Iwa ni Hana

As I was saying, back at university I used to translate newspaper articles I picked in random from English into Japanese and vice versa for practice. Naturally, I encountered stumbling blocks from time to time, in which case I would turn to my language exchange partners for help. One of my partners was a girl from Kobe who was studying to be an English teacher herself, and one of the articles we worked on together was “Mozart redeems my mediocrity” from The Guardian (see here for the full article).

We beat our brains out as to how to translate the sentence “Mozart redeems my mediocrity”. In fact, my partner had not been exposed to such usage before, and was puzzled that anyone other than God can be the subject actor of the verb “redeem” when you are talking about redeeming a human being’s shortcoming (ie. mediocrity). This sentence may sound natural and native enough in English and may be intuitively understood as long as you are thinking in English. After all, we all know that Mozart is dead, and even if he were alive it is doubtful whether he would be able to redeem anyone. “Mozart redeems my mediocrity” is really a shorthand for expressing:

My recognition of the greatness of Mozart redeems my mediocrity.

In any case, our difficulty was that there was just no equivalent Japanese that would be an appropriate translation of “Mozart redeems my mediocrity”. However you translate you it, it just ends up sounding funny, nonsensical, confusing or ambiguous in Japanese. To have a subject other than God when you use the word “redeem” in Japanese just does not seem to work. At last, we agreed that translating a sentence like “Mozart redeems my mediocrity” just forces you to make your best effort to rewrite the whole sentence as something else. Probably something along the lines of:

My recognition of the greatness of Mozart makes up for my mediocrity.

If you think about it, a sentence like “God redeems me” is really a similar shorthand expression for “my humble submission to the greatness of God redeems me”. There is a lot more to be said about it, but first I would like to turn to an anecdote I once read. I have quoted it directly below:

The Welsh are great ones for possessing and continuing the past. I was just reading a few days ago an article by some Americans who had been travelling in Wales last year and who had been startled while travelling over a road and said “This is a very fine road.” Their driver who was a Welshman – this was in mountain country – said “Yes, a fine road. They designed it; we built it, and you know they never paid us for it.” They said “Well, who are they?” “The Romans.” This is not exaggerated. They still hang on onto old grievances, old feelings; they hang on to a lot of old things too. [...] This is not self conscious. It is as though you possessed all the past and you have a fairly happy consciousness that the future is going to possess you too. You just don’t live once, a rotten eighty years. I never conceive why people want to be modern all the time. Being modern really means only now. There is only one instant of time. – from the transcript of an interview dated 1968 in Conversations with Robertson Davies.

The word “redemption” reminds me of that road designed by the Romans, which was apparently working just fine – long after the Empire that had caused it to be built disappeared.

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Photo of Harada Munenori (1959 - present).

Harada Munenori [原田宗典] is one of the finest humorists in Japan today.

Once upon a time when I was still a university student, I often translated newspaper articles I picked in random from English into Japanese and vice versa, not for homework (though there was a lot of similar exercises for homework too) but for my own practice. One day, it occurred to me that one of the true tests of translation is translating the humour of one language into another, and dry materials like Asahi Shinbun’s editorial Tensei Jingo [天声人語] would probably not cut it. To challenge myself, I asked my profs for recommendations of humorists in contemporary Japan, and Harada Munenori was one of the names that came up.

17-Sai Datta [17歳だった] was the first book by Harada Munenori that I read. It is a collection of articles in which he reminiscences about his happier days as a teenager in the 1970s. I consumed the book mostly on my way to class by bus. I think I laughed aloud so hard, that on more than one occasion other passengers on the bus nearly called for medical assistance.

I have posted below my translation (dated 2005) of one of the articles in that book. The original title is Bungaku Seinen he no Michi [文学青年への道] but to translate it literally as “The Road to Being a Young Man of Literature” sounds somewhat flat in English, and so (with apologies to James Joyce) I translated it as A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Man.

I think I will let his writing and sense of humour speak for themselves. Enjoy.

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There ought to be a word for Japanese films in which two people fall in love, and then nothing much happens.

A screencapture of the official website of the film "Yamazakura" (山桜), based on a novel written by Fujisawa Shūhei (藤沢周平).

A while ago, I was watching Yamazakura (2008), an above-average film in which two people fall in love, and then nothing much happens. Before that, I was watching The Invitation from Cinema Orion (2007), an average film in which two people fall in love, and then nothing much happens. There are many other Japanese films in which the love story is characterized by what never happened (I mean this in a positive way). These films are a genre in themselves.

History’s sense of black humour

Before I go on, I would like to take a moment to mention the two people – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I think it must be history’s sense of black humour that just when all the traditional barriers to love such as class, wealth, religion, race and nationality fell apart to a large extent (though not entirely) after the WWI, this pair came along and turned “freedom” itself into a barrier to love.

Personally, I found their idea of “freedom” dubious, but I suppose one must give them credit for managing to turn “freedom” into a prison. I say it is a prison because it seems that under their credo you have the freedom to do what whatever you like… except for the freedom to refrain from doing whatever you like.

Love and harmony

The Japanese humorist Harada Munenori [原田宗典] once mused in his writing that the translation of “love” as ai [愛] back in the Meiji era was a mistake; instead, the more correct expression should have been the word wa [和], or “harmony”. So instead of a girlfriend asking her boyfriend, “do you love me?” [愛してる?], she would ask, “do we harmonize?” [和してる?] and he in turn would reply, “yup, we are harmonized” [うん、和してるよ]. And instead of saying things “love will save the world,” you would say “harmony will save the world”.*

The below is just my opinion. If you look at the word wa, it is comprised of the words for “thousand” [千] and “mouth” [口]. In other words, harmony is made of a thousand voices. Naturally, these thousand voices may all say different things. This makes me think of Yoshinaga Fumi’s Ôoku, a manga series I have been reading. You can read more my introduction of this series here.

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As I was saying, Sakura no Mori no Mankai no Shita [桜の森の満開の下] by Sakaguchi Ango [坂口安吾] was my most anticipated storyarc in the anime series Aoi Bungaku produced by Madhouse. I have read the original story and also watched the 1975 film adaptation by Shinoda Masahiro [篠田正浩]. I sometimes think of that story as the Japanese answer to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and J.K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours.

Screenshot of the OP of "In the Woods Beneath Cherries in Full Bloom"

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Eno. (who is also known as 何何舞) is my favorite illustrator of all time. She published her first artbook in 2007 under the title "Marquee Moon" (华盖之月). Above is an image from a series of drawings called "night of sublimation" dated from 2004 - 2006 and collected in that artbook.

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Oshii Mamoru’s film “Innocence” and the world of things

One of the most iconic features of Oshii Mamoru’s film Innocence is a sequence of festival parade lasting approximately 5 minutes. The parade was extravagantly animated with a myriad of ornate details, but at the same time the sequence did not really advance the story in any way, and even felt somewhat out of sync in the natural flow of the story. When I first watched it, I remember wondering to myself: why bother?

The festival parade scene in Oshii Mamoru's "Innocence"

Oshii-sensei has probably been asked this question and answered it accordingly somewhere. For my part, I could only say that my gut feeling on seeing it was that it is a powerful and nostalgic expression of the world of things – by which I mean the seen and touchable world:

• that one interacts with through one’s physical senses
• in which one lives in perpetual want of one thing or another

This is a point of contrast to the state of human existence you see in the film. Humans live in various states of modification from their natural biology – the Major long transcended to a form of existence not unlike “data” on a vast network, and various characters living in man-made bodies instead of their natural bodies. Yet the world of things is still the point of reference in human existence, even though ironically humanity seems to show tendencies of leaving that world of things behind. The parade seems to express nostalgic yearning for physical presence, the sensation of being there, of things with colours that you can perceive through your eyes, texture that you can perceive through your sense of touch, producing sounds that travel to your ears. The objects you see in the parade are all reminders of the natural world, recreated from man-made materials in the likeness of their natural counterparts. What you can no longer have, you create a likeness of.

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Tankouban release of Nokemono to Hanayome [ノケモノと花嫁]

Illustration of "Nokemono to Hanayome"

To those of you who wonder what ever happened to Ikuhara “Utena” Kunihiko [幾原邦彦], I gathered from his blog that a tankouban of his manga collaboration with Nakamura Asumiko [中村明日美子] is to be released in December. This manga is serialized so far on a fashion magazine called KERA. I will be sure to place an order and write more on this when the time comes.

Ikuhara-sensei’s blog entry with a photo of this announcement can be found at: http://www2.jrt.co.jp/cgi-bin3/ikuniweb/tomozo.cgi?no=504

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iiiis is a talented male artist in the PRC who is involved in music production as well as art illustrations. He is known for his soft, ethereal and graceful artstyle and has won many awards. Like another contemporary artist Eno, he follows the technical concept of 計白當黑 (ji bai dang hei) in traditional Chinese paintings. The idea is to leave blanks in a painting, and yet the blanks do not mean that the painting is incomplete. On the contrary, the blanks are part of the completed painting. In this way, not only the material world of touchable things is depicted, but also the immaterial world of void.

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Cover image of Vol.5 of "Ôoku" by Yoshinaga Fumi. On the cover is the third female shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi.

Ôoku must be the first shoujo/josei manga in which the heroine (or at least one of the heroines) had been raped, killed the rapist and given birth to a stillborn child from the first time you see her.

The story is currently being serialized on the manga magazine Melody and it is a historical fantasy set in an alternative Edo era in which:

• The male population had been decimated by an infectious disease, leaving Japan with a male-to-female ratio somewhere between 1 to 4 and 1 to 5.
• Japan implemented the close country policy in order to conceal this demographic crisis from foreigners.
• Gradually women took over the labours of men, and men were free from labour, became very sheltered and had only one contribution to society (ie. reproduction).
• The shogunate came to be headed by a lineage of female shoguns and the Ôoku (the shogun’s harem) was filled by men as i) a reserve military force to protect the shogun in the event of war and ii) to mate with the shogun.

I know you are probably thinking that this must be some sort of escapist fantasy, but I can endorse my name that it is not. It is more like apocalyptic fiction about a demographic crisis that spans across generations. In that alternative world, women for the most part live their lives without fathers, husbands and sons. The female shoguns in the story do find something like romantic love with men (though it seems to me that it is not really in the pattern of what is typically recognized as romantic love – I mean this in a positive way).

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There is a special meaning to the word mushi [虫] in Japanese, the nuances of which are lost in its common English translation of “insect” or “bug.” I think it would be most straightforward to quote directly an excerpt from an article called Mushi ga ii [虫がいい] from am insightful book entitled Nihongo Omote to Ura [日本語 表と裏] written by Morimoto Tetsurou [森本哲郎]. Below is my translation:

The Japanese characterize such mysteries of the heart as mushi. The heart is what one desires, what one thinks and what one feels. Nevertheless, there are times when the heart does not work the way one would like it to. In other words, there is another heart within one’s heart. The Japanese call that “second soul” mushi. It is believed that, of the two, mushi is by far closer to the depth of one’s being. The reason for it is that when one loses consciousness and when one’s breathing weakens, the Japanese call that condition “the breath of mushi.” The breath of mushi means that only the mushi within one’s body is left to do the breathing. In other words, mushi is the last thing that supports one’s life. In that sense, the Japanese concept of mushi is close to Freud’s libido.

In addition to “the breath of mushi” [虫の息], Morimoto provided other examples of Japanese idioms that illustrate the Japanese concept of mushi. For example, “mushi’s notification” [虫の知らせ] means a gut feeling for something inauspicious.”Where mushi lives is bad” [虫の居所が悪い] means you are in a bad mood. “The mushi in one’s stomach cannot be suppressed” [腹の虫が収まらない] means you are out of control with your anger. “Fusagi no muishi” [鬱ぎの虫] means a fit of blues.

Mushi clearly means more than just “insect” or “bug.”

The reason is I mentioned the above is that recently I read some additional information on this subject, so I am just posting my questions here to see if anyone can point me to more relevant sources that may lead to an answer -

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