Liza Dalby is one of my favourite authors on Japan. She’s an anthropologist who has studied (and lived) Japanese culture since the late 1960s. East Wind Melts The Ice is a collection of 72 short essays, based on an ancient Chinese almanac which divides the year into 72 five-day periods. Each five-day period has its own maxim to describe what happens in nature in those five days of the year. These vary from the obvious (‘peach blossoms open’) to the obscure (‘moles become quails’).
Dalby explains these maxims and uses them as a jumping-off point for a short essay observing nature either around her home in Berkley, or in Japan. In Japan, this format is called a saijiki, a “year’s journal” which entwines personal experience, natural phenomena and seasonal categories. She wrote two versions of each essay – one in English and one in Japanese, and often comments on the difficulty of this, observing things that are ‘obvious’ in one culture and obscure in another.
Dalby has has a good eye for what is going on in the natural world as time passe and plants bloom and die, birds migrate, animals appear and disappear and weather changes. She is also a lyrical and descriptive writer without being effusive and cloying. She covers an eclectic range of topics and often pokes fun at her own mistakes.
East Wind Melts The Ice is the sort of exercise I’d love to try myself, as a way of sharpening my observation and writing skills, though I know I’d never have the stamina to keep it up for a year. The only disappointment I found with the book was the sappy subtitle: ‘a guide to serenity throughout the seasons’. It’s not. It annoys me that some publisher somewhere seems to have thought that a book about nature and culture won’t sell unless it’s given some sort of self-help angle.
I enjoyed this book very much, and it would make a great gift for anyone you know who’s into gardening or nature watching. Liza Dalby’s Geisha and Kimono are also both very good.
East Wind Melts The Ice – a guide to serenity through the seasons
Liza Crihfield Dalby
Vintage, 2008
