Welcome to Deena's kanji-ku corner

Click on the links here and then click on the X to close the box.

About these little works

When and why did I write them?

What do you plan to do with these?

How could I do this?

What are Kanji-kus? WE MOVED THIS!!

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Kanji-kus are a series of short hypertexts where a stylized Japanese kanji holds a short, haikuesque poem in English within the lines. Each of these poem lines becomes the title for a corresponding short node, and these nodes comprise a short story, poem, or essay. Readers can mouseover the kanji-ku to access text or go through textual links. I was interested in exploring what you could do within the structure of the ideogram that meant the word, using layering and spatial relations as well as link and image to incorporate meaning and mood.

For me, this kanji-ku artform culminated in my mystery novel, Disappearing Rain, in 2001.

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I wrote these works in the late 1990s, using the same Java and Javascript that Rich Higgason and Miko Matsumura coded for me in about 6 minutes in a long-ago conference. A couple of them have an image rather than a kanji, as I was experimenting with various structured meaning approaches. I used these pieces mostly as battering rams to break down online magazines’ dependence on linear works. This, you will not be surprised to know, did not work out well. Even though most of these works were published in these online journals, they were an exception and very rarely a rule. I made this code available, but I’m not sure anyone else did anything with it.

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Originally, I confess, I had a grand scheme for the kanji-kus. Jim Rosenberg had shown me a magic square text in Chinese story that you could read across, diagonally, and down, garnering different meanings with each direction. I wanted to do something like that, and I was gathering the words carefully to fit into the larger work, which was going to be something like 6 characters on a side, so 36 total.

However, these works are no longer accessible. They present mobility challenges (on the mouseover hovering), visual challenges (as the kanji-ku goes untranslated from the image), and cell phone challenges (as hover does not exist on cell phones so you can’t replicate the desktop experience). It might be hard to get others to write in this code, as the work takes so many steps (kanji, kanji-ku, story, links, coding). So while saving this code is fantastic, I may well wait to come back to the kanji-kus until I can come up with a more accessible way to place words on a structural image and corresponding words next to that image in a way readers can experience both simultaneously.

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There are probably much better ways to showcase the same thing--this was what was available and new and way cool beans in the 1990s. However, if you want to do this, download Holly's Legends and look at the comments to see how to make your own!

List of kanji-kus

a screenshot from the NEXT of all of the kanji-kus pre 2024

Kanji-kus (View them in The NEXT as the Electronic Literature Lab resurrected them).
Holly's Legends, 2024 (Revived as a thank you to Holly Slocum)
Dreams of Cobras, in Tattoo Highway, 2002
Children's Time, in Snakeskin, 2001
Sea Whispers, in Currents, 2001
In the Sun, in Project Hope, 2001
Bubbles, in Electronic Poetry Center, 2000
What Women Say, 2000
Breathing at the Galaxy's Edges, in Planet Magazine, 1999
Mountain Rumbles, in New River, 1999
The Language of the Void, in Riding the Meridian, 1999
Spiritual Comfort, in PIF, 1999
Dream Mergin, in Aileron, 1999
Sand Loves, in Eastgate's Reading Room, 1999
Stained Word Windows, 1999
Father Figures, 1999
Power Moves, in Cauldron and Net, 2000 and Ghost Moons part of Akenatondocks published cd, 2000 have disappeared.