In Culture
Fuji Musumè (藤娘) or Wisteria Maiden is an Otsu-e (Japanese folk painting in Ōtsu, Shiga) subject thought to have been inspired by popular dances. These painting were often sold as good-luck charms for marriages. Fuji Musumè is also a famous classical Kabuki dance.
In Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Bean Trees, Turtle refers to wisteria vines as bean trees, because the pre-bloomed flower pods are shaped like beans. Later, she and Taylor learn that wisteria is a legume (i.e., is in the bean family) and that wisteria and other legumes engage in symbiotic relationships, just as the book's characters do.
Read more about this topic: Wisteria
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)