The Sweet

 [You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

I translated another story by children's writer  新美 南吉 (NIIMI Nankich, 1913-1943) earlier, 牛をつないだ椿の木. The story translated here, 飴だま (amedama, 'The Sweet') is a lot shorter. It seems to be set in the Tokugawa period, when samurai had considerable freedom to punish perceived disrepect from commoners. For some reason, I can't help casting MIFUNE Toshirou (三船 敏郎) as the samurai in my head, particularly the Youjinbou period Mifune. The story is in the public domain; and you can read it online at Aozora Bunko here.

The Sweet

by NIIMI Nankichi

It was a warm day in spring. A woman travelling with two small children was riding on the ferry. As the boat was about to set off, there came a shout, 'Oy, wait there just a moment!'

From over on the embankment a single samurai came running, waving his hand, and leapt onto the boat.

The boat set off.

The samurai sat down heavily in the middle of the boat. The day was so warm that he fell asleep as he sat.

He was a strong looking samurai, with a black beard; but the sight of him sunk so deep in sleep seemed funny to the children. They giggled at him.

Their mother put a finger to her mouth. 'Be quiet!' she said. An angry samurai is a terrible thing.

The children stopped laughing.

A little later one of them held out her hand and said, 'Mummy, a sweet please!'

At that the other one said, 'Mummy, me too!'

Their mother took a paper bag out of her pocket; but there was only one sweet left in it.

'Give it to me!', 'Give it to me!' the two children begged her from either side. As there was only one sweet, she did not know what to do.

'Be good children and wait,' she told them. 'Once we get to the other side, I'll buy you some, you see.'

But the children just threw a tantrum, shouting, 'Please! Please!'

They had thought the samurai was dozing; but he suddenly snapped his eyes open and looked at the begging children.

Their mother was shocked. She was sure this samurai was angry at having his sleep disturbed.

'Behave yourselves!' she tried to calm the children down; but they would not listen to her.

At that the samurai pulled his sword smoothly from its scabbard and came over in front of the mother and children.

The mother turned deathly pale and set herself between him and the children. She thought he was going to kill them for disturbing his sleep.

'Give me the sweet!' the samurai said.

The mother handed it over with trembling hands.

The samurai put it on the railing of the boat and with a clink of his sword he split it neatly in two. Then, 'There you go!' he gave one piece each to the children.

After that he went back to his place and was soon sunk deep in sleep once again.

Boy Science Detective: Ultraviolet Rays

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 

  This story completes the translation of the book Boy Science Detective by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard
• 4. The Secret of the Skull  
• 5. The Wisdom of a Fool

As Kosakai promised in the preface, he did go on to write more Boy Science Detective stories; but having translated a whole book (even if it's not a very long one), I think I'd like to give my attention to the works of some other writers for a while. 

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children's Science) from July to September 1926. You can read the story in the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko here. I've put in footnotes that look like this[1]; I'm afraid that they aren't actively linked. You'll have to scroll down (or use find) to the footnotes at the end. As always, I've put the translation after the break, so click to read on.

Boy Science Detective: The Wisdom of a Fool

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 Another translation: this is the fourth Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard
• 4. The Secret of the Skull 

Most of the stories from the series have had something in them to make them worthwhile. To be honest, this one is one I might have been tempted to leave untranslated. It does not have much of the detective or scientific interest that the other stories had; and its central idea is one of the worst plot elements of the detective story (and probably back around 1600 people were saying, "I don't know, Will, that scene seems a bit clichéd to me"). But since I was already two thirds of the way through the six stories that made the first collection, I thought it was a pity not to translate the whole book.

The story deals with intellectual disability, in a way that did not ring true to me; but that may be because the people I have known were more mildly affected. The question of what language to use comes up here. In general I mostly aim for the most polite expression which still sounds more or less like something someone might have said at the time. But I don't know how successful I was here.

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Childrens' Science) from January to March 1926. You can find the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko here. As always I've put the translated story after the break; so click to read on if you're interested.

Boy Science Detective: The Secret of the Skull

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard

I imagine most children's detective stories prefer to stay with less serious crimes. The Boy Science Detective stories start with an incident that is hardly a crime at all and move on to theft and then in the third story murder. This one goes even further. The murder of children is a crime that writers were a little shy of using in stories that were meant essentially for entertainment; but here we have the murder of a child as the fourth mystery in the series. The only respect in which this is a children's story is that it has a child as protagonist and (as always) the solution is a bit obvious. I hope you won't think that means it isn't worth your time. The answer is obvious, but you might well miss the clues; and the story is an interesting reflection of the state of forensic science at the time.

I've glossed most of the things that need explaining in the translation itself. So I think we can get away without footnotes this time.  I'll put a few links in advance. The Great Kantou earthquake took place on Sep. 1, 1923 and caused massive destruction in Tokyo. The most interesting part of the story is the forensic facial reconstruction which is central to the plot. The late nineteenth century reconstruction of Bach's face was performed by Wilhelm His and Carl Seffner. The detective called Williams that Kosakai mentions seems (from Google) to be Lieutenant Grant Williams, bureau of unidentified dead, Manhattan,  who in 1916 identified a skull found on a farm in Brooklyn as Dominick La Rosa leading to arrest of Giovanio Romano (Brooklyn Eagle Oct 10, 1916). Kosakai probably did not know of another more recent case where Williams had been called in by a former subordinate, Mary Hamilton to investigate a skull found  in Rockland County, N.Y. and had reconstructed the face as a missing girl, Lillian White. Hamilton's investigations lead to a suspect James Crawford, who was also missing at the time, but captured in 1925 after a different crime. 

One last thing: this is a bit spoilerish, but if you don't know how kimonos are worn, you might search out some photographs or prints on wikimedia commons or elsewhere on the internet to get an idea.

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children’s Science) between October and December 1925. It's in the public domain, so you can read the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko, here.

As always, the actual story is after the break. So click below to read it.

Boy Science Detective: The Riddle of the Beard

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 

This one doesn't give away the endings to the previous stories, so you don't need to have read them to read this. The first story introduces the main character, boy genius Toshio Tsukahara and his bodyguard/assistant Ono. Toshio has a private laboratory and office a few streets away from his rich parents' house. The stories first appeared in a children's science magazine; and Toshio's investigations always involve a Dr Thorndyke style scientific element.

The puzzle in this one is quite well done, I think (although as always the culprit is fairly obvious). The story is also a spy story, and has a not very sympathetic MacGuffin in the national secret of a poison gas formula. At the time of the story, Japan had a small empire (the result of Meiji period militarism) and was a not very stable democracy, which had to struggle with the kind of militarism that would so disastrously come to dominate a few years later.

The story was first published from June to August 1925 in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children's Science), then collected in book form in 1926.

As always, I've put the translated story (whose Japanese original you can read online at Aozora Bunko here) after the break. Explanatory footnotes look like this[1] in the text; but you'll have to scroll to the end of the file to find them.

Boy Science Detective: A Fight in the Dark

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

Another translation from the Boy Science Detective stories by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond

 暗夜の格闘 (anya no kakutou, 'A Fight in the Dark') is the second Boy Science Detective story, featuring twelve year old Toshio Tsukahara and his bodyguard and assistant Oono (whom Toshio addresses as niisan, older brother). It was published serially from March to May 1925 in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children’s Science). The work is in the public domain in Japan and Europe (and probably America, but I don't know the rules there). You can read the original at Aozora Bunko, here. The story does give away the (very obvious) culprit in the previous story. So you might want to read 'The Scarlet Diamond' first, if you care about that.

Footnotes look like this[1] and you'll have to scroll down to the end of the story to find the annotation they're pointing to (or search for "footnotes").

As always, I've put the translation after the break: so click through for the actual story.

Boy Science Detective: The Scarlet Diamond

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

Here, as promised, is the short story by KOSAKAI Fuboku (小酒井 不木, 1890-1929), the first of his 少年科学探偵 (shounen kagaku tantei, Boy Science Detective ) stories, 紅色ダイヤ (beniiro daiya, ‘The Scarlet Diamond’), which you can read on Aozora Bunko here. It was first serialised in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children's Science) between December 1924 and February 1925, then collected in book form in 1926. Kosakai’s works are in the public domain almost everywhere, but if you prefer a book, there is an edition of the stories in print. You can see the earlier post for a general introduction.

I’ve put most of the explanations of subject matter in notes at the end this time, partly because some of them would give away the solution to a puzzle if I wrote them at the beginning. I’ll explain one point in advance, as it might help you if you want to play along with the mystery. The story involves code breaking in Japanese, so the Japanese writing system comes into play. Japanese writing has two kinds of characters, the kana, the Japanese syllable alphabet, and the kanji, the symbol set borrowed from China. The relevant kana for this story are the hiragana, which encode the syllables like this:
あいうえお a i u e o
かきくけこ ka ki ku ke ko
さしすせそ sa shi su se so
たちつてと ta chi tsu te to
なにぬねの na ni nu ne no
はひふへほ ha hi fu he ho
まみむめも ma mi mu me mo
やゆよ ya yu yo
らりるれろ ra ri ru re ro
わ wa, ん n, を o.
As you can see, these look quite like western handwriting, made up of few strokes, mostly curved and flowing. The kanji (used for most nouns, verbs and adjectives) are generally more complicated and more angular looking. For instance, the book title 少年科学探偵 that I quoted above is all kanji.

Story and footnotes come after the break. The footnotes look like this[1] and you'll have to scroll down for them I'm afraid, as I can't work out how to make internal page references inside the blogging editor. I realise this is not ideal, especially since you run some risk of spoiling the story for yourself, if you don't scroll fast (using the find function to get to "Footnotes" would get you past the story, I suppose).

A Record of the Preliminary Hearing

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

This is another translation, of a story by 平林初之輔 (HIRABAYASHI Hatsunosuke, 1893-1931), 予審調書, his first crime story, published in the magazine 新青年 (Shinseinen, Modern Young Man) in 1926. You can read it online at Aozora Bunko: here. Hirabayashi was a critic and translator (of both French and English). He also contributed to the Japanese detective story with essays, and translations of Poe and S.S. Van Dine.

I'll explain a few points of the story in advance.
Shikishima: a high class Japanese cigarette brand: 敷島.
zashiki: a room in traditional Japanese style spread with tatami mats.
jou: a measure of area, derived from the tatami mats used for floors, about 1.65 square metres.

As usual, I've put the actual translation after the break.

A camellia tree with a tethered cow

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

I’m in two minds about putting this translation up. It’s a children’s story, 牛をつないだ椿の木, by 新美 南吉 (NIIMI Nankichi, 1913-1943), one of the best known writers of children’s stories from the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the stories are really very good, and I think this is good too; but it has a problematic element too, towards the end. I’ll quote from the last paragraph here (so if you want to read the story uninfluenced, skip ahead to the background explanation now): ‘In the end Kaizou did not come back. He was one of the gallant flowers scattered in the Russo-Japanese war.’ I can imagine this kind of sentimentality in an English imperialist writer in the late nineteenth century (though I suspect that even then someone like Kipling would not have had much respect for it). Reading something from a book of that period, I’d probably just shrug and call the writer an idiot and read on. But Niimi was writing for children in the second world war, when Japan was cheerfully throwing the lives of its own people away in an attempt to impose its rule on other countries. Since the first world war, writers worth reading in England didn’t write like that about war. If the story were just propaganda, I wouldn’t have translated it. The story is more one of someone finding meaning in doing one little good thing for the community. It's not by giving his life for the fatherland, but by building a well that Kaizou leaves something worthwhile behind him. That too would have been an idea that the regime of the time would have found useful – they were calling for a lot of self sacrifice from their civilians, for the sake of the war effort; but bad people can find a bad use for anything.

Background Explanation 

Rather that add footnotes or links, I’ll explain a few points in advance.

The story is set at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Russo-Japanese war was fought in 1904-1905. You can see the uniform described in §6 in this print.

I’ve written people and place names with spelling that reflects the Japanese. Most are pronounced as you might expect. The less obvious are roughly like this: Kaizou > Kye-zoh; Risuke > Ris-ke; Shingorou > Shin-go-roe; Shouhei > Show-hay; Oono > Oh-no. When the well digger Shingorou gets called Ido-Shin, ido means ‘well’; so it’s something similar to the Welsh ‘Jones the bread’ style of naming  (but I don’t know any Welsh people who actually say things like that).

A sen is 1/100 yen. A rin is 1/1000 yen.

A jizou (ji-zoh) is a Bodhisattva (enlightened being in Buddhist religion), often worshipped with small roadside statues in Japan, sometimes set up in rows.

I translated tea shop as café, because for me ‘tea shop’ conjures up something more genteel that what is evidently meant here. I translated aburagashi as fried cake pieces, as that seemed to be the direction that recipes I found on the internet were going. Konpeitou are small many coloured sugar sweets. I’m not sure if yakisurume (‘fried/grilled squid’) is literally squid, but an internet search seems to find sweet sellers selling something with this name whose ingredients at least include squid. The ‘knuckles’ are (apparently) a sweet made from soya bean flour: here.

You can read the story online at Aozora Bunko here.

I've put the actual translation after the break.

A Ginza Ghost

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

This a translation of a short detective story by 大阪圭吉 (OOSAKA Keikichi, 1912-1945), first published in the Japanese magazine Shinseinen (新青年) in 1936. I've called it "A Ginza Ghost", but you might prefer "The Ginza Ghost"; there's no article in the Japanese. You can read the original online at Aozora Bunko here. The four stories that I've read by this writer all feature amateur detectives; but they are not the aristocratic dilettantes that the word suggests. They are all professionals in some modern specialist work, sometimes in a management role, but still closely involved with the actual work (the director of a marine biology laboratory, for instance). This story shares with another famous Oosaka story, とむらい機関車 ("Funeral Train") a narrative approach which gives the narrative viewpoint to a whole neighbourhood. There are certainly better stories by Oosaka than this one; and I wouldn't want to claim too much for it. But I think it's an effective mystery, and the evocation of thirties Ginza could be interesting for western readers.

 There are only five named characters in the story, TSUNEGAWA Fusae, her daughter Kimiko, her employee Sumiko, her lover Tatsujirou, and the detective NISHIMURA. We don't learn the surnames of Sumiko or Tatsujirou, or the first name of Nishimura. I've written Tatsujiro in the story, because that's how the name would mostly be written in English.

Where I could easily translate with an English expression, I have. I'll try to explain everything else here in advance.

Ginza: a Tokyo district, at that time very lively, and very modern, with many cafés.

ken: an old Japanese length measure, 1.8m.

tsubo: an old Japanese area measure, 3.3 sq. m.

well beam pattern, a shape with two crossing vertical and horizonatal lines, like the kanji for well, 井.

yakko kite: this is actually the point in the translation where I'm least confident. The symbol 奴 has various meanings: slave, person (derogatory) and I think I've seen it used dismissively for an (unspecified) thing. But here this is the only thing that seems to fit from what my dictionary or the internet offers me. The yakko kite is a traditional kite shaped like a man (a servant, hence the name).

Shinbashi: a Tokyo district just south of Ginza.

National Lamp: a popular square shaped (bicycle) lamp of the time, made by the company that later became Panasonic.

Story after the break.

When Yatchan Swallowed a Go Stone

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

This is another translation of a story by ARISHIMA Takeo (有島武郎, 1878-1923), whose ʻA Bunch of Grapes’ (一房の葡萄) I translated earlier (here). It was published along with ʻA Bunch of Grapesʼ and other stories in the collection of that name in 1922. Arishima’s work is in the public domain; and the story can be downloaded from Aozora Bunko, here.

 I’ll explain in advance a few of the things mentioned in the story. If you’re familiar with Japan, you probably know everything already and you might want to skip this. 

Go stones are the playing pieces for the game of go, a board game played on a grid (19 rows each way), in which two players, one with white stones, one with black, compete to control territory. In Japan the stones are typically shaped like lentils (or smarties, if you prefer). The diameter of a stone might be about a centimeter or slightly under that.

Go stones

By liz west  [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The tatami mentioned in the story is a kind of straw mat of a standard size. Several of them are placed together to cover a traditional Japanese room. The rooms are in standard sizes too, measured as multiples of tatami mats. The rooms are fairly flexible, with removable or slidable walls and doors.

Japanese room

 

 The ochanchan that the nurse is sewing in the story is the same as the chanchanko (ちゃんちゃんこ), I think, a short padded sleeveless kimono jacket (typically for children).

Seishoukousama (“Say-show-Coe-sama”) is probably a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, also known as Kakurinji. But I haven’t found anything relevant about it online.

I’ve put the translation after the break.

A Bunch of Grapes

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

I had meant to make inaccessible Japanese works available, when I started. But in this case, after finishing my draft, I did an internet search and found that there is at least one book with a translation of the short story translated here. In addition, there is a translation online by Takumi KASHIMA and Loretta LORENZ in The journal of Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies here.

有島武郎 (ARISHIMA Takeo, 1878-1923) is a major writer of the Taishou period. 一房の葡萄 ('A Bunch of Grapes') is his best known children's story, first published in 1920. There is a page on the story, showing Arishima's illustration, here. You can read it online at Aozora Bunko, here.

Translation after the break.