Hello guys! Sorry that I was inactive for several months after posting the translation of Hiyokuroku 2. I’m trying to get back into working on translations more often though. I’ll be posting Tsukiyasha 3 here after this, but there are just some things I want to clear up first.
Around the time that the first series of Tsukiyasha was being released, someone wrote the following on their blog after they received some emails about Tsukiyasha:
In the otome industry, there’s either homosexual (for the fujoshi) or straight guys for the otomes. Producers will be highly afraid to introduce a bisexual into otome games and CDs, unless he’s an Onee who discovers his male hormones work better when he meets you. I’m not sure who translated the web wrongly, but “Misao is a maniac who kills both men and women, tearing them into a thousand pieces and a sexual maniac” – should be the clearer take on Misao’s character.
I never said that Misao was bisexual. I did not use that word anywhere in my post about the characters of Tsukiyasha. I only translated what was in his official profile, the wording of which could be open to interpretation.
Here is the original Japanese text of the sentence from Misao’s profile that is mentioned above:
I’m going to break down the different parts below, but for a start, it says nothing about “tearing them into a thousand pieces”. The number one thousand does appear, but it’s next to the kanji 人, meaning “person”. So I don’t understand how they came to that translation.
男女問わぬ means “both men and women”. You can use it in sentences such as 「男女問わず友達が欲しい」(I want to make friends with both guys and girls) or 「彼は男女問わず人気です」 (He is popular with both guys and girls). 問わぬ and 問わず are both negative forms of 問う, though I see 問わず used more often, like in the examples I’ve given.
I’ve researched the meaning of 千人切り (which can also be written as 千人斬り) and although it can be translated literally as “killing a thousand people”, there are also contexts where it has a different meaning entirely:
品行方正な人気のバリトン歌手が あの「千人斬りの色男」役に挑む。
A respectable and popular baritone singer takes on the challenge of playing the role of the “ultimate ladies-man”.
*From an article about the opera Don Giovanni.
じっさい知り合いの千人切りの男（３５歳）は全員に声かけるんだって好き嫌いは寝てから決める。
I know a promiscuous guy (35 years old) who approaches any woman and decides whether he’s interested in her after he sleeps with her.
*From the log of a topic on the message board 2channel.
Personally, it makes sense that Misao is someone who doesn’t care about who he sleeps with. The rest of his profile mentions him falling into a reckless state, where he committed crimes serious enough to be exiled for, so it’s not unreasonable to think that he could have abandoned himself and decided to sleep with a lot of different people.
One of the tracks in the CD itself is also pretty clear that Misao had no issue about sleeping with both men and women, which is something they should have known about since they wrote a review of the CD. In the ninth track, Misao says the following:
男女問わず手を出して、体を繋げながら、血を吸うことを覚えたよ。
I remember involving myself with both men and women, sleeping with them while I drank their blood.
男女問わず = both men and women
手を出す = make a move on/get involved with someone
「俺の彼女に手を出すな！」 = “Don’t make a move on my girlfriend!”
「友達の彼氏に手を出してしまった」 = “I made a pass at my friend’s boyfriend.”
体を繋げる = to sleep with someone
It seems that some people interpreted Misao as bisexual after reading the information that I translated. I do not have any problem with that at all. As I already said, I think it’s open to interpretation and it’s something people can decide for themselves after listening to the CD. But I am annoyed that I was called out as if I was spreading misinformation when it seems to me that the other person is the one causing a misunderstanding. If they were so convinced about the point they were making, I feel that they should have backed it up by explaining how they came to the translation that they provided. I’m not a native speaker and I realise that I’m learning new things about Japanese all the time, but I had plenty of experience with studying other languages before I even considered learning Japanese and I definitely know to ask for help or spend a little extra time figuring something out when I’m stuck. I also wouldn’t put up a translation if I wasn’t satisfied with the quality or didn’t have confidence in it.
