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)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)