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Best Books of the Month
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RYOKUSHU KUISEKO was born in the city of Nagoya in 1934. Soon after graduating as an English major from Doshisha Women's University in Kyoto, she married a renowned calligrapher. From 1963 she began studying shodo under her husband while assisting at his calligraphy school. The author has held a special calligraphy class for non-Japanese students for almost twenty years.
This is a good beginning book for learning brush technique for Japanese calligraphy of the pictographs that are based on the Chinese characters. She goes through everything from basic setup and rubbing ink through a couple dozen characters, so if you already know stroke order and have some idea of the characters you want to do, this book focuses on how to make the brush strokes for plain 'block' characters work, with some hint as to the possibilities with script characters and more artistic forms. There is a single page for how to form the phonetic characters as well. The sample characters are big, bold, and easy to learn from and have the easier posture of a native calligrapher, rather than the squared-off posture of most American renderings. It's a very good starting place for someone wishing to make characters with more personality than can be done with a normal pen or pencil. But is only a beginner's book if you already have some experience with a brush and ink.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful
This is a good book for beginning students learning to write Kanji and Hiragana. The large format makes it easy to see how to form the character correctly. The instructions are excellent, showing you step-by-step, how to write each symbol in detail. Though cursive script is shown, it is smaller and detailed instructions for writing it are not given. Each character's reading and meaning are shown as well. However, since less than 75 words are covered, it is not intended to teach you to read Japanese. The book also covers materials, techniques, & a brief history of Asian calligraphy. There is a beautiful calligraphy appreciation section in the back. It shows some of the characters reflecting their meaning.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
The title well describes the content. The focus is on the techniques with a short intro of the essential equipment. The reader is guided through a selection of some 50 characters with the emphasis on how to proceed stroke by stroke and how should the result look like. This book is a good quick start but won't serve as a long-lasting reference. As soon as you find the art of shodou as the thing for you, you'll be looking for more in-depth and covering texts on the subject. Although somewhat narrow, all the content is useful - except a list of the equipment suppliers in the US.
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