General spaces

There aren’t almost any described spaces in the hypertext. Some of them are closed, for example, inside a house, inn, etc. However, other open spaces appear like two big cities Yokohama and Nagasaki. They’re much known in Japan. Besides, there are many photographs which show us a fishing port and the name of a volcano appears: Fujiyama, which is inactive.

The first place that the authors decided to write about was the small fishing village below Yokohama. This small village is the one which is shown in the first image of the hypertext. This village is not described but I can tell you that there lived a blind man and it is the village where the narrator goes to find beer.

The action takes place in this small fishing village below Yokohama. Yokohama is the capital of Kanagawa Prefecture, located in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshū. Its fishing port was opened on 2 June 1859. It became the base foreign trade in Japan.

The authors write about Nagasaki which is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. We must know that during World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Nagasaki the second city in the world to be the subject to nuclear warfare.

Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki
rising 60,000 feet into the air on the morning of August 9, 1945
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki)

This is related to the hypertext because the authors tell us that the blind man lost his sight because of looking at the searing light caused by the bomb.

The main open spaces that appear are an ocean, the sky and the jade dark mountains (this description can be found in the fourth image). In the fifth photograph, Michael Joyce and Carolyn Guyer talk about Fujiyama, a big volcano which is the highest mountain in Japan at 3,776m. Its last eruption was in 1707-08.

Another external space that the authors mention is the outside village where there is a red bridge and a Buddhist Temple where the blind man lives. Virtually every Japanese municipality has at least one temple.

In the seventh photograph it appear the fishermen’s huts where they and the narrator spend lots of hours drinking Saki and passing the pipe back and forth. In the same image, the authors mention the “Fuji”: “the cone of their huts echoing Fuji’s cone”.

If we continue reading, we will see another place: the inn. It is where the narrator and his friends sleep. They are at ease in this inn. Besides it is mentioned the path they take to return to sleep: “illuminated with a powder of dried phosphorescent seaweed”.

Again, in the tenth photograph, there are more external or open spaces mentioned: “shore and mountains, sails and distant abodes”. The last space appointed is the room were there is a Geisha with whom one of the characters will sleep.

Page last modified: 4th of December

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Fran García Ribes
garifra2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press