Word: haras
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the aging General and his wife learned of Meiji's death, they purified themselves by Shinto rites. Then according to the old Shinto practice of junshi (servants following masters in death), they knelt before their household shrine and with ceremonial swords committed hara-kiri by eviscerating themselves. Later, Americans, shocked and baffled when trapped Japanese soldiers blew themselves to bits with hand grenades, or Japanese civilians drowned themselves rather than surrender, might recall General Nogi's act, with a shudder...
...Hirohito decided to go abroad. Never before had an imperial Heir Apparent left the Land of the Gods. Shinto jingoists threatened to fling themselves in fanatic immolation under the train that bore the Crown Prince to his ship. But Hirohito was not deterred, and this 20th Century form of hara-kiri did not take place...
PIPE NIGHT - John O'Hara- Duell, Sloan & Pearce...
...typical John O'Hara story, a character wants something, needs some thing or works for something - a date, a job, a reconciliation - and is at the point of getting it when everything goes wrong, the tables are turned, his friend becomes his enemy, his girl laughs at him or some body punches him, physically, intellectually or spiritually, on the nose. Three of the stories collected here (most of them first published in The New Yorker) deal with face slappings, knockouts, punches in the jaw. Thirteen deal with their social equivalents: snubs, cuts, insults, brush-offs and cold shoulders...
...brief introduction Wolcott Gibbs pays a toastmaster's tribute to John O'Hara's remarkably accurate ear, to his clear perception of the difference between satire and burlesque, to his characters who, though they are "great ones for clichés, which they usually get just a little wrong," are never caricatures. O'Hara's virtue, says Gibbs, is that he is thoroughly at home an the varied worlds between 52nd Street and Hollywood Boulevard, in one of which "every lady is a tramp and every man an enemy," and in another, "it is possible...