Welcome to the final day of our second Immersion Reading Project. Please post your responses to pages 19 and 20, the final two pages of Tamura Toshiko’s short story ‘Ikichi’, below.
I cannot wait to read your thoughts and questions!
I enjoyed the story so much! It was difficult, yes, so many unfamiliar words and kanjis, my god! but i can understand that it is written beautiffully, and those descriptions of heat made me feel like i was in some hot place too, oof. but there's one thing i can't really get. so, as i got it from the story, Yuuko hates that man, but when she sees just a small bat she... kinda tries to seek for some protection in him? from it? i mean, if coming to sit beside him after seeing the bat can be interpreted like that... or did i misunderstand smth about the story? i would be happy if somebody clarified that part to me.
Hi Elena, I'm so glad you liked it! Haha yes it was a challenge, so be proud you got through it. If you can read something like this, there's not much you can't read. So please feel encouraged to keep on reading.
The significance of the bat is a mystery, as is the fish at the beginning of the story. As perhaps you noticed, the story is about the complex psychology of a girl who lost her virginity the night before. She hates the boy, but also cannot get away from him. How the bat plays a role in this is up to our own interpretation.
The first day was probably the hardest when I was confronted by lots of unfamiliar kanjis, strange terms about clothing and many other things. After that, however, each day it felt progressively easier.
I purposely avoided consulting the English translation until the very end. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that Akiji actually was a man, not a woman.. To be honest, reading the Japanese version first felt like walking through the mist with occasional moments of clarity.
It was certainly above my level. But sometimes punching above one’s weight may bring positive results. This was my first time dealing with pre-war Japanese literature, and the hardest piece I had to deal with so far. But now, thanks to this experience, reading pretty much everything else feels so much easier.
And one last thing. I would never have dared to even look at anything like this piece on my own. That is why I am especially grateful to you for organising this immersion project. Thank you!
Yes!!! It's so good to hear that you feel that everything else is easier now. The process of grinding your way through a text like this can be painful, but the rewards at the other end of the tunnel are big. Congrats on making it to the end, and you're welcome. There will be more projects like this one in the future (although I'll probably pick something easier next time).
I thought this was a great story. I really enjoyed it. The clothes and the customs may differ, but the issues people face are the same! To me this wonderfully captured the ambiguity and uncertainty of Yuko's situation (as we can surmise it) and reflected it in her heightened senses. It was also a vivid portrait of the era and the locale, and really brings it to life.
I loved the language - the vocabulary is definitely extensive, but the grammar is not so complex (although that can easily be masked by the difficult vocabulary). The sentence structure is lovely, which makes it worth studying not just reading.
In this last stretch, one thing I picked up on was that she has a habit of using furigana to spell out a somewhat different word to that represented by the kanji. I suppose you could consider it an 'unusual reading' or 'ateji', but I think it's more than that - it's like getting two for the price of one. Examples in this stretch were ひもじい for くうふく, or ぐるり for 輪郭. Murakami often does something similar by using kanji to show a Japanese word, but spelling out the English word in katakana furigana.
I would recommend for folks who weren't too overwhelmed by this that it would be worth attempting it first in Japanese only, but then going back over it with the translation side by side, so you can see the quality of the prose reflected in the English (and pick up some additional subtleties).
Hi Jonathan, it's great that you enjoyed this story and that you were able to pick up on the power of its language. And yes, especially in Meiji you get a lot of the kanji/furigana combinations, sometimes as ateji, sometimes simply as a play on words. It's almost a shame that we don't have this anymore with the exception of a few instances. Hope you'll join in on the next one too!
I enjoyed the story so much! It was difficult, yes, so many unfamiliar words and kanjis, my god! but i can understand that it is written beautiffully, and those descriptions of heat made me feel like i was in some hot place too, oof. but there's one thing i can't really get. so, as i got it from the story, Yuuko hates that man, but when she sees just a small bat she... kinda tries to seek for some protection in him? from it? i mean, if coming to sit beside him after seeing the bat can be interpreted like that... or did i misunderstand smth about the story? i would be happy if somebody clarified that part to me.
Hi Elena, I'm so glad you liked it! Haha yes it was a challenge, so be proud you got through it. If you can read something like this, there's not much you can't read. So please feel encouraged to keep on reading.
The significance of the bat is a mystery, as is the fish at the beginning of the story. As perhaps you noticed, the story is about the complex psychology of a girl who lost her virginity the night before. She hates the boy, but also cannot get away from him. How the bat plays a role in this is up to our own interpretation.
Well, that was a challenge indeed.
The first day was probably the hardest when I was confronted by lots of unfamiliar kanjis, strange terms about clothing and many other things. After that, however, each day it felt progressively easier.
I purposely avoided consulting the English translation until the very end. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that Akiji actually was a man, not a woman.. To be honest, reading the Japanese version first felt like walking through the mist with occasional moments of clarity.
It was certainly above my level. But sometimes punching above one’s weight may bring positive results. This was my first time dealing with pre-war Japanese literature, and the hardest piece I had to deal with so far. But now, thanks to this experience, reading pretty much everything else feels so much easier.
And one last thing. I would never have dared to even look at anything like this piece on my own. That is why I am especially grateful to you for organising this immersion project. Thank you!
Yes!!! It's so good to hear that you feel that everything else is easier now. The process of grinding your way through a text like this can be painful, but the rewards at the other end of the tunnel are big. Congrats on making it to the end, and you're welcome. There will be more projects like this one in the future (although I'll probably pick something easier next time).
I thought this was a great story. I really enjoyed it. The clothes and the customs may differ, but the issues people face are the same! To me this wonderfully captured the ambiguity and uncertainty of Yuko's situation (as we can surmise it) and reflected it in her heightened senses. It was also a vivid portrait of the era and the locale, and really brings it to life.
I loved the language - the vocabulary is definitely extensive, but the grammar is not so complex (although that can easily be masked by the difficult vocabulary). The sentence structure is lovely, which makes it worth studying not just reading.
In this last stretch, one thing I picked up on was that she has a habit of using furigana to spell out a somewhat different word to that represented by the kanji. I suppose you could consider it an 'unusual reading' or 'ateji', but I think it's more than that - it's like getting two for the price of one. Examples in this stretch were ひもじい for くうふく, or ぐるり for 輪郭. Murakami often does something similar by using kanji to show a Japanese word, but spelling out the English word in katakana furigana.
I would recommend for folks who weren't too overwhelmed by this that it would be worth attempting it first in Japanese only, but then going back over it with the translation side by side, so you can see the quality of the prose reflected in the English (and pick up some additional subtleties).
Hi Jonathan, it's great that you enjoyed this story and that you were able to pick up on the power of its language. And yes, especially in Meiji you get a lot of the kanji/furigana combinations, sometimes as ateji, sometimes simply as a play on words. It's almost a shame that we don't have this anymore with the exception of a few instances. Hope you'll join in on the next one too!