“In case you don’t know, kanji is the stuff you see on scrolls and painted in big black letters on banners – logographic Chinese characters used in the modern Japanese writing system. Sometimes in movies you see people dabbing big brushes in ink and artily doing strokes across washi paper…
In [Akira] Kurosawa films there’s occasionally kanji that dominates the screen all by itself – accompanied by a sparse, minimal score by a composer like Fumio Hayasaka or Toru Takemitsu – and it’s powerful stuff even if you can’t understand what the devil it says.
So in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat I decided to do a Kurosawa and throw in meaningful kanji, some of which isn’t even explained in the text – meaning that anyone who scoots through this piece will have a wee bit more insight than anyone having read the book…”
READ MORE ABOUT KANJI & ITS PLACE IN TSMG @ FORCES OF GEEK HERE:
http://www.forcesofgeek.com/2011/06/kanji-can-can.html
Tags: Akira Kurosawa, andrez bergen, Another Sky Press, calligraphy, Forces Of Geek, Japanese, kanji, tobacco-stained mountain goat
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