Rite? Amirite?

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You’ll have to forgive me – this semester has been insane. Japanese is still happening, almost on an everyday basis, but often it’s in my dreams. I have been reading Dance Dance Dance in Japanese with the hopes of translating some of the abridged sections this upcoming September. But other than that, I’ve been teaching, reading, and writing English. Here’s a quick lame post so that I don’t skip February.

I wrote about でしょう a couple years ago and wasn’t able to give a really good example of the tone that I was trying to express. Well, I was watching my Twitter feed not too long ago and caught this interaction between New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi and Jean Snow of Neojaponisme:

Tabuchi’s でしょう I think accurately captures what I was trying to communicate – it’s almost along the lines of the tone of the English amirite? or rite?

To further impress this upon you, I have recorded my own versions of the various でしょう tones. Here is How to Japanese Podcast Ep 2, which is so short that it doesn’t even deserve a time index. Hope this is helpful.

おかげで vs. せいで

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After the last posts, I got an email from a friend reminding me that there was one more element of おかげ（さま）で that I needed to discuss before I could run it into the ground. Here’s the email:

E-mail from a colleague I’m in contact with made me think of your post recently. (Context: discussing her school closure due to SNOWMAGEDDON up in Seattle):

「明日も休校です。こんなに続けて休校になったのは本当に久しぶりです。お蔭で家でゆっくりと読書に耽ったり、好きなフランス語の勉強をしたり、ヨガをしたりしています。」

Sounds like she is have a pretty sweet snowcation. So, yes, おかげで has another usage, which is closer to the ので and で that I wrote about in the past – it’s explaining causality, in particular beneficial causality. Because of/“thanks to” the snow and the school closure, she’s been able to read and study French and do yoga and damn you for living in a cold climate! I want a snow day! In the sentence above, おかげで is used at the beginning of a sentence, but you could easily use it as a conjunction and mash the clauses together: 休校になったおかげで、久しぶりに読書した。

This is the way that I first learned おかげで, which is partially why I was confused when I heard it as an idiomatic greeting. I knew that someone was being thanked, and I may even have had a sense that the someone had been dropped (pronoun drop yo) and was an implied “you.” But “you” hadn’t done anything for me! So why was I supposed to be saying お陰様で元気です? Because that’s what they say. When used as an idiomatic greeting phrase, you don’t have to consider the “beneficial causality” as much.

There is an equal and opposite conjunction せいで which is used to explain negative causality. For example, 雪が降ったせいで、自動車事故が増えた。

Personally, I loved watching all the videos the last few days of Seattle drivers running into each other in the snow because that’s exactly what would happen in New Orleans. I, however, mastered snow driving in Fukushima. The best policy is just not to drive (as long as you have sufficient supplies of chocolate and beer).

More on お陰様で

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Durf sent along an interesting post about お陰様で on Japan Echo by a Japanese columnist. He notes that お陰様で has been used frequently in the areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami. The examples show how it’s really just an idiomatic greeting that can be used to acknowledge someone’s concern for your person. Most excellent. Start using it…now.

I was curious to see that the writer’s wife, a Kansai native, was unfamiliar with the term. My friend who just had a baby is from Sendai, but I can’t remember where my Japanese teacher is from. For the most part they tried to teach us 標準語 (ひょうじゅんご), so I’m tempted to say that お陰様で works in the capital as well.

Getting used to お陰様

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One of the best parts about my return to New Orleans is that I have not been sick as much as I was in Japan. My first winter in Fukushima I caught pneumonia. The second year I had the flu or something similar. The third year my nose completely closed up and I went on nasal steroids (which became an annual thing). I loved the healthcare system in Japan – the doctors were friendly and everything was really affordable – but it’s better not to get sick. I say this on a day in early January in New Orleans where it was overcast and rainy but still in the upper 70s: I had the air conditioner on. Two days ago I went for a jog along my normal jogging route in a sleeveless T. Life is good. I occasionally get a bit sickish, but my body has had fewer catastrophic failures than it did in Japan.

Part of this could be that I’m exercising more. My normal jogging route takes me along the Mississippi River, but back in November I was blocked by the train and ran back to Magazine Street rather than along “the Fly” (the park area in a batture along the river). This resulted in one of those 何かの縁 moments that life surprises you with every now and then. My Japanese conversation partner happened to be walking in the park with her mother and newborn son. I hadn’t seen her for about a month since she gave birth.

She said, おお、偶然だね。何している？ジョギング？ I replied, お久しぶりです。はい、ジョギング。おめでとうございます。 無事に生まれた？ (Or something like that. I was a little winded and surprised, so I’m sure my Japanese was crap.) Then she said one of the best get-used to it phrases in Japanese: お陰様で無事に生まれた。

I’m not sure if that’s the exact verb/verb form she used, but I want to focus on the お陰様で (おかげさまで). This is a great phrase. Forget about what it means. Let’s focus on some context.

My first encounter with this phrase was on the very first day of the second semester of my third year – so the first day of class after the New Year holiday. The teacher said, お元気ですか？ We began to reply 元気です and the teacher tilted her head to the side like we were making a mistake. No one could figure out what the mistake was was until she fed us the answer – お陰様で元気です。 I remember being baffled. I had no idea what it meant. I wish I could go back and shake myself and say, “It doesn’t matter what it means! It’s just what they say! Just say it! Say it all the time!”

Now the question becomes when do they say it. These two examples have at least one thing in common: a certain length of time has passed since the speakers last met. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen my teacher and about a month since I’d seen my friend. Things happened since the speakers met.

Now is there any similarity between these things? And here is where I give some background context: I’d given my friend a baby gift before she gave birth. And then she gave birth. So yes, some things happened. In the case of my teacher, not much happened. We had a week of vacation between exams and the start of the new semester. I’m going to say no, the things that happened are not similar. This is good. This shows us two different uses of the phrase.

In my teacher’s case, the お陰様で is used almost exclusively as a set 挨拶 (あいさつ). Get used to it, use お陰様で元気です all the time, especially after using しばらく or 久しぶり.

In my friend’s case, it’s used as a way to express thanks. Not that the baby blanket I gave her helped her give birth at all (at least I hope not…the hospital should have enough blankets), but I’d done something nice, and then she’d gone and done something successfully. お陰様で is a useful way to report an accomplishment and indirectly express thanks for the accomplishment. It’s also a very polite phrase. Simply say お陰様で and add whatever you accomplished. You passed a test? お陰様で合格 (ごうかく)しました！ You were accepted into the JET Program or some other job? お陰様で就職(しゅうしょく)しました！ Your friend fed you ramen when you were wasted and you didn’t get a hangover? お陰様で二日酔い(ふつかよい)になりませんでした！ This phrase has all sorts of great usages.

There are places on teh Internetz where you can read about the origin of the phrase, but it’s advisable to just get used to it. Or Google it and then get used to it.

2011: 1Q84 Goes Abroad

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I have a piece up on Neojaponisme today about the reception of the English translation of 1Q84 abroad. Murakami has been divisively cool in the U.S. ever since The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was published in 1997 and lauded in The Hipster’s Handbook (which gets it all so so wrong! Hard-boiled Wonderland a dud?!); his popularity was always treated like that of a well-respected indie band: he was critically respected to a great degree, and even if people didn’t “dig,” they understood why he was so popular and maybe even quietly fumed that they couldn’t join the bandwagon. Some probably even invented reasons to dislike him and practiced delivering them in front of their mirrors.

The tides have turned. The great critical organ has been rent divisive. I didn’t follow the response to Kafka on the Shore or afterdark all that closely, but I don’t think it was as divided as the response to 1Q84 has been. I remember being baffled by Updike’s response to Kafka (“Japanese spiritual tact”? WTF, mate?), but a lot of people (other than Jay Rubin) seem honestly to have enjoyed Kafka. I actually liked afterdark. Neither of those novels were as heavily anticipated as 1Q84, though.

One thing we’ve learned is that Murakami has aged like a motherfucker, and I don’t think he has much more to say that isn’t fueled by the books he reads or researches. His first two novels and Norwegian Wood all take his own experience as the seed for the concepts he addresses – coming of age, love, loss, the death of the student movement in Japan. Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, while somewhat researched, still deal with concepts that Murakami seems invested in and able to grasp firmly in his noggin – results of Japan’s economic development, ghosts of the early 20th century push for modernization and results of the war. And Hard-boiled Wonderland deals almost strictly with memory, making it one of his more focused works. (Notice that I didn’t mention Wind-up Bird. Let’s just ignore that one. La la la la la, I can’t hear you…)

1Q84 would make sense if it were a novel about cults or religion, since that is something that Murakami knows a good bit about thanks to Underground, but it isn’t a novel about cults or the cult mindset. It’s something different altogether, and with the text that he gives us, it’s impossible to know what that something is. Good and evil are not black and white? Love conquers all? He’s trying awfully hard to say something, something very serious, but it becomes clear that anytime Murakami introduces a new Concept (and they do feel awfully heavy, which is why I capitalized the C) into his novels, he ends up citing it with some sort of book the protagonist has read. This gets tiresome very quickly and doesn’t feel organic like with his older works.

And as noted in the piece, Murakami’s playful tone is completely absent from this book. All that’s left is unintentional humor like the lesbian sex scene quoted in the post and this give and take between Aomame and the evil (or is he?!) badguy of the book, “Leader”:

“All right, then,” Aomame said. “There is no firm basis. Nothing has been proved. I can’t understand all the details. But still, it seems I have to accept your offer. In keeping with your wishes, I will obliterate you from this world. I will give you a painless, instantaneous death so that Tengo can go on living.”

“This means that you will agree to my bargain, then?”

“Yes. We have a bargain.”

“You will probably die as a result, you know,” the man said. “You will be chased down and punished. And the punishment may be terrible. They are fanatics.”

“I don’t care.”

“Because you have love.”

Aomame nodded.

The man said, “ ‘Without love, it’s a honky-tonk parade.’ Like in the song.”

I’ve been reading through the Japanese version of Dance Dance Dance recently, 2-3 pages a day which I follow with an equivalent amount of the English translation. I’m only about 20% through the novel, and while it does show some of the same weaknesses as 1Q84 (terrible pacing, repetition of weird actions intended to express character traits, lack of direction), Murakami feels in control of the Concepts of the book. He’s able to play with them in a way that’s funny and critical at the same time.

The boku narrator of Dance Dance Dance senses that something is fishy about the newly developed Dolphin Hotel, and one of the employees mentions an investigative report published in a weekly magazine. Boku tracks down the article, which details the real estate gymnastics that had to be performed to get the property and build the new hotel. After going through it with the reader, this is boku’s response:

The reporter had devoted a lot of energy to following the paper trail. Still, despite his outcry—or rather, all the more because of his outcry—the article curiously lacked punch. A rallying cry it wasn’t. The guy just didn’t seem to realize: Nothing about this was suspect. It was a natural state of affairs. Ordinary, the order of the day, common knowledge. Which is why nobody cared. If huge capital interests obtained information illegally and bought up propery, forced a few political decisions, then clinched the deal by having yakuza extort a little shoe store here, maybe beat up the owner of some small-time, end-of-the-line hotel there, so what? That’s life, man. The sand of time keeps running from under our feet. We’re no longer standing where we once stood.

The reporter had done everything he could. The article was well researched, full of righteous indignation, and hopelessly untrendy.

Unfortunately I think the same could be said about the Concepts that Murakami is addressing in 1Q84 – nobody cares (not really), and they are untrendy.

(Art courtesy of Ian Lynam and Neojaponisme.)

1Q84 English Translation Liveblog

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I spent about a month preparing material for my liveblog of 1Q84 when it was released in 2009. I had bits of translation from his works, pieces of interviews I’d translated, write-ups about the beer I was drinking, and other fun links. I’ve got none of that this time! As with Murakami Fest 2011, my liveblog of the English translation will be fast and loose…and hopefully not too boring. (On a side note, this past year I’ve noticed that English professors love using that term “fast and loose.”)

Comment away. Check me out on Twitter to see action updates when I leave the computer. I’ll start with the same caveat with which I began my liveblog of the original: What we’re doing doesn’t make sense, but we’re not doing it because it makes sense. Continue after the break for liveblog madness all weekend.

Continue reading →

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 1 景気を付けて

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I’ve been interested in doing a podcast for a while, and I was finally inspired to start one by my last post about 景気を付けて, which really only makes any sense if you can hear it, so go ahead and check out the first How to Japanese Podcast episode and hear me do my fierce 祭り yell.

Podcast Contents:
1. Intro (0.00)
2. 景気を付けて (1.11)
3. Plugging the liveblog (5.37)

How to Japanese – Ep1 景気を付けて by howtojapanese

And yes, I will be liveblogging my reading of the English translation of 1Q84 this weekend. I liveblogged my reading of the original Japanese novel (at least the first few hundred pages of the first book) when it came out in 2009, and it was a lot of fun. I may not be the first to read the translation, and I definitely won’t be the last to read it, but I sure as hell will be the best to read it.

The little shamisen/violin thingie I stole for the section break sound in the podcast comes from Estradasphere‘s song “Those Who Know…” which refers to the most excellent Japanese saying 知る人ぞ知る – those who know know…motherfucker. I’m on the lookout for some sort of sound that will evoke Japan and be usable under Creative Commons licensing or whatnot. Any ideas? Anyone willing to lend some catchy shamisen or shakuhachi notes? Bueller? Tanaka?

Mind Yer Imperatives

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Well, I’ve emerged from the Pain Cave just in time to turn 30 and to finally get around to transferring my new domain name howtojapanese.com to Namecheap and setting it redirect to howtojaponese.com. I do hereby return this blog to its original name, How to Japanese! (And the crowd goes wild.)

A couple of weeks ago was Japan Fest over at the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park. Last year I wrote about the Yakumo Nihon Teien (named for the original Japanophile, Lafcadio Hearn) over at Untapped Cities.

This time, I geared up 祭り-style with my happi to fold some cranes and dress some folks in yukata. Devoted readers might recognize this clothing from the local autumn festival in Nishiaizu.

My participation in the Nishiaizu festival involved helping carry the mikoshi, eating lots of food, and drinking lots of beer. It was a fun time. I was also required to embarrass myself at least once a year by performing the 景気. The mikoshi made the rounds of different neighborhoods, stopping frequently at houses to receive donations and to もむ (lift up and down). Occasionally we parked in front of a house for snacks and a rest. And when we began again, we had to 付ける the 景気 – literally, “apply the good energy.” If you checked out the definition on kotobank, you could say “apply the 元気.”

This meant someone stood up on the mikoshi, shouted 景気を付けて! (which sounded something like けいーきをーつけて: the い and the を were drawn out) and did a little dance while holding a fan. The rhythm was kind of similar to a slow version of a 三本締め party close. Here is what a certain foreigner looked like (his face has been covered to protect the rhythmically challenged):

(Notice the courtesy laughs and the pity smiles.)

The first time I did it, I had no idea what it meant and just followed the instructions of my adopted 祭り family, but I asked in later years and came to have an understanding of what it meant: the person is helping to provide a sense of good spirit for the people who provided snacks. As always, translating this phrase will make you feel like an idiot or a Neo-Confucianist philosopher, so just concentrate on understanding it in Japanese.

I noticed that other people who did the 景気, notably guys, always said 付けろ rather than 付けて. Whenever it was my turn, though, there was a brief debate amongst the townsfolk about whether I should use 付けて or 付けろ, and the former always won. The latter was considered a “bad word” – a curse word, basically.

Until that point, I don’t think I’d ever had a real conception of what the imperatives felt like for Japanese. I used てください and て pretty consistently, and I knew that the ろs and れs were stronger, but I didn’t know exactly how strong. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle, as it were.

Check out this video on YouTube to see some もむ action and read the caption to check out how 景気を付ける gets used.

Last Line

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With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October tomorrow, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this year’s series here: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa.

Tomorrow is the announcement! Murakami started at 16/1 moved to 8/1 and now is in second place at 6/1 behind Bob Dylan. (If Bob wins, I hope Sgt. Tanuki writes something epic about it.) This year Murakami’s chances are as good as they’ve ever been.

For this year’s final entry, I figured I’d go simple. I began my liveblog of 1Q84 with the very first sentence of the novel, so this week I’ll translate the very last sentence of Book 3. Translating any more than that will spoiler.

Here it is:

Until, in the light of a new sun that had just risen, [the moon] quickly lost the intense shine it had at night and turned into just a gray cutout hanging in the sky.

As you can see, he ends with the same metaphor that begins Book 1 in an epigraph – “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” I don’t really have much to say about this other than that it again mirrors the ending of “The Twins and the Sunken Continent.” There, too, he uses a new foreign environment (a sea bed) as a metaphor for how life will proceed. In 1Q84, the new world will be different; its moon may lack the shine from the night, but the passage still feels hopeful. Not completely negative at least. And that’s about all I can add without saying too much about the plot.

In terms of the translation, the definite/indefinite article before “new sun” forces a translator to make interesting decisions. The Japanese is: それが昇ったばかりの新しい太陽に照らされて、夜の深い輝きを急速に失い、空にかかったただの灰色の切り抜きに変わってすまうまで。 I went with “a” to imply that it’s a brand new day. Using “the” would feel more like rebirth of an old sun, which is also a nice image. I’ll be very curious to see how Phillip Gabriel renders this line. I wonder if he’ll leave it as a fragment or connect it with the previous sentence. If I have the energy/effort/time, I’ll try to go back through these posts and compare my versions with the official translation. Should be fun.

Hooray for Murakami Fest! I’m running out of ideas for Murakami translation themes, so you’ll have to give me your thoughts about what I should do next year. I have a couple of things I’ve been working on, but nothing set in stone yet. I’m pretty happy with the way this year turned out, even though it was all off the cuff.

Ushikawa

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With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this year’s series here: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude.

As promised, this week I want to take a look at Book 3. One of the interesting/strange things that Murakami does with Book 3 is to add an additional narrative perspective – the book suddenly starts with a chapter from the point of view of Ushikawa, a creepy messenger/errand boy for the cult in the novel.

The name Ushikawa might be familiar. I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner (as in, when I was writing one of my two reviews of the novel), but Ushikawa was also a character in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. He sneaks into Toru Okada’s house in Chapter 13 of Book 3, he makes another house call in 16, and in 19 they talk on the phone.

And that’s the last we see of him for the entire novel.

He’s nothing more than a device that Murakami uses to advance the plot: he delivers a threatening message from Noboru Wataya – cut ties with “the Hanging House,” the residence where Cinnamon and Nutmeg are set up – which gradually becomes less and less threatening until eventually he just helps Toru get in touch with Kumiko via computer and disappears. We get long blocks of dialog that show what a poor bastard he is, but as best I can tell, he doesn’t really serve any other purpose in the novel.

He’s described similarly in both novels – disheveled, bald, an uncanny ability to track down information, clearly a lackey for someone powerful – but he doesn’t appear to be the exact same character. Just the same trope.

In 1Q84, too, Ushikawa is one sad bastard. In Book 2, he’s again used mostly as a plot device, but because he’s the narrative point of view in Book 3, we get extended information about how sad his life is in Book 3, so much so that I even started to feel bad for him – of all Murakami’s characters, he seems to get a raw deal.

And Murakami seems to revel in making him more and more miserable. I noted one passage in particular on 202. Ushikawa is riding around Tokyo on trains, hunting down information about Tengo and Aomame, and as he does, he’s thinking through the different possible connections in his head (connections that we as readers have known for hundreds of pages). Here’s the part just before a space break:

Ushikawa thought about this the entire time he was on the train from Ichikawa to Tsudanuma. He grimaced and sighed and stared off into space, probably without even realizing it. The primary school student sitting across from him was watching him with a strange look on her face. Out of embarrassment he smiled and rubbed the top of his lopsided bald head with his palm. However, that just seemed to scare the girl. She stood up all of the sudden right before Nishifunabashi Station and quickly ran off somewhere.

I felt like this was a bit overkill. We know he’s ugly. We know he’s a sad bastard. Does he really have to frighten primary school kids? Oh well. I guess that’s Ushikawa for ya.

One little language nugget of note: “lopsided” is いびつ in Japanese, and it appears over and over again in the novel. It’s one of those words that Murakami fixates on and uses a lot like 胡散臭い, 具わっている, and 惹かれる. He uses it a lot to describe the new moon that appears in the 1Q84 alternate reality: the new moon is smaller and more lopsided. I probably would have used a word like warped or irregular, but a teaser from Knopf shows that Rubin went with lopsided, which is a far superior choice. So I borrowed that for this week’s translation.