/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I was born in 1510, in Buşteni. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Wallachian, of mixed Magyar and Slavic descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious castle on the Black Sea. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married a Kievan Rus girl, daughter of Jerzy Radziwiłł, the voivodes, and granddaughter of two Novgorod parsons, experts in obscure subjects--sculpting and Halberstadt organs, respectively.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean dirt, blue trees, rabid dogs, mountain vistas and scowling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Eltnama revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly Armenian ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Turkish princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, draga mea mica tata, took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, recited to me Mioriţa and Meşterul Manole, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.