電車男 Densha Otoko

The only thing really guaranteed to chill me to my very marrow is complete and utter silence--rather the absence of human noise, be it talking or laughing or farting or whatever. So I'm standing on a crowded train leaving Kanayama and reading a Wittgenstein memoir (don't ask), and the only thing the train car is full of besides people is silence, absolute silence. At one point as I'm reading I come across something that made me chuckle, and as a result everyone in my immediate vicinity twitched as if startled. Fascinated by this reaction, I started whistling softly "On the Street Where You Live," and noticed the invisible barrier that surrounds all gaijin begin to widen and push people back.

I stopped whistling, and after time the gaijin barrier began to recede. I waited a few minutes, let everyone get comfortable with the silence again, and let out a huge guffaw the likes of which even I have yet to see. The gaijin barrier exploded. One guy nearly had a heart attack, a woman further down the car jerked as if buffeted by the explosion, and two people in the seat behind me actually got up to move further away. All of which didn't help the situation, because it just turned my fake laughter into real laughter.

And my notebooks are no better; sometimes I get so caught up in my digressions that I wind up in places from which there is seemingly no escape:

"some say witty; some say shitty. still others only marvel at the size of her titties. of the witties, shitties, and titties, I most readily side with the witties but reserve my strongest sympathies for the labor of the titties. cities - titties - these are the best of Man's capabilities. however, in other news, some prefer Harvard, and some prefer Yale, but most could throw up in a bucket or pail. whether awake or you snooze, either is suited to 'cademy blues. and if you lose what you had in Nantucket, remember, at least, to learn when you fail."

and the word games ended up with me writing

"never wonder why a lonel[ly] spider tears her - weaving -
elaborate maps of indigenous fruit flies.

at a nightclub buzz chittering queens like bees to - honey -
'the kids have to be at soccer practice by five.'

love is not love which alters when it alteration - finds -
that made him wonder why he ever shopped retail.

sev'ral hunnerd packs of Sudafed and min'ral - spirits -
her away to a land with the sweetest hazes."

And in the margins next to those little ditties: "for want of fatter joints."

THE PHILOLOGIST!

I have a feeling if I were ever bitten by a radioactive spider, I wouldn't luck out like Peter Parker did. I'd end up with some sort of lame ability like the ability to spot a spurious etymology from a hundred yards. Who needs a power like that? Anyway, this little number goes out to all the classicists who never thought I was a real philologist (*cough*John Foley*cough*).

わたしのなまえをおしりになりたいのでしょう
watashi no namae wo oshiri ni naritai no deshou

I never would have suspected Shiina Ringo to have written a song entirely in kana, given her penchant otherwise to use kogo (classical Japanese) and some of the most obscure kanji (chinese characters) in composing her lyrics. it looks like a kids' song (Ringo's [Apple's] Song), and that's precisely what it was when the song was set to an animated short for NHK's Minna no uta (Songs for Everybody).

you probably want to know my name

The Ringo persona addresses her audience in keigo (respect language) and further softens the presumption that she knows what her superior desires with the supposition deshou. assume for a moment, though, that oshiri ni naritai is not keigo at all.

you probably want my name to shoot our your butt

But now that Ringo is no longer speaking keigo she could just as easily be talking about her own desires.

I kinda want to shoot my name out my butt

The auxiliary verb なる (whence naritai, "[somebody] wants to なる) becomes 生る, "to bear fruit," a verb entirely appropriate for the assumption that Ringo is singing in the persona of an apple tree. and if なる becomes 生る then something has to be done with oshiri; easy, make お知り (the articular form of the verb 知る, "to know") into お尻, "butt." you might prefer something more literal, then.

I kinda wanna bear the fruit of me name in me bum

it's no coincidence this song comes as a loner when Ringo was making several transitions: a transition to motherhood, a transition from marriage to divorce, having her trademark mole removed, from a solo career to joining a band. the biographical reading of this moment is both easy and entirely unnecessary.

I wanna shove my name up your ass

な る could just as easily be 成る, "to include/to comprise." we've already seen how the lack of explicit subjects in Ringo's statement permits a shifting of perspectives. it can just as easily switch back. once again, you might want something more literal.

I want for my name to be included in your butt

Normally, we'd expect oshiri kara here if the verb なる is in fact to be read as 成る. I don't think this is a matter of great concern, as the most common verb of receiving もらう can take either or kara to indicate the direction of reception (はは　に/から　りんごをもらった, "I got an apple from my mom"). I see a certain affinity between the two verbs, so let us assume for the moment 成る can take ni as well.

I want my name to be behind me

What if なる is just なる? in pulling the syntactic taffy, I've failed to entertain the possibility that なる is just plain old なる, "to become." and until now I've also assumed that を is nothing but the particle that marks a sentence's direct object. it has an emotive use as well.

夢と知りせば覚めざらましを
ah, if I'd known it to be a dream, I'd never've awoken!

What is your butt? euphemistically speaking, it's your behind. it's behind you. in that other video set to the same song, Ringo appears alone re-presenting all of those images of herself over the years. it's cute in its own way.

Manga-loids

I am somewhat surprised at how hard it is to find a Peanuts collection in this country. Everywhere I go I see students with little plush Snoopy or Woodstock figures attached to their bags along with tiny, tinny, annoying little bells. I suppose it is symptomatic of my general inability to find even the books I'd settle for (much less need), more often than not winding up with something that isn't quite good enough but in general resembles the kind of information I need. I'm starting to realize what a wealth of Lit. there is on these here interwebs.

Literature (of course, to pronounce that correctly you need to suck your bottom lip back a bit and slur the word into lit-chruh-chuuuuuur) does not seem to be much of a priority to the Japanese. As Colleen can attest, many students can barely remember having ever read a book much less one they enjoyed or read recently. I'd like to think it's differnt [sic] in the old US of A, but perhaps it isn't.

So, I walk into the Book Off (not its cousin the Hard Off, which, as I feel the need to point out to anyone who'll listen, is the opposite of a hard on) in Toyohashi to look for a few books, nothing major just some pop crap to read on the trains. Your average used book shop in DaiNippon is roughly 50% comics, 20% "other books," 20% digital media (CDs, games, DVDs, etc.), and 10% porn of various stripes. The porn is particularly perilous as a faulty sense of how the shelves wrap can lead you from the hardcover M's right into a wall of innocent (buxom) animated schoolgirls being raped by intergalactic sex demons. Generally speaking, I wind up looking about for 10 minutes trying to find a copy of Murakami's Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which supposedly sold several million copies here), giving up, and heading over to the manga section to buy an old issue of Hikaru no Go or occasionally the weird Tale of Genji manga.

Comics in Japan have something of a throw away quality to them. In the US, pimple-faced barely pubescent nerds (and their fat, middle-aged counterparts) treat their comic books with something of a reverent awe. Generally, after the most mild of readings with perhaps a pair of tweezers or rubber gloves, the comic book is locked away in a mylar bag to protect it from 1) any acids that might discolor the paper and 2) the general wear and tear that might result from transport or a particularly uncooth manhandling. Manga here are, for lack of a better term, cheap pieces of crap, generally published on the lowest quality newsprint one can find. The weekly anthologies in which the newest chapters of each publisher's running series appear are typically given a once over and tossed in the trash. Incidentally, train station trash cans are something of a trove of reading material.

So as a dedicated word nerd, I am sometimes saddened to live where books just aren't made to last.

So, Blogger screwed up and somehow my most recent post got put in the wrong place. You can go directly there, if you so wish.