was.  Theoman and Shirley both saw simplicity (why they thought that second character looked simple is a mystery to me), but they went in opposite directions.  Or rather, they went in the same direction–only one direction you can go on a history quiz, really–but Shirley went a few centuries further back.  TGCU, on the other hand, saw warriors.  And by now, if you are an experienced KYPC participant, you have probably already guessed what I am going to say: none of their answers was correct.  C is the Tomb or Kofun Period, famous for keyhole-shaped burial mounds which could get to be over 400 meters in length.

But Shirley did not stop there.  Her persistence in the face of (entirely understandable) ignorance was rewarded with the only correct identification of the week: E is the Northern and Southern Courts Period.  I like the idea of one character standing in the middle holding the two sides at arm’s length, but actually North and South are right next to each other, with the Imperial Court hanging out at the end (interesting that in Japanese one says “Southern and Northern” but in English, at least in some parts of the U.S., it sounds better to say “Northern and Southern.”)

A Fan was our lone iconoclast, refusing to be sucked in by the popularity of C.  Despite probably knowing more about the Azuchi-Momoyama period than any of the other participants, however, he was unable to correctly spot it.  The era of the three great unifiers (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu) was B.  Its direct predecessor, the Warring States or Sengoku Period, was the most common guess this week; it was located at D (one of the fun things about the Japanese language is that you can’t be sure whether it refers to one country at war or many provinces).  And out on the edges we have two sets of kanji with obscure pronunciations that may have tripped up Theoman: A is (for?) Asuka, and F is Yayoi.

While they don’t do it quite as regularly as the ones from last time, at least half of these periods continue the trend of being named after places.  Asuka was the site of the capital before they decided to pack everything up and move about seventeen miles north to Nara.  Oda Nobunaga built a castle at Azuchi, and Hideyoshi built one at Momoyama.  The Yayoi Period is named for the neighborhood in Tokyo where artifacts from it were first found, much like you might name a dinosaur the Utahraptor or Koreaceratops.  You can even argue that the Northern and Southern Courts Era was named after places, though more accurately it referred to two competing bloodlines.

Now that the new year is upon us, I think we should do a quiz on naming the months.  Now, in modern Japanese, the month names are very boring: literally “month one,” “month two,” etc.  So we’re going to be working with the traditional names instead.  Here are the first six months of the year; pick whichever one you want.  Keep in mind (if you feel like it), that the traditional Japanese calendar is the lunisolar calendar, and therefore originally the first month started a handful of weeks later than ours does.  On modern calendars, however, which list both the old names and the new names, the old first month mutsuki is listed with January, and so forth.

A. 卯月　B. 如月　C. 皐月　D. 水無月　E. 睦月　F. 弥生

A. 雁　B. 雉鳩　C. 卿　D. 黒歌鳥　E. 鼓手　F. 小間使い　G. 淑女

H. 白鳥　I. 笛吹　J. 雌鶏　K. 山鶉　L. 指輪

And now, after having delayed a week in order to allow everyone to become thoroughly sick of Christmas stuff, we present the answers to this “Twelve Days of Christmas”-themed puzzle (hopefully everyone figured that part out).  This challenge would be somewhat intimidating even to a long-term student of Japanese like me, simply because of the sheer quantity of birds.  A full half of the types of things given in the song are birds.  You’ve got birds staring at you from every direction.  It’s just like that Alfred Hitchcock movie with all those birds in it.  I think it was called Psycho or something like that.

Thus, the intelligent thing to do is to avoid our fine, feathered friends altogether, which is why the smart money in the early running should have been on Theoman, who is more interested in girls than he is in fowl (and who can blame him?)  He correctly spotted the nine ladies dancing (NOTE: the kanji are only for the most basic parts of the gifts, without the descriptors, i.e. “ladies,” “lords,” “pipers,” etc.) as G.  This means that A Fan’s guess that G was lords a-leaping is incorrect, which is too bad, because he seemed so sure about it for some reason.  The lords are hanging out at C, wedged in between the pair of turtledoves (B) and the quartet of colly birds (D).  Yes, that’s right, I said “colly birds,” which is what there were originally four of in the song (it’s another word for blackbird). Look it up.

We will forgive Shirley for being busy with travel preparations, which meant that she only had enough time to make five times as many guesses as anyone else did.  Contrary to typical KYPC results, however, the shotgun method failed to yield a correct answer.  Overall she was pretty good at identifying which ones were birds and which weren’t, but the specification of species eluded her.  To be fair, if I was trying to do this without a dictionary, I would probably have similar results.  A is our goose a-laying and H our swan a-swimming.  C, as has already been explained, is our wacky lords, who probably told everyone that they were only smoking pipe tobacco, and hey, who’s going to argue with a lord?  Those stuck-up foreign hens can be found at J, and F is our milking maid.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: “Hey, the characters in F do mean ‘maid,’ but it’s a maid like a housemaid, not a milkmaid!”  And you are correct (I think).  But where is it said that it has to be a milkmaid?  All the song says is “maids a-milking.”  It is not specific as to the type of maid.  This is Christmas time, remember.  Sometimes crazy things happen.  Just look at those lords.  How often do you see lords leap?

Dragon came at this puzzle from an interesting angle, attempting to read hidden meanings into my every statement.  As a matter of fact, she was correct: the things are listed in alphabetical order.  Unfortunately for her, it is the Japanese alphabetical order (which is a misnomer, since it has nothing to do with the English alphabet), and therefore it did not help her.  But it was a good thought nonetheless.

Let’s see, what’s left . . . people seem to have mostly ignored the musicians.  E is the drummer and I the piper–at least they have the sense to be doing things that suit them.  L is the ring, significant in that it is just about the only item on the list that a sane person would give as a gift.  And, last but not least, our most famous pear tree-dweller is sitting there at K.

A new year is upon us, a time for looking ahead to the future.  Ah, forget the future.  Let’s look at the past instead.  Here comes the second official Periods of Japanese History Quiz!  Your options this time are the Yayoi Period (300 BC-250 AD), the Tomb Period (250-538), the Asuka Period (538-710), the Northern and Southern Courts Period (1336-1392), the Warring States (or “Country at War”) Period (1467-1573), and the Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1568-1603).  I’d like Theoman to look for Asuka, because . . . because I said so, that’s why.  You may notice that some of these overlap with times covered in the previous quiz; several of them are smaller divisions sometimes identified within a larger historical era, such as the Muromachi.  And sometimes, looking back at things centuries later, historians can’t always decide exactly in which year one period ended and another began.

A. 飛鳥　B. 安土桃山　C. 古墳　D. 戦国　E. 南北朝　F. 弥生

A. 怒りの葡萄　B. 王子と乞食　C. 誰がために鐘は鳴る　D. 白鯨

E. 響きと怒り　F. 緋文字

It seems clear that A Fan is the most well-read of our contestants, or at least the most interested in showing it off.  We can’t tell you what led him to call on some of the more obscure works of the authors in question, but we can do two things: the first is to recommend Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”  The second is to point out that, among his eclectic guesses, there was one that did appear on the list: Grapes of Wrath.  Unfortunately, he put it in the wrong place.  The Steinbeck tale comes up first at A, where it was correctly identified by Theoman, who is perhaps more of a bibliophile than he himself believed.  One last consolation for A Fan: perhaps he can take some solace in the fact that he is more in tune with the authors than with their works; the titles are wrong but the writers are right on his guesses for C and E.

Theoman is on a roll, and he’s beginning to show his swagger.  Note the brusqueness of his “guess”: “B is The Prince and the Pauper.”  Not “I think,” not “B could be,” it is.  And he’s right, which means he’s two-for-two this week, and how many other KYPC regulars can boast that kind of success? (I don’t know; maybe you folks are keeping track better than me).  Shirley had two guesses as well, but her record this week was a little less impressive.  She wanted to find what A Fan called the recognized great American novel, and, in her defense, I wanted to include it, but books with names in the title don’t work well for this game, so Twain’s river-rafting epic sat this one out.  She should be glad, however, that the featured Hemingway work was For Whom the Bell Tolls, which shows up not at B but at C.  Shirley was correct in saying that B and C were Hemingway and Twain, just not quite in that order.

And then we had a last-minute entry by Dragon, who probably does all her shopping on Christmas Eve.  She came in seeking forgiveness, though she chose a strange way of showing it by making her guess a tale of vengeance.  “Now wait,” you all say (yes, I can hear you), “You said no titles with names in them!”  I did say that, or rather, I implied it.  But I did also point out that one of these works has a slightly different title in Japan.  And this is it.  The characters in D mean “white” and “whale,” and I don’t think I have to explain which book that is.  So, in the spirit of Christmas, I have no choice but to forgive Dragon for whatever the heck it is she’s so sorry about.

Our outcasts this week are E and F, which are Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, respectively.  One of them I read in high school and thought it was boring, and the other of which I have only heard is boring.  Hey, there are a lot of books out there.  They can’t all be winners.

Much as you may not want to think about it, we’re running out of time before Christmas.  Need help with gift ideas?  Check out this list of things my true love gave to me.  I’m telling you, she just won’t stop!  Seriously, it’s been almost two weeks, and she just keeps handing these things over.  More and more and more of them!  Maybe you can figure out what they are, and why she seems to be suffering from such an acute attack of Christmas spirit.  (Just to let you know, they’re not listed in order.  At least, not the order you would expect them to be in).

A. 雁　B. 雉鳩　C. 卿　D. 黒歌鳥　E. 鼓手　F. 小間使い　G. 淑女

H. 白鳥　I. 笛吹　J. 雌鶏　K. 山鶉　L. 指輪