Subcharacter

The characters, the subcharacters, the mature but tragic love story, all appealed to me. And the technique of telling the stories with a narrator who would function like a Greek chorus occurred to me in what I thought was a brilliant flash.

However, as discussed by Melton, a Chinese character is an ideograph which frequently contains two or more parts called subcharacters. The subcharacters are commonly called radicals in Chinese lexicography.