Sunday, April 04, 2004

Black Cherry

I'm sure others will have spotted this before - the name of the magician in Cardcaptor Sakura. I had pronounced it to myself to rhyme with "glow", but then found that in the text it was rhymed with "now". And the different values of "-ow" reminded me of another magician who had a similar issue of pronunication for that phoneme - only in his case the words used were "foully" and "holy". And then it struck me - the lack of distinction in Japanese between the sounds of "l" and "r". Wouldn't it be all too possible - in the way that "out of sight, out of mind" could be round-tripped into "invisible idiot" - that the magician, Clow Reed, [in katakana, with the "glow" pronunciation, something like クロー    リイド  ] who synthesised Eastern and Western traditions, and who made his own deck of cards - to be found by an innocent Japanese school-girl? - might in fact be none other than the Great Beast, himself - Aleister Crowley, who did much the same.

Was it deliberate on the part of the ladies of the Clamp Collective? If so then all I can say is "Naughty, naughty! Bad girls!" - otherwise, (or even so) that would make a very nasty BESM scenario...

Later - Google only turned up one other reference making the above identification when fed the first full name and the latter surname, from a blog entry made some years ago. So, not original, as I'd expected, but by no means a widely spread meme...

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