halfcactus

In any case, translation toward English is not an act of benevolent charity — Penguin’s imprimatur did not rescue Truyện Kiều from obscurity. Nearly a hundred million people live in Việt Nam and several million Vietnamese people live abroad. Việt Nam is now more populous than the United Kingdom, Turkey, Australia, France, Germany, South Korea — and many, many other countries. A friend recently shared a reminder from her mother: Vietnamese doesn’t need you. We get so embroiled in our diasporic angst, writing heartfelt, tortured essays about not being able to impart cultural knowledge to any children we might have, but we’re lucky for what is not the case for everyone who has lost a language or had it taken from them. Vietnamese is not endangered, and its literature is not honored by translation toward English — it is English-using society that benefits from gaining access to literature produced in other languages. . .

—Som-Mai Nguyen, "Blunt-force Ethnic Credibility" (h/t

superborb on Bluesky)

2.

In that instant, Kiyose realized something. If happiness, or beauty, or goodness existed in this world, for him, they would take the form of this runner.

Just finished Shion Miura's Run with the Wind (translated by Yui Kajira) and loved it. Although I barely remember anything from the anime, I adored it the first time I watched it and I now appreciate it as an adaptation. :') The big race (Hakone Ekiden) took almost half of the book and I'm amazed at how invested and emotional I was throughout it, even when I was just reading it! I did mostly have to skip Shindo and Haiji's legs because I was too anxious haha.

Also loved the bits where Musa was struggling with colloquial language (as a foreign student) and Shindo was always checking in on him. I actually don't remember Shindo at all in the anime, which makes me feel bad because he is such a GEM.

Some of the side characters (namely the rival athletes and Hana) were more obviously narrative devices than people and it took some time for me to get used to that, and I was very surprised to see the (one-sided) Kakeru/Hana developments.

Really enjoyed the English translation, the (consistent and intentional) choice to leave specific words untranslated and unitalicized, and the writing.

Some excerpts from the translator's notes:

Miura's writing has a warmth and an openness, though it's hard to put a finger on what exactly gives it that feeling. Her all-embracing love for human beings and their everyday lives, in all their messy glory, seems to seep through her words and touch us, too. Her characters come alive on the page, each possessing their own past and future. As readers, we are pulled into that embrace, and, like the spectators of the Hakone Ekiden, we feel absorbed in the Chikusei-so team's endeavor as if we were running alongside them ourselves.

My general stance in translating this novel was to prioritize the momentum of the story, the feel of each character (and their relationships, with all the banter), and the authenticity of the language revolving around running. At the same time, I wanted to retain as many Japanese terms as possible, and in a way that allows curious readers to look things up. After all, it's perfectly natural to come across unfamiliar words or concepts while reading any book, no matter the language it was originally written in. Luckily, it's easier than ever to find out what an engawa or a kamaboko looks like, or what a higurashi sounds like. Of course, there are many English videos and articles about the real-life Hakone Ekiden as well, packed with as much human drama as the story of the Chikusei-so team.

llonkrebboj linked me to their translation of 人是_ by Zhou Shen, which naturally led me to falling in love with the song and being tempted to watch Wandering Earth 2.

Watch on YouTube

Spent last weekend trying to make up for lost sleep and bingeing 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy! in both anime and light novel form. The title is misleading; rather than a villainness, the main character is a disgraced noblewoman who gets stuck in a time loop beginning with her unjust exile and ending with her inevitable death five years later. The days and manners of her death are never the same due to the different routes she takes, but they're always a consequence of a fixed event: the ML usuruping the throne of the Emperor and starting a large-scale war. In the FL's sixth loop, she is killed by him personally and immediately transported to her seventh loop where she decides to take a new path, runs into the ML and, in a series of strange events, accepts his sudden marriage proposal.

The main tension is in the FL wanting to use her new position to hijack the ML's warmongering efforts, and the ML having unreadable (but no doubt shady) motives even when he's transparently attracted to the FL and more human around her. In every arc, we meet characters whom the FL has previously met in her past loops and uncover a little bit of the bigger political conspiracy that connects them. It's also all very, very YA... six volumes in, this so-called battle couple and their equally powerful allies have yet to kill anyone... The ML has at least canonically killed people in a previous war and in his traumatic past, but in the present day he and everyone else just knock all the bad people unconscious.

I thought the anime was enjoyable in a "light and mindless" shoujo canon way, and the light novel more interesting as you got to see the characters' thought processes. I felt that the FL's OP-ness was more well-executed than the standard transmigration/timeloop manga; even the improbability of the FL acquiring all her skills in five-year increments grew on me when we saw how the time limit ate at her and gave her the fear of her next death and the anxiety of not knowing exactly when or how she'd die. The worldbuilding is meh, the cases formulaic, and the romance increasingly less interesting, but I do like the thread of mystery surrounding the loop and the ML, as well as the emotional storyline of the FL dealing with her survivor's guilt by forcing the "everybody lives" fix-its in the present loop.

Now going through The Apothecary Diaries, which is a denser read now that I'm past the parts I've read in the manga. I'm finding the translator's notes at the end interesting! But I might slow down and take a break because I've been too unproductive... And anyway Arcane S2 is coming out imminently.

PLOT: Following the death of her daughter, middle school teacher Ms. Moriguchi talks about the law leaving major crimes unpunished, and gives her students one last message before she resigns. Mayhem ensues.

This was a twisty and unhinged revenge/psychological thriller that really committed to its premise. As the title suggests, the story is a domino effect of consequences structured as confessions from different characters. There's a good mix of social commentary and varying cynical worldviews that reveal the darkness of human nature and failures of society. The fragmented, slightly unchronological and incongruous, information that you get, gives it some reread value. The revenge stops being cathartic because the circumstances it presents are so complex, but it still doesn't hesitate to pull the trigger, and I love that about it.

It also made me think about how italicized text isn't a feature in other languages haha.

I really loved the PoV writing in this!!! So many different grievances, so many different senses of justice. This one is from Mizuko, my favorite PoV just because no one in the book knows what her deal is:

. . . I suppose everybody wants to be recognized for what they’ve done; everybody wants to be praised. But doing something good or remarkable isn’t easy. It’s much easier to condemn people who do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing yourself. . . it’s easy to join in condemning someone once someone else has gotten the ball rolling. You don’t even have to put yourself out there; all you have to do is say, “Me, too!”

It doesn't end there: You also get the benefit of feeling that you're doing good by picking on someone evil—it can even be a kind of stress release. Once you've done it, though, you may want to find that you want that feeling again—that you need someone else to accuse just to get the rush back.

Content warnings: Child harm, drowning, domestic violence, and bullying (resolved quickly, but it involves two students being forced to kiss); The starting point of this story is a four-year-old child found dead in a swimming pool, and the cast is comprised of one teacher and several of her middle school students.

Trying to remember my thoughts about books I read a month ago and have already mostly forgotten ;___;

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Quirky and intermittently bleak historical fiction that follows (and critiques) the trajectory of the Russian Revolution. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is tried and sentenced to a lifetime of confinement in the Metropol for being a class enemy, but he opts to embrace what life has to offer. Life embraces back.

For most of the novel you follow him through his routine from his little room in the attic to the fancy restaurant, barbershop, etc etc, and he gets to grow emotionally and find family among the hotel staff and some of the guests. Over the course of thirty years, the various effects and undulations of the Revolution trickle into his little life.

I'm generally pretty blind to history so I guess it was useful for me to have this contextualized in fiction (even though I skip-read a lot of the early bits ^^;). Rostov's that type of wish-fulfillment Gary Stu that is mostly inoffensive but I simply don't care about. He's a ~gentleman~, one of the last true ones in Russia, which means all the cool people like him and are impressed by him. There are some found family beats I found touching, but I'm not a fan of fatherhood fantasies where the daughter is precocious and emotionally well-adjusted. Again, I don't think this is one of the worst offenders since the daughter figures are still characters in their own right and it's very sweet that they change his life and his priorities. I just think it shouldn't be this convenient, especially with one of them going through a lot of trauma.

The Miracles of Namiya General Store

Keigo Higashino - Miracles of the Namiya General Store (translated by Sam Bett)

Historical fantasy novel that reflects the state of Japan's economy from 1980 to 2012: a magical mailbox creates a bubble in time that connects past and present with letters. As more letters appear, you see how the characters' lives intersect. The convergence point is very moving!

I was already kind of familiar with the premise, especially since there was a Who's the Murderer episode that came out during the pandemic featuring a Chinese cover of the Mika Nakashima / amazarashi song I Once Thought About Ending It All (I really love both language versions), but never knew how much real estate was involved in the original story... Overall a solid book with twists and emotional knives. Not sure I loved it but it's a well-executed ensemble canon with a lot of humanity.

Both the Japanese and Chinese movies came out in 2017 but I haven't seen either and don't know if I ever will because I don't deal well with heavy themes onscreen... I just want to experience the songs haha.

Content notes: contains themes of death, suicide, aging parents

-

Also finally finished the Dungeon Meshi manga (vol8 onwards; fantranslation)! I'm so happy the canon is complete. ♥ I didn't expect to mainline the last volumes, actually! I normally read these in increments, which I think is the most natural pace, but the plot really does pick up towards the second half, which is very meaty and satisfying. It's not the kind of manga I usually read (and in fact I've never been fannish about it), but my tumblr/Twitter moots circa 2015-2017 were very into it. XD And the art, characters, and world-building are so well-designed and the themes so memorable and well-constructed. ;__: Because the storytelling style has a more, idk, tabletop RPG structure, the character expositions are spread out very well and it felt organic for them to tell their stories as they reached a sufficient amount of intimacy with the other characters.

PS. I didn't notice the logotype until the anime (which I'm not watching) OP2 dropped. It's been like that since the manga apparently!!!! It's so good ;____;
dungeon meshi logotype