Here’s a moment of clownery that I experienced a couple of weeks ago.
Recently I managed to obtain a digital copy of the first volume of Otherside Picnic in Japanese (that way I can even pretend reading it isn’t procrastination). So I’m reading this yuri novel instead of studying for the exams, as one does. And there comes up a sentence that goes, “デス寝湯である。”
“It’s a bath”, translate I, but what’s that デス there for? That’s a polite sentence ender, why is it at the beginning? Why is it in katakana? Sure, coupled with から it means ‘therefore’ and you put in in the start of the sentence, BUt there’s no から (and it would hardly explain the katakana spelling),
and then it dawns on me that it’s just the loan-word for ‘death’. “It’s a death-bath”! Katakana is the norm for loan-words, this one just got transliterated in an unfortunate way. So I cringe at myself for this hitch and move on.
A few day later I’m scrolling through tumblr, again, as one does, and see this:
so,, here's that picture of Yuri Gagarin i was trying to upload a couple of days ago (for cosmonautics day, the anniversary of Gagarin's flight was this week)
This is from his his visit to Japan in 1962. The writing on his haori is so blurred i can't read it, but the headband says "peace".
Turned in my final paper recently, it's the longest thing i've ever written (but still quite short and of terrible quality compared to my classmates'). The faculty will probably beat me over the head with it until i perish this wednesday
Meanwhile, here's a fishprint:
An image of a crucian carp caught in Kinshi moat [in Edo] (「於錦糸堀御獲鮒之図」) by Hayashi Masanaka(?) (林正中), 1839; from Tsuruoka City Museum
And by “fishprint” i mean a literal bodyprint of a fish, produced by covering a fish in ink and pressing a sheet of paper to it. This Japanese art is called gyotaku (魚拓) and it apparently first emerged during the Tokugawa period as a method of documenting the size of of fishers’ trophies.
The picture above is said to be the oldest existing one, but the art has since evolved to include greater detail and even colour.
A print of a red sea bream by Takusei-kai (拓正会), one of Japan’s many societies dedicated to keeping up the traditional art. Check out their website for more pictures!
For more info go to this Ted-Ed video about gyotaku. Among other things it describes a second method for producing prints. Also the animation style is pretty o(ˊ▽ˋ*)o
So I'm translating a part of the novel The Holy Man of Mt. Koya (高野聖) by Izumi Kyoka for my final paper this year. And the thing about Kyoka is, he chooses his words in ways so eccentric it makes your head spin.
One thing that had me thinking recently is his usage of the kanji 乳 when speaking about a man's chest. There are 2 instances of that in the opening chapters of the novel:
In Chapter 7, the narrator says (about himself), "うむとこの乳の下へ念仏を唱え込んで [...]". In the english translation Charles Inouye renders this as, "and, with the nenbutsu on my lips, [...]". More literally it means something like, "and, humming the nenbutsu towards my chest [i.e. under my breath, presumably]".
In chapter 8, the narrator says (again describing his own experience), "乳の下へ潜んで帯の間にも一疋", which Inouye translates as, "another [leech] had worked its way into my kimono and was hiding on my chest".
There is no denying that normally 乳 is the word for 'breasts' and is used specifically in relation to women. Kyoka himself uses it in that meaning in later chaplers.
I'm nothing even close to a native speaker, but i have formed the impression that in modern japanese the basic option in both cases above would be 胸, 'chest' (also, figuratively speaking, 'heart'). If there's a specific word for male boobies, i'm not aware of it. So, why 乳?
The first thing that occurs is that for some reason Kyoka wanted to avoid the word with a hint of a double meaning (胸), but this idea doesn't hold up as Kyoka thrives on layered meanings and making the reader guess. And 乳 doesn't mean precisely the same.
Having read even a few chapters of Kyoka's work, it's easy to see his peference for unconventional spellings. For instance, he always writes the word for a person's head as 天窓 (あたま) instead of standard 頭 (this seems to be consistent across different works). Note the reading written beside in kana: it needs to be specified bacause the word 天窓 normally has a different reading. My favourite case of this kanji/reading disparity is this: 停車場 (ステイション). Here Kyoka basically writes the (probably rather recently coined) kanji compound for 'train station' and then breaks out katakana to explain it with a loanword of the same meaning.
Maybe, the reason behind 乳 is simply that Kyoka felt fond of it in some way. The only trouble I find with this explanation is the lack of an explanatory reading above.
Speaking of readings, in this article Izumi Kyoka and Language Inouye quotes recollections of some Kyoka's relative, describing his "eccentric regard for certain sounds". For instance, he avoided the syllable ge, as to him in sounded "vulgar" and was in turnd comforted by the syllable na. This might be a bit far-fetched, but perhaps something in the reading of 胸 was unpleasant to Kyoka and he had to create a work-around.
Finally - and this IS too far-fetched, but I'm just making things up off the top of my head here so bear with me - the use of 乳 for a man sort of fits with the themes. The main character/narrator of the story is a monk. His narrative foil is a brash, almost toxically masculine tradesman. This conforms to Kyoka's favorite archetype (as described in his only english-language biography "The Similitude of Blossoms", again, by Charles Inouye): his sympaties lie with the unassertive, emphatic young man. In this light the lexical grafting of a female form onto the protagonist may be read as an attempt to further soften his image by way of feminizing it. Certainly, the opposite transformation - that of the violent masculine body into (literally) bestial - is a crucial part of the story.
Of course, neither does this supposed feminine transformation of the hero appear in the right place in the plot to make any such impact, nor is Kyoka's feminine unequivocally good and gentle. This idea requires further thought to fit into the world of the story properly.
Meanwhile, instead of thinking I'd like to suggest my personal favourite reading: literal. The narrator has boobs. He's trans. There, I won diversity for you.
(Alternatively, call this the Eowyn Solution. Oh, the character escaped the witch who turns all men into animals? well that's cause they are no man.........)
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Read The Holy Man of Mt. Koya in "Japanese Gothic Tales", trans. by Charles Shiro Inouye, 1996
Also, in addition to previously mentioned pieces by Inouye, you can check out Metamorphosis: Fantasy and Animism in Izumi Kyoka by Cody Poulton - a (repulsively Freudist) article about transformations in Kyoka's prose
Stumbled upon this lovely manga-style portrait of famous writer/essayist Natsume Sōseki (漱石 夏目) while following up on my notes from the course on manga I take this year.
(image via the British museum)
It was painted in 1927 by Okamoto Ippei (岡本 一平), a cartoonist and comic artist, famous for his work as a manga-kisha (漫画記者, "manga jounalist", self-invented term) for Asahi shimbun newspaper, as well as for the influence he reportedly had on the art style of the "manga god" Tezuka Osamu. Okamoto was one of the first (and most enthusiastic) artists to call the comic strips he produced manga.
This particular hanging scroll looks like something made using paper and ink appropriate for a classical Japanese painting. The style, however, is distinctly cartoonish. This portrait is part of a series called Nikuhitsu manga, kaikoku rokujūnen-shi zue (肉筆漫画, 開国六十年史図絵, Manga paintings: Illustrations of Sixty Years of History Since the Opening of the Country). It included 50 portraits of famous people done by 25 cartoonists.
Natsume Sōseki (a notorious cat-lover - hence the kitty on the right) is painted seated at a traditional low table, presumably creating another masterpiece. The capture on the left simply reads: 漱石先生 ("Prof. Sōseki")
I recently started reading Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro, and in Chapter 2 encoutered an interesting colour: 海老茶 (ebicha). Which, when translated literally, means 'shrimp tea' and, to confuse things further, looks like chestnut/maroon.
So, am I telling you a shrimp brewed this tea? Or, even worse, someone brewed a shrimp in their tea to make this colour?
While some sources online see similar colouring in shells of various crustaceans, this is pretty much unrelated to the name of the colour ebicha. Instead, we are dealing with a mix up in kanji. Originally, the word was written as 葡萄茶, 葡萄 meaning 'grape'. Later, since the old reading of the word 'grape' (葡萄 = ebi) sounds exactly like the word 'shrimp' (ebi = 海老) the characters used for the colour got confused.
Far-Eastern grapes (山葡萄, yama-budō) are dark purple in colour, and so the colour called ebi (葡萄) is a kind of purple. Ebicha is that colour with an added brown hue. The kanji for 'tea' (茶) reflects the addition of the hue. (In the same way as 赤 means 'red' and 赤茶 means 'reddish brown').
Ughhhhhhh i'm not dead but the uni is working hard to change that. Aren't we supposed to be working on our theses this year?.. Anyway, here's a new proverb i learned recently:
譬えに嘘無し坊主に毛無し
Or, as i'd translate it, "[The] proverb isn't lying [as sure as] monks don't have hair". Nothing much to add to that, i just like the comparison, it's very vivid.
