Re: OT: strange glyphs at Benihana

They're part of an old Japanese incense game. The host lights five different pieces of
incense, separately, and the guests use the diagrams you describe to mark their
answers as to which incenses are similar or not. The patterns correspond to
chapters in the Tale of Genji, and are hence called Genji-mon. Here's a
website:

http://www.man-pai.com/Artigos/genjimon_e.htm

Aidan

----- Original Message ----
From: Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
Sent: Monday, November 6, 2006 3:08:19 PM
Subject: OT: strange glyphs at Benihana

OK, so in our local Benihana restaurant I noticed on the wall six
woodcuts of large single glyphs.  Each one includes five vertical
lines with various pairs of them connected by a horizontal crossbar.
Sometimes the vertical lines between outer connected lines are also
touching the crossbar, and sometimes they are shortened so as not to.

Any idea what these might be?  At first I thought they might be some
variant of I Ching hexagrams, but as there are only five lines, not
six, I don't know what the correspondence might be.  And I suspect the
fact that there were a total of six exemplars might be significant as
well.

I wish I'd thought to bring a camera...

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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