The guest-bond: hospitality, gift-exchange, and inherited obligation.
A boy is told his mother lies pinned under Mount Hua for the crime of marrying his father: how a folk-and-theatre tale of the Ming and Qing borrowed its splitting axe from a river-god fifteen centuries older.
The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.
Confucius almost never called anyone humane, not even the sage-kings. Yet he swore the virtue was one act of will away: I desire it, and it is here.
His name means "the cormorant-feather roof was not finished". Born at the edge of land and sea, Ugayafukiaezu stands between the gods of Japan's oldest chronicles and the human imperial line.
