Peachfuzz Translations

Yume de Aimashou: Apartment (Itoi)

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​Yume de Aimashou: Apartment (Itoi)

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from Yume de Aimashou, collected here

Apartment

    Mr. Yoshio Kotaka authored a book, “How I Became Section Chief”; unfortunately, this maiden publication of his came just on the heels of the launch of his colleague Takao Ōyama’s “Do This and You’ll Be a Department Head,” a step up the corporate ladder. Mr. Kotaka’s book did not set the charts ablaze.
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    His wife Mutsuko, missing the bright and cheery Mr. Kotaka of old, reached out to her mother and sister-in-law at their family home.

    She needed the help.
    The three Yamamoto women - the new Yamamoto, the née Yamamoto, and the Yamamoto who’d been one for a good long time - took Mr. Kotaka’s work and covered the “Section Chief” type on the cover with stickers that read “Company President”.
    The née Yamamoto - that is, Mutsuko, now Mr. Kotaka’s wife - was a woman who could sustain her ardor.
    By the time her mother and sister-in-law timidly asked her if she’d take care of the bullet train tickets to take them back to the Yamamoto home, the sticker-sticking work had stretched on for fifty hours in all.
    “I’m not a Yamamoto, though, I’m a Kotaka,” Mutsuko said resolutely. She kept at the stickers, not even pausing to see the other two off.
    Her labor went on for twelve whole years and more.
    Perhaps it would’ve been better to sell the amended books as she finished them, but if they had sold out, there wouldn’t have been any more to restock with yet.
    When the first printing of three thousand copies, each one with the “Section Chief” changed to “Company President” and the publication date in the colophon fixed, was finally ready to rush to bookstore shelves, Mutsuko Kotaka read her husband of many years’ work afresh, and she was moved to tears.
    Mr. Yoshio Kotaka was, at that moment, in the bath; when the sound of his wife sobbing reached him, though, he came running, still wet. Mr. Kotaka held, by this point, the title of Department Head. The dripping, naked, aging man with a towel wrapped around his waist and his wife, wrapped in a very unsteady posture of embrace, cried aloud together.
    Mr. Kotaka had one secret he’d been keeping from his wife: thanks to an acquaintance who had a printing company, he’d begun printing copies of his second work, “Finding Success As an Apartment Manager!”
    His old rival Takao Ōyama had launched his own book, “I Got This Rich Managing Condos!”, a single day before.
    He couldn’t ask her to cover the title with “a Home Realtor” stickers, even if he tore his mouth open. Mr. Kotaka gently stroked the stiff curls of his wife’s permed hair, and bulbous tears drooped from his eyes.
    ​Mutsuko felt a distantly remembered something - something like warmth and affection - coming from her husband’s hands, and as she cried, she squirmed and slipped out of her skirt, letting it drop away.
    
--Shigesato Itoi

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Yume de Aimashou: Asparagus (Murakami)

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Yume de Aimashou: Asparagus (Murakami)

from Yume de Aimashou, collected here

Asparagus

    We found ourselves lost in the middle of an asparagus field, of all places. We’d set out early that morning, aiming to arrive in the next town just after midday, but before we knew it, there we were in a vast field of asparagus, and the sun had begun to lean to the west. The breeze carried a definite chill, and the air all around was pregnant with that sinister asparagus smell.
    I got out the compass and map from my knapsack and tried to determine where we’d ended up, but the effort left me even more confused. The map didn’t show a single thing about an asparagus field anywhere near here.
    
“Let’s just figure out where the town is. As long as we know which way to go, we can knuckle down and make it out of this field, at least,” I said.
    My little brother, the lightest of us, shimmied gracefully up a towering asparagus tree, then gripped the trunk tight with one hand like a monkey as he swiveled to look all around.
    “I don’t know. I can’t see a thing. There’s no lights or anything,” he said, shaking his head.
    “What’ll we do?” my little sister asked me, her voice trembling with tears waiting to spill.
    “Hey, it’s okay. No need to worry,” I told her, patting her shoulder. “I need you two to get us a bunch of kindling. Enough to keep a fire going all night. I’ll dig us a ditch.”
    My sister and brother did as I asked: covering their mouths and noses with towels to keep from going numb, they set out to collect twigs and dead branches of asparagus. In the meantime, I dug out a ditch around a meter deep with my shovel. A ditch without water and only about a meter deep wasn't much more than a placebo, but it was better than nothing. At least it would calm the other two down.
    The full moon floated clearly up in the sky, and its light dyed the cloudy breath that the asparagus spewed from its roots a shade of blue. Some straggling little birds alighted on the ground, looking pained as they beat their wings. Very soon now - when the moon shone straight overhead - they would probably be ensnared and dragged away by the asparagus tentacles. Of all nights, tonight had to be a full moon.
    “Stay low to the ground, and keep your head below the gas. No falling asleep. The second we do, the tentacles will find us,” I said. The long night was about to begin.

--Haruki Murakami
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Yume de Aimashou: Assistant (Itoi)

 

Yume de Aimashou: Assistant (Itoi)

from Yume de Aimashou, collected here

Assistant

    An assistant may not, without permission, eat a manjū which the professor has kept to eat at their leisure later on.
    An assistant may not scheme to prevent a lady visitor, on the pretext of said visitor’s beauty, from entering the professor’s office.

    An assistant may not practice such discrimination as to pour watery, worn-out tea for the professor, then give themselves the first pour of a new kettle.
    An assistant may not, when speaking with the professor, begin their sentences with “So, y’know…”
    An assistant may not covet a salary greater, nor chair more comfortable, than that of the professor.
    An assistant may not arbitrarily print “section chief” or other such titles on business cards.
    This being the case, I have no intention of becoming an assistant, now or anytime in the future.

--Itoi Shigesato
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Yume de Aimashou: Eisenhower (Murakami)

 

Yume de Aimashou: Eisenhower (Murakami)

from Yume de Aimashou, collected here
Eisenhower (or the State of the Postwar in 1958)

    On September 26th, 1958, in the evening, Sonny Rollins stood upon the darkening Brooklyn Bridge, alone and diligently practicing his scales on his tenor saxophone.
    “Hey, mister, what’re you doing?” asked a boy as he walked by Sonny.
    “I’m fighting a nuclear monster,” Sonny answered.
    “No way!” said the boy.

    At that very moment, President Eisenhower was commanding the armed forces, out in the middle of the New Mexican desert, locked in grand and deadly battle with a real nuclear monster, which was possessed of four enormous pincers.
    “Mr. President, if this goes on, the whole world will be destroyed. Our weapons can’t contend with that,” reported the Secretary of State, delivering the battle status in a haggard voice.
    “O God, forgive us. We have brought into this world a being that never should have been,” the President murmured.
    Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, went the nuclear monster, crushing and trampling tanks and desert soldiers as it came.

    “Hey, aren’t the doughnuts ready yet?” I yelled, at nine years old, toward my mother’s back as she stood in the kitchen.

--Haruki Murakami
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Murakami Haruki & Itoi Shigesato: Yume de Aimashou (Let's Meet in a Dream)

 

Murakami Haruki & Itoi Shigesato: Yume de Aimashou (Let's Meet in a Dream)

Earlier this year, a friend told me about the book Yume de Aimashou (Let's Meet In a Dream)​, by pretty-famous novelist Murakami Haruki (whom you've probably heard of if you're reading this at all) and Itoi Shigesato, designer of the Mother games and occasional Studio Ghibli voice actor. There's a huge cross-section of the Internet to whom this book should at least be worth some curiosity!

I'll post links to individual translations below.

The book is a collection of short stories, or thoughts, or ideas - it's hard to pin down. Lindsay at Yomuka! has included a translation of Murakami's thoughts on the subject, from his introduction to the book, on this detailed page - which incidentally is the most complete collection of translated works from the book that I've found online, and some seriously nice work!

As always, this is just for fun, and should official English publication ever come up (fingers crossed!), I hope you'll buy a copy if you're interested. Even if I'm not involved. :P
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Murakami

Itoi

  • Eisenhower
  • Asparagus​​
  • Assistants
  • Apartment
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Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing Retranslation

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Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing Retranslation

Last September, The Guardian announced that Ted Goossen, a professor at NYU and literary translator, will be retranslating Haruki Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing (風の歌を聴け, Kaze no Uta wo Kike), which was first published in 1979 and has been out of print in English for a while now (originally translated by Alfred Birnbaum). The translation is apparently due out sometime this year (2015). Ted Goossen also translated Murakami's The Strange Library, which came out last year plus a number of short stories from Men Without Women (hey I did that too).

Seeing this made me remember I had a copy of the book laying around! I've translated the first 10 or so chapters (some of them pretty short) and will post some here, with the caveat that y'all should buy the official version when it comes out of course. Text of the first chapter is below. Let me know if you want to read more!
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Kage Akashi (影明かし)

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Kage Akashi 影明かし (roughly, Bringing Light to Shadow) is an independent RPG by a developer called Foomal (website), made using the Wolf RPG Editor tool. I've been recording myself playing it for the past week or so, which should be up on Twitch for another few weeks. 

It's meant to be played through in just a couple hours. It has an incredibly fast and pared-down battle system, and the in-game fast-travel system (which can bring you to discovered points in the world or any locked door you encounter!) makes exploring and backtracking painless.
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For the first half or so of the first playthrough, it's hard not to look at  all the abilities and weapons it tosses haphazardly out for you to pick up and feel overpowered. Eventually, a sense of challenge does set in, but you can switch equipment on the fly in battle and use as many items per turn as you want. If you get to know the systems, there's no reason to die, ever. 

It's a game that's meant to be optimized, for speed, for efficiency in battle. It knows that's what's fun about it, and is good at placing very surmountable barriers in front of you and enticing you forward with locked doors, so you always feel like there's a clear thing to progress to.

It's possible to play this without understanding Japanese if you're willing to experiment with a few trial-and-error menu selections, but I had fun trying to on-the-fly translate the names of items and moves, plus the occasionally-arcane speech of NPCs and bosses. Had fun playing it. Try it out or check out my videos on it (labeled Kage Akashi)!
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Haruki Murakami- Men Without Women

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Haruki Murakami- Men Without Women
村上春樹「女のいない男たち」

So midway through my last post about Haruki Murakami, I realized there was nothing really stopping me from just getting a copy of his new short story collection Men Without Women (Onna no Inai Otoko-tachi) and trying to beat every other nerd to translating it. A couple stories from it have already been officially published in English (Yesterday, translated by Philip Gabriel, came out in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, and I could swear I saw that an official translation of Drive My Car was being published somewhere a few months ago, but I'm coming up dry. Side note: two more Beatles-song-titled stories! I can't decide if I want more to write songs so great and famous people name stories after them, or to be such a great and famous writer that I can just use Coheed and Cambria song titles and everyone else has to deal).

Here's the opening section of the last story in the collection, Men Without Women--the source of the collection's title, which is a pretty accurate thematic summation of about 90% of Murakami's writing, as well as an Ernest Hemingway nod (to which Murakami cops in the foreword). 
        JUST PAST ONE IN the morning, a phone call comes and wakes me up. The phone ringing is always more violent in the middle of the night. It sounds like somebody at work with ferocious metal fastenings, trying to wreck the very world. As a member of the human race myself, I of course must stop them. Which is why I get out of bed and go to the living room, and pick up the receiver.

A man's low voice informs me of something, of the fact that a woman has disappeared from this world for all time. The voice's owner was this woman's husband. Such was the only identification he gave for himself. And then he said this: My wife committed suicide on Wednesday this past week, and if nothing else I think I have got to tell you that, he said. If nothing else. As far as I heard, there wasn't a drop of emotion in his voice. It was like he was reading off a telegram. There was nearly no space between his words. A pure announcement. Information, no decoration. Period.


Now how did I respond to that? I'm sure I said something, but I can't remember what. Either way, for a while after there was silence. A silence like two people staring deeply, from opposite sides, into a gaping hole in the middle of the road. And then the man hung up just like that, without another word, like placing a fragile work of art gently on the floor. I stood there for some time after, holding onto the receiver without any real point. There in my white T-shirt and blue boxers.


How he even knew who I was, I have no idea. Had she dropped my name, that of an old lover? Why? And how did he get my home phone number (which was unlisted)? And in the first place, 
why me? Why had her husband had to expressly call me, and inform me that she had died? I highly doubted that she would have asked him to in her will. It had been a long, long time since we were together. We had only even seen each other once since then. We hadn't even talked on the phone.

But that, well, who really cares about that? The problem here is that he he didn't bother to give me a word of explanation. He'd believed he had to let me know that his wife had killed herself. Then he'd gotten hold of my home phone number from somewhere. And then he hadn't felt the need to give me any further details. Just left me right at the halfway point between knowledge and ignorance, where it certainly looked like he'd intended to leave me all along. Why in the world? Was there some thought he was trying to lead me to?


Like what?


I can't even imagine. The question marks just keep on piling up, as if some child with a question mark stamp were trying to fill up a whole notebook with them.


So I'm still in the dark as to why she committed suicide, and how she chose to do it. I have neither the inclination nor the means to find out. I'd had no idea where she was living, or even that she was married, for that matter. Couldn't possibly have known what her new surname was (the man on the phone hadn't given his name). How long had they been married, anyway? Did they have a child? Children, even?


But I accepted what her husband had told me at face value. I didn't feel inclined to doubt him. So, then: after breaking up with me, she'd gone on living through this world, fallen in love (probably) with someone, gotten married, and then, for some reason, by some means, ended her own life on Wednesday of last week. 
If nothing else. There had, without a doubt, been something in his voice that was deeply bound to the world of the dead. In the stillness of the night, I could hear it vividly. I could even see the tension of a thread pulled taut, the sharp glimmer. By that line of thought--whether it was intentional or not--calling me at one in the morning had been, from his perspective, the right choice. One in the afternoon probably wouldn't have worked out.

When I finally placed the receiver down and returned to bed, my wife was awake.


"What was the call about? Did someone die?" she asked.


"No one died. Just a wrong number," I said, in a sleepy drawl.


She didn't believe me, of course. A hint of death was buried in my voice. The unrest stirred by the recently deceased is virulently contagious. It travels down phone lines as a faint quiver, mutating the vibrations of words, synchronizing the world with its oscillations. But my wife didn't say anything else. We lay there in the dark, leaning our ears to the silence, each with our own thoughts spinning through our heads.
If you're interested in reading the rest, let me know AND/OR buy whatever publication an official translation eventually comes out in! It features sailorphobia (nautaphobia?), wind-boners, elevator music, and critical levels of unreliable narrator-ing, plus possessiveness and infatuation and pedestal-placing. And, if you want, some real and sometimes striking images and thoughts on loss. I liked this story and enjoyed working on it, with all its silliness and despite its poor male role-modeling.

P.S. will sincerely try and post about something besides Murakami next time (maybe)
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Haruki Murakami- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

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Haruki Murakami- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami's work is a good part of the reason I decided to study Japanese in the first place, though much of that credit goes to his seriously talented translators as well. I worked with a couple of his short stories for my senior thesis in college, and recently started translating some of his newest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Japanese: 色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年 | Shikisai wo Motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, Kare no Junrei no Toshi). There's no official English release yet, but looks like it'll be here August 12th. 
Below I've shared probably the most "oh yep this is Murakami" passages out of what I've done so far. If you're into it, buy the book when it's available! 
Trigger warning: both the book and this post contain suicidal and deathly thoughts described in sometimes unsettling detail.
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image: http://www.haruki-murakami.com/post/47999929283/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of
           Normally he wasn't even aware of it, but there was one place on Tsukuru's body that had a terribly delicate sensitivity. It existed somewhere on his back. It was a soft and tender place that he couldn't reach with his hands, normally covered up and invisible from the outside. But when he least expected it, some accident would expose the spot, and someone's fingertip would find it. Then something would begin to work inside him, and an unusual substance would start secreting through his body. That substance would blend with his blood, permeating every nook and cranny of him. The stimulus that was born from that secretion manifested in a feeling that was both concrete and imaginary, simultaneously.

The time he first met Sara, he had felt the sensation of an anonymous finger, extended from who knew where, that pressed deeply into the switch on his back.  They had talked at fair length that day, but he could barely remember what about.  All he remembered was the small gasp and the sensation on his back, and the indescribable stimulus that it wrought in his mind and body.  Like he was part loose, part drawn tight.  That sort of feeling.  What on earth was it supposed to mean?  ....  Unfortunately, he was by nature ill-suited to thinking over abstract, shapeless ideas.  Tsukuru sent her a message inviting her out to eat.  He meant to find the meaning behind the sensation and the stimulus. from Chapter 1
           He was surrounded, as far as he could see, by earth littered with wild rocks. There was not a single drop of water or blade of grass. This place was empty of color and even the light seemed un-light--there was no sun, no moon nor stars, and most likely there were even no directions. There was only the enigmatic twilight and bottomless dark, trading places at predetermined times. It was the furthest reach of what a conscious being could perceive. Yet in its own way, it was rich with life. In the twilight time, flocks of birds came with razor-sharp beaks, and gouged out his flesh without mercy. But in the silence when darkness hid the earth's surface, and the birds took off to who knew where, this place filled the newly carved space in his body with substitutes.

Tsukuru didn't understand the things that made up his new substitute flesh, and he never had the chance to approve or reject them.  They came as swarms of shadows to alight on his body, and laid thousands of their shadow eggs.  When at last the dark retreated and twilight returned, the birds came again, and pecked furiously at his body.

At times like those, he was himself, but in another way he was not.  He was Tsukuru Tazaki, and he wasn't.  When his pain became unbearable, he left his body.  From a painless place a short distance away, he would observe the suffering form of Tsukuru Tazaki.  If he concentrated his whole awareness on it, it wasn't impossible.

Even now, the feeling of leaving himself, of gazing at his own pain like it belonged to someone else, could still be reawakened within him when he least expected it. from Chapter 2
Well, that was a whole barrel of monkeys, wasn't it? That passage about the spot on Tsukuru's back is a very Murakami-esque one--that intimate physical description of a certain spot on the body having weird, unexplainable, driving power. If it were about ears, we'd be on our way to winning Haruki Murakami Bingo! 

Favorite word/phrase I learned: Not featured in these passages, but possibly 笠雲 (かさぐも, kasagumo): a "cap cloud (cloud shaped like an Asian bamboo hat that forms at the peak of a tall mountain)". Interestingly, though, when Murakami uses this word, he changes it up a little: in the dictionary entry I've cited, the character kasa (笠) means the aforementioned conical Asian bamboo hat, but Murakami replaces it with another character also read kasa: 傘, meaning "umbrella." I haven't looked too deeply into it, but a couple quick dictionary and Google searches suggest that this is not a common spelling. My first instinct is that this is more likely to be the author playing with language than making a typo, and doing it in what is--let's be honest--a pretty cute way, too.

Also, I just ordered Murakami's most recent short story collection, Men Without Women (Onna no Inai Otoko-tachi), minutes before writing this up. My mouth's watering a little bit.
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Yonjouhan Shinwa Taikei: The Tatami Galaxy

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Yonjouhan Shinwa Taikei: The Tatami Galaxy

A couple weeks ago I watched the anime adaptation of Yonjouhan Shinwa Taikei (四畳半神話体系 or, roughly, The 4.5 Tatami Mythos), which is officially called The Tatami Galaxy in English, and was originally published as a novel in 2004 (the anime came out in 2010). With a few caveats, especially that there is definitely nostalgia for Kyoto at work here, I was very into it! It was unusual and pretty and frenetic--its art and animation, the dizzying speed of the narrator's speech, and the storylines it leapt between every episode all felt hyper-vital and energetic. It also has a pretty fun opening song:
I picked up the book out of curiosity. I don't remember the anime's narration exactly, but just from some glancing through I wouldn't be surprised if most of it was lifted straight from the book, which is hardly a bad thing, though it does reduce the fun of discovery a little bit. The narrator has a kind of formal-in-grammar but frantic-in-content speech style that's amusing to read but hard to capture. He's a student at a high-ranked university and is in some ways smart, but comes across as highfalutin. Here's a quick ("quick") translation of the first few paragraphs of chapter one, which establishes the basis each story starts from.
       Let's go ahead and declare here that for the two years leading up to the spring of my third year in college, I have done absolutely nothing of any practical value. I have completely rejected healthy interactions with the opposite sex, devotion to my studies, discipline of my body, in fact any number of strategic moves toward becoming a worthwhile member of society, in favor of flailing away with singular focus at shunning the opposite sex, neglecting my studies, letting my body go soft, and other such "strategic moves" that deserved to be smacked off the board--and how did it come to this?

This demands an answer from the responsible party. Where is the responsible party?

I have not been this way all my life, after all.

It's said that just after I was born I was the very avatar of innocence and purity, that my charm (likened to that of Hikaru Genji in his infancy) and my smile (with not a shard of wicked thought) bathed my birthplace of Yamano in the light of love. But how about now? I am driven into anger every time I look in the mirror. How did you turn out like this? Is this the sum of your accounts?

"You're still young," some might say. "People can change as much as they want," they might say.

As if such a foolish idea could be true.
FUN! not sure if I'll keep going with this book yet, we'll see!
Favorite word/phrase I learned: 三つ子の魂百まで (mitsu go no tamashii hyaku made). 
Literally: "the soul of a child of three (is the same) at 100." 
Figuratvely, any number of English idioms: the child is the father of the man; once a(n) X, always a(n) X; the leopard cannot change his spots; etc.
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    Jackson Pietsch
    ピーチ・ジャクソン

    I eat pizza backwards

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