Japanese Literature discussion

Hi all,

In the November-December Poll thread, Christian and I briefly discussed reading インストール by Risa Wataya in Japanese together, so I decided to make a thread for it. Whoever wants to join in is welcome!

I'll be starting today.

I should be starting soon too! I realized during the last days of the poll that in fact, the translation I put was in French. Oops, looks like there's no English version available yet! Doesn't matter though, it makes it even more fun! :D

I would love to join you, since I want to read more in Japanese, but sadly I don't own a copy of this book :/

One good website (in my experience) is Yesasia: http://www.yesasia.com/us/insuto-ru-b...

I find it tough to start: lots of vocab I had never seen before. Also maybe it's that "first page syndrome" where it seems the first page of any novel is the most difficult one.

Anyway, here are a few words I had to look up, in case that's useful!

野望: ambition

甘ったるい: sentimental; mushy. I think it's from 甘い + だるい (heavy, bothersome) but not sure.

興ざめる: to lose interest

うだうだ: long-winded

乗り越える: to get over/surpass/overcome

ありきたり: common

引きずる: to drag along; to pull

眉をひそめる: to knit one's brows (in discomfort, unease, disapproval, etc.); to raise one's eyebrows; to frown; to scowl

八重歯: double tooth; protruding tooth

批判: criticism

まくしたてる: to talk on and on; to rattle on; to keep on talking (without pause)

五臓六腑: internal organs

沁みる: to pierce, penetrate

ひるむ: to flinch

つぐむ: to shut one's mouth; to hold one's tongue; to keep silent

負けじ: indomitably; undauntedly

かけもち: holding two or more positions concurrently (here I guess: going to two prep schools at the same time...)

充実した: productive

消し飛ぶ: to scatter away

実践: practice; practising; putting into practice; implementation

勘違い: misunderstanding, wrong guess

スポ根　(abbr. from スポーツ根性): fighting spirit (in sport); tenacity

真性: inborn　(I'm guessing: naturally masochistic)

Hopefully it gets easier lol.

Here's one I don't get, right at the start (from Kouichi presumably)

「バカだねみんなと同じ生活が嫌なんて一体自分をどれだけ特別だと思ってるんだ努力もせず時間だけそんな惜しんで、大体あんたにゃ人生の目標がない、だからそう、うだうだと他の何百人もの人間が乗り越えてきた基本的でありきたりな悩みをひきずってんのさ。」

My best (and yet very poor) attempt would be:
Isn't it stupid? Not wanting to live the same life as everyone else. With time you'll regret not putting any effort in thinking about how much you're special/different. First off, there's no goal in your life if you're not part of it(?). That's why you're dragging the fundamental and common troubles of surpassing hundreds of people.

It does make a little bit more sense now that I've took the time to write down a translation, but it still has very rough edges :P

Can anyone help? In fact, I think I'll also cross-post this one to the Japanese StackExchange ^^
There are definitely many challenging sentences in this book so far.

Following from StackExchange, I was quite wrong lol.
Here's a better translation (notice how it has the complete opposite meaning :P)

Isn't it stupid? Saying you don't want to live like everyone else... How special do you think (the hell) you are? (You're) Just grudging time, even though you're making no effort. So that's why you're being bothered by the basic and common trouble hundreds of other people have already overcome.

(http://japanese.stackexchange.com/que...)

The mistakes I made were those:
First, punctuation is omitted in the text, but it should be:

バカだねみんなと同じ生活が嫌なんて。

一体自分をどれだけ特別だと思ってるんだ。

努力もせず時間だけそんな惜しんで（いる）。

大体あんたにゃ人生の目標がない。

だからそう、うだうだと他の何百人もの人間が乗り越えてきた基本的でありきたりな悩みをひきずってんのさ。

That で＝でいる thing completely threw me off :P Also, I made a mistake in the last sentence: it's clearly 人間が, not を, so those people should be the ones doing the action of overcoming!

Sounds good! I tried to come up with a translation after your first post but while I got what the text was trying to say (tone, meaning) it's really hard to come up with a translation.

On another note, I am crying with laughter and facepalming because I kept reading 光一 as the actual word (second meaning) and not a name. Everything makes sense now. So that's what happens when you read Japanese books when you're tired.

Hahahaha! Aww :P
Learning Japanese is very humbling lol!

I love how one moment I think, "I can do this! OMG I know this language!" and the second moment I feel almost desperate and think "I don't know a thing" :P

I would love to read along, but i think it's still too complicated for me to understand.

Mini-tip around p. 38-39: 埋める also means "to fill" as in filling up silent moments :p (I couldn't make sense of a couple of sentences before I realized that ^^)

Christian,

Small grammar mistake:

あんたの人生にゃ should be あんたの人生の, unless the speaker is a cat...

Sorry...
大体あんたの人生

Oh, I think we are both wrong Sean! The book really has "にゃ" and I took it as the abbreviation of なければならない, but here it's not after a verb, so that can't be right (plus, it was weird!)

I now realize it's actually the abbreviation of には
大体あんたには人生の目標がない。(for you, life has no purpose)
^^;

Amazing how digging ONE sentence brings so many mistakes lol. The rest is mostly easier though ^^; Thanks for pointing that out!

俺も日本語の勉強のが好きやからこれをフォローしてる。めっちゃ頑張ってるね。偉い！次日本語で読むるもり本は村上春樹のやけど、時間が先ず見付からないと！

Hi Sean! I also have a few Haruki Murakami on my to-read list :) Hopefully you can join us next time! Nice Kansai dialect :P