Iwa ni Hana

Bakeneko (the cat spirit) in film and anime

This is purely a guess. If any one film inspired Nakamura Kenji’s anime Bakeneko (2006), it must be the B&W film directed by Shindō Kaneto [新藤兼人] dated 1968 and entitled Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko [藪の中の黒猫].

A scene from "Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko" (1968) directed by Shindō Kaneto.

Shindō Kaneto is best known for the film Onibaba (1964), of which Yabu no Kuroneko is said to be a “sister work”. The story is set in the late Heian era, in which a pair of mother and daughter working on a farm were raped and killed by a group of passing samurai who had just returned from war. Having struck a deal with some dark powers, mother and daughter return to the human world as bakeneko (cat spirits) in order to lure passing samurai to death. The plot thickens when the daughter’s husband, who had been taken to war by force, return with high honours as a samurai, and is charged by his superior to confront and exorcise the two bakeneko. He is surprised that the two bakeneko look so much like his wife and mother-in-law. Meanwhile, part of the deal that mother and daughter struck with the dark powers is that they must never speak to anyone of why they turned into bakeneko…

A screenshot from the OP of the anime "Bakeneko" (2006).

So I wondered, could the ban to tell their tragic story be what inspired the Medicine Seller’s catchphrase in the anime Bakeneko, which is:

モノノ怪の形を成すのは 人の因果と縁
よって、皆々様の 真と理 お聞かせ願いたく候
The katachi (form) of mononoke is caused by the karma and enishi of people. Therefore, would everyone please let me hear your makoto (truth) and kotowari (reason)?

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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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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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The Chinese language has a rich vocabulary for sadness. Consider the Chinese characters that all have the meaning of “sadness” -

憂 愁 悲 哀 惆 悽 悕 悴 悵 惙 惻 愴 慘 慽

Now if you consider combined words that all have the meaning of “sadness,” the list could go on and on – from commonly used words like xin suan [心酸] to very rare words like liu li [懰慄]. In addition, if you also add to your list four-word Chinese words like qi chu bei qie [悽楚悲切], duan chang cun duan [斷腸寸斷] and so forth, you will probably add up with a dictionary of several hundred pages of Chinese words describing “sadness” alone.

Personally, I think the proliferation of words for “sadness” in Chinese is not confusing at all but adds precision as to the the exact shade of sadness one is describing. Among these many shades of sadness, there is one area that the Chinese language is particularly good at describing. I refer to dan dan de ai chou [淡淡的哀愁] – the kind of sadness that is light in touch on the surface. This kind of sadness is never so violent as drive you to put a gun to your head or jump off a bridge. In fact, this kind of sadness is usually not apparent on the surface, and no one knows how deep it cuts within. Within this category of sadness, there is one particular word I wish to highlight, and it is wu nai [無奈].

The meaning of wu nai

Wu nai [無奈] is short for wu ke nai he [無可奈何]. It is hard to translate into English but you may think of it as:

Something sad that cannot be helped due to lack of means or solution, typically brought about by forces that are out of human control, such as the passage of time and vicissitudes of the world.

Let me give a more concrete example -

Suppose when you were a teenager you used to have to an older friend who opened your eyes to a new world of ideas and art. You read the same books, listened to the same music, admired the same artists and watched the same films. You lived in the same intellectual universe with him and spoke in the wavelength. There were scarcely any topic you do not like debating with him on, and for once in your life you felt you had met your equal. And because he was a few years older and had more experience of life than you, you looked up to him.

And then (as is typical of the young and headstrong), the two of you had a quarrel that was really quite trivial in retrospect but instead of making up at that time, you parted ways, burned all bridges and never spoke again. Ten years passed. One day, news of that older friend trickled through to you. From what you gathered he had not really kept up with all the books, music and art. He embraced a lot of things that he once thought was low and vulgar, and associated with people he used to consider silly and ridiculous. It was like he had given up all the pride and sophistication you used to see in him.

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Recently I was asked by a Japanese acquaintance (who happened to be learning Chinese) as to how Chinese people distinguish levels of intimacity and politeness in oral speech. As you may know, in Japanese, you i) conjugate verbs and ii) use a different set of honorific nouns to show respect to your listener or reader (see this Wikipedia entry for details). But Chinese does not really conjugate verbs, and although a different set of honorific nouns can be used to show politeness, such nouns tend to be appear only in written form and almost never in oral speech. So how does the Chinese, with cultural concepts of insider group and outsider group similar to the Japanese, distinguish between formal speech and informal speech from a linguistic perspective? While I am far from having the complete answer to this, I believe the partial answer may be in the use of nicknames.

You just know that A is speaking to B in Chinese in familiar terms if a number of nouns of people, things, corporate entities and places are substituted with:

i) nicknames that only the speakers or their immediate circle knows

ii) nicknames made up on an impromptu basis

On the other hand, you just know that A and B are speaking formally if they use proper nouns that can be found in a dictionary.

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