The complex “wall” character 壁 (kabe) begs for dissection, so I obliged. But I wasn’t remotely prepared for what I found. This is a bit X-rated, so readers beware. Let’s look at one component at a time, working from the bottom up (which turns out to be quite appropriate!).
The bottom component, 土, means “dirt.” So far, so simple.
On the upper right, we find 辛. Although 辛 (kara(i)) now means “pungent,” “spicy,” “sharp,” “bitter,” or “severe,” it also has the sense of “needle.” An extended meaning is “to pierce” or “to penetrate.”
As for the upper lefthand element, it combines the “buttocks” radical 尸 with 口, which can mean “hole.” The “hole” in the “buttocks” is, of course, “anus”!
Taken together, the top two components in 壁—”anus” and “needle”—mean “anal penetration.” But Kenneth Henshall somehow deduces that they lend the meaning of “surround” to 壁. That is to say, 壁 was an earthen embankment surrounding something (a building perhaps). This earthen embankment came to mean “wall.”
Whew! Some derivation!
One more thing. On the road to figuring this out, I came across a puzzler of a compound:
尻子玉 (shirikodama: mythical ball in the anus that kappa seek)
buttocks + spherical object + jewel
Kappa are mythical water-dwelling creatures. They’re also cucumber rolls, so named because cucumber is supposedly a kappa’s favorite food.
And now everything is coming full circle. In his novel The Silent Cry, Nobel Prize–winning writer Ōe Kenzaburō wrote about a man who jammed a cucumber into his anus and then hung himself. There, that ought to put you off cucumbers for a month.
I think I’ll rein in my kanji curiosity at this point!
