Daniel's enlightening liveblog of MURAKAMI Haruki 村上春樹's new novel 1Q84 (suggested pronunciation: "Q-teen eighty-four") during the two or three hours over the weekend he didn't spend napping or eating gigantic sausages has already inspired a MutantFrog post, and here I am, arms morphed T1000-like into sharp hooks, clinging to the bandwagon as well. My topic today, courtesy of H2J, is the unintuitive spelling 抽斗 for hikidashi, "drawer".

The etymology of the word hikidashi itself is obvious: hiku (pull) + dasu (take out), nominalized. So you might expect it to be spelt using the standard characters for hiku (引) and dasu (出), and in fact it often is: 引出し is the first spelling given in the Kōjien. Whence, then, 抽斗?

抽 means "pull out," although nowadays it's often used in a more figurative sense: 抽出, "extraction"; 抽象, "abstraction", literally meaning something like "to pull something out of a (more general) phenomenon". The left side of this character is a hand, but the right is apparently disputed: Kanji gen claims that it's just 由 meaning "emerge from", but the Shin kango rin claims (apparently based on the Kang xi) that it's a simplified form of another character the right half of which was 畱 (留 "stop", pre-simplification), and 畱 in turns means "a deep hole"... and since I can't afford the really good kanji dictionaries yet, I'm afraid I'm just going to have to teach the controversy and leave it at that. But do note that 抽出し, using 抽 as a straight replacement for 引, is another Kōjien-approved spelling.

斗 refers to a traditional East Asian unit of measure for liquid volume, the to (about 18 L in Meiji Japan*), and by extension the implements used to measure such volumes—ancestors of those square wooden boxes called masu in Japan. One famous and early use of 斗 as an object rather than an abstract unit is in "酌以大斗" in this poem. Legge translates it "He fills their cups from a measure"; Jeffrey R. Tharsen [PDF] prefers "He deals [wine and spirits] out with a big ladle." The commentary claims that whatever it is, it has a handle three shaku long, which would be two or three feet depending on era.

So, put together, 抽斗 means "pull-out container, like a box with a handle maybe." Multiple sources assert that it was used in ancient China long before Japanese speakers assigned it, as a two-character unit, to the native Japanese word hikidashi. There is actually another spelling that was imported in the same way and uses a different character for "box": 抽匣. This one died out (or was murdered) during the Meiji period, but its fossil record can be examined in works such as Sōseki's Michikusa, which alternates between the two spellings freely. For of such was Sōseki's individualism.