Buruma takes an unusual approach to his central character, dividing her biography into three parts, each narrated by a different man and each paralleling a different phase of Japan's self-reinvention.
In her most generously realized novel, "The Age of Innocence" (1920), written well after her affair with Fullerton, and after the Great War had made the decades preceding it seem suddenly historical, Wharton told her own story more directly than she ever had before, by splitting herself into a male and a female character, dividing beard from lily.
Like a playwright including a play within a play, with characters dividing into actors and audience members on the stage, Cervantes made his book be about books, and turned his characters into readers of and characters in those books.
Ever since Shakespeare made one of his characters divide human life into seven ages, so-called experts have been dreaming up categories to slot us into.
Instead, we have an ever increasing cast of secondary characters, divided not by opposing moral imperatives but by mere ideology, two camps making precisely the same argument on behalf of righteousness.
Failing that, I'd at least have a nice neat list of literary characters, divided by gender and ranked by age (which I concede may not be everyone's idea of an achievement).
In an unmistakable echo of Chekhov, the family home is to be bulldozed to make way for a new estate of semis; the characters divide into those, such as Rhodes and her brother, who recognise that their old life is unsustainable, and others, such as Mrs Powell, who cannot imagine that their comfortable, servanted existence is coming to an end.
The result was a book consisting of some five thousand Chinese characters, divided into two parts, which discusses "the meaning of Dao and virtue".
Sonic Adventure 2 is a 3D game that features six playable characters, divided into two campaigns: "Hero" (consisting of Sonic the Hedgehog, Miles "Tails" Prower, and Knuckles the Echidna), where the player battles to save the world, and "Dark" (consisting of Shadow the Hedgehog, Doctor Eggman, and Rouge the Bat), where they battle to conquer it.
Average gap block length: The total number of gap characters divided by the total number of gap blocks.
At one stage, a character suggests dividing this space to represent the Unionist North and Confederate South, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine, although the slippery brutal amoralism of one and all is such that tribal-loyalty partition was never going to work.
