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Saki returns! It's The Soul of Laploshka and The Open Window - climb on in!

Special thanks to reader Wilmon Black!

Next up: The Lumber Room and The She-Wolf 

Comments

Anonymous

Loving hearing you guys continue to cover these and more importantly enjoy them! due to how much I loved these tales growing up hearing folk experience and enjoy them for the first time is a real mood lifter :)

Anonymous

Is it weird that I got stressed when he pilfered 2 francs from that lady? Social horror beats out cosmic horror, whatever Lovecraft might have said.

Incaptivity

Laploshka had me in stitches, you can hear Frolic throughout almost the entire story. I’m with Chad on this, I think I WILL have more Saki

Anonymous

Absolutely delightful! Thanks, gents! Loved the talk of social graces and who pays and all. Many years ago I was involved with Tokyo casting and pre-production for Memoirs of a Geisha. I happened to be in LA during filming and was treated most generously. My moment of real panic happened at the end of a very cool day. I was invited to set to watch them filming a sumo scene. In that scene, my favorite wrestler, Minomi. At the end of shooting, Minomi and his fight partner invited me out to dinner (Japanese restaurant) where the proceeded to do that thing I always thought was fiction: they looked over the menu and nodded their agreement. What followed was a procession of every item on that menu. Their manager was with me and must have seen the panic in my eyes because he leaned over and quietly told me that he'd be picking up the check.

Anonymous

Yay, good to hear you cover "The Open Window"! I enjoyed your discussion of secret or delayed jokes - I agree, the knowledge that it's out there, waiting to be discovered, is entertainment in itself. I once picked up a treatise called "Threat Modeling" from my boss's desk, and tucked a picture of Derek Zoolander attacking the prime minister of Malaysia into it. It took him weeks to discover it, and in the meantime I'd just chuckle to myself knowing he'd get to it eventually.

Anonymous

So tell me more about this spa. It's been a rough year, and I could really use the pampering.

John Ross

The Open Window is a story I know I have encountered in more than collection but it wasn’t until last week I sought out a collection of Saki’s writing. Thanks to kindle I have it now and am reading choice selections to my young. Sadly he isn’t as enchanted in the writing as I would like, given the lack of Minecraft elements but it is a large collection so you never know.

Anonymous

Roasts always make me think that the subject is cheerfully laughing along while also making a note of every person there, prior to those people dying in a series of inexplicable, but particularly gruesome, accidents.

Evan

The open window was very good, and honestly probably the better story, but good GOD I loved the first one. That’s exactly the kind of humor I need right now. The conversation about wanting to reward cleverness and the ability to get away with things if they themselves make it big made me think of the Ronald Wright quote (which gets attributed to Steinbeck due to some paraphrasing) about how in America “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. We let people get away with that stuff because the “American Dream” has such a strong hold on our psyche that we can hold on to the belief that someday, we just might actually make it to that degree of wealth ourselves.

Anonymous

These stories are a lot of fun. Thanks for covering them. I'd read Sredni Vashtar before, and the Interlopers. These two stories really made me chuckle. The discussion on delayed jokes or stories for your own amusement is relatable, but misses the true strength of that character... her ability to keep a straight face. Every time I've tried to do something like that, I crack up or get some weird eyebrow expression, and the game is over. In the Before Times, some staff in our office would hide pictures of random things (a magnet of one of the singers from ABBA, a picture of a staring ostrich) in other peoples' cubicles, and wait to see how long it took them to notice. I couldn't even walk past a cubicle where I would hide something without laughing, so that girl is a master to not only tell one, but two stories without giving it away.

Steve

It's a testament to Saki's concision and genius that your commentary runs longer than his stories. Pip pip!

Anonymous

Laploshka and the discussion about hating to give money to the poor reminds me of a story about the writer C.S. Lewis. Lewis, who was a very comfortable Oxford don, was walking down the street with an equally well-off friend. A particularly unpleasant beggar approached them, and Lewis cheerfully gave him the money in his pocket. Lewis's friend said, "You know he's just going to use that money to buy cider and get drunk, right?" To which Lewis replied, "Yes, probably. But then, that's the same thing I was going to use it for."

Anonymous

My Badger, Strumpy Joe is very interested in the spa you mentioned.

Anonymous

Follow up to my comment on the last episode, The Open Window is a great story! I’ve gotten over my high school rage against it and realized just how good it really is. Saki’s got the goods.

nils hedglin

Michael Sheen was in a good adaption of the Open Window. https://youtu.be/pBXb-8YoR0E

Anonymous

I love the open window joke. Some roommates and I used to cosplay at movie premieres and one of them did Van Helsing with the three brides’ heads for the Gary Oldman Dracula. We left the heads in the kitchen cupboard when we moved out. No idea how that played out.