Fun for Friday: Big Pink Book Prompt 16 Results!
This week’s prompt from the Big Pink Book went in an odd direction! I’d called this one “space” on Monday, because of the top left sticker, and when I sat down to work on this page, I was also thinking about a prompt of “trickster.” My thought was to find a trickster goddess who might also have something to do with the heavens, so that I could pull off the combination of those two elements.
Instead, I wound up on yokai.com and found the hoshi kōmori. There was a bit there about two possible con artists who claimed they had one of these unusual bats, and I thought I might go in that direction. But as I dug further into that (rabbit hole 1), the timeline didn’t add up–they were living in the 1800s, but the warlord referenced by the person who wanted to trade them for the bat lived maybe 600 years earlier. I suspect there was a translation or transcription mishap at work, but since I couldn’t quite square the details, I didn’t pursue that storyline.
I also took notes on nogitsune, a type of kitsune that don’t serve as messengers for Inari and are generally seen as “evil” tricksters. Since there was also mention of fox spirits learning magic from the sun, moon, and stars to become kitsune or nogitsune, I thought I had a winner there. I jotted down some notes about kitsune-mochi families, which were said to have kitsune that did their bidding, and tskuimono-suji or -tsuji, which were hereditary witches that also had ties to animals, both from Japanese culture.
Then I poked around at constellations, thinking that it could be fun to play with Canis Major, as nogitsune are said to be afraid of dogs (among other things). I also learned that Canis Minor is supposed to be a fox in Greek mythology, and there’s some fun interplay there with a fox that can’t be caught and a hunting dog that always caught its quarry. (And they’re separated by a constellation that is sometimes portrayed as a unicorn!) Since some people call bats “sky puppies,” I thought I might be able to get the hoshi kōmori back into the story! But I also fell down another rabbit hole (rabbit hole 2) about Chinese constellations (which are also part of Japanese and Korean astronomy and astrology) that was ultimately far more complex than I wanted to try to sort out. Especially because all of this? It was supposed to be for a drabble. I think my notes were longer than the story could have been!
And in the end, I had a page with some rough notes and no strong story plot, and I’d fallen down two DEEP rabbit holes that ate up most of my evening. So this one is something I’ll have to come back to–maybe I’ll see something in Japan that pulls all the pieces together!
Comments