At 08:37 am 24/07/99 -0400, you wrote:

FIRST STEPS
A Ranma 1/2 Fanfiction by Jan Story

Standard Disclaimer: All characters � by Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, etc.

For my daughter Meg, and for small martial artists everywhere.

Nothing to do.

She was tired of coloring and there was nothing on TV. She couldn't go to
the park without a grownup, and the only games she knew needed somebody else
to play with her.

"Play with me, nee-chan?"

The fewer words, the better said.  With the shortest of sentences, 
the author very effectively sets the tone for the entire story.
Rarely done, and rarely better.

Akane turned away. They hadn't even seen her. Okaasan was spending more and
more time with Kasumi these days, teaching her mommy-things, cooking and
sewing. Everybody praised Kasumi because she was so good at mommy-things.
Everybody praised Nabiki because she was so good at numbers. Nobody praised
Akane for anything. And now there was going to be another baby, the boy
Otousan had always wanted. The boy she was supposed to have been. Nobody had
time for Akane any more. They didn't care if she had nothing to do. They
didn't care if Nabiki called her names.

I cringed when I read that paragraph.  An obvious and more than 
logical explanation of Mrs. Tendo's absence, one I've never seen 
explored before.  It could only have been more damaging if there 
had been suggestion of a failed home birth.

She didn't even notice at first that she was shuffling down the passage that
led to the dojo. She wasn't allowed there either; Otousan said it wasn't a
place for little girls. But now that she was in the passage, she could hear
a faint sound, different from the rhythmic shouts of the students. There
weren't supposed to be any students there today anyway. The sound made her
curious.

<snip>

Soun Tendou finished his kata and bowed to the kamidana. Akane bowed
likewise. Then he turned and faced his youngest daughter.

Here's a good example of how and when to use a Japanese word.  
Rather than interrupting the flow and forcing the reader to refer 
to a glossary to understand the meaning, there is an implicit 
suggestion of what the word means and its proper use.

"It says I-ro-ha. That's the first word of a song that children used to
learn to help them remember the hiragana, so it means the beginning. 

Said syllables can also be ordered as "ha ro i". ^_^

 The
basics. You have to master those before you can do more advanced things.
Now, the beginning of the Art is learning to stand. Can you knock a mountain
over by hitting it?"

Akane giggled. "No, Otousan!"

"Then if you stand like a mountain, nothing can knock *you* over. You place
your feet so..."

There's a difference between WAFFy and sappy; many fanfics that 
strive for WAFFy end up over-worked and unconvincing.  The touch 
here is pleasantly subtle.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.
Iroha is, of course, the sign on the wall of the dojo.  It's the first word
of a Buddhist poem in which each sound in the Japanese syllabary occurs
once -- and only once.  Thus it was used for centuries as a mnemonic, until
the modern Fifty-Sounds Table was adopted.  Any good kanji dictionary should
have the text.  The fact that it's written right to left means it is very
old, pre-WWII at the latest, and possibly even older.  (Left-to-right
actually began to come into use in the late 1800s or early 1900s, according
to my reference books, and the two systems coexisted for a time so signs
might be written either way!)

I don't know about right-to-left, but vertical writing was and is 
still common.  (For you NGE fans out there, the vertical writing 
you see on paper in episode 26 just after Shinji's 5 minutes of 
"reality" is a script for a play.)


Shunsuke


"If I could wave my magic wand, I'd make everything alright."
                                      - Rush, "Presto" (1989)