Sinnesspiel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sinnesspiel) wrote2013-08-29 06:24 pm
sinnesspiel) wrote2013-08-29 06:24 pm
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Shiki Novel Translations 3.8
8
Seishin looked up at the community warmed by the sun's rays from the shade of the fir trees.
The resonance of the cicadas' chirps echoed along the slope of the mountain. Two-toned colored cars were stopped here and there on the street by the Murasako family home. Like on TV or a movie, Seishin thought. The sight of those cars and the investigators was dreadful, enough to disconnect from one's sense of reality.
The first to rush on scene was the resident officer, Takami, and as he explained the situation to Takami, pointing out the various calamities, the prefectural police arrived. He did the same with them, going back over the incident and story, leading along the paths he took and giving the explanations again but once that was over, there was nothing left for him to do. He couldn't get used to it---feeling constrained with so many people flowing into the place, though he had no particular destination, he walked the roads of Yamairi. Just maybe, he thought, he had the feeling, that this could be for the last time.
Even in the abandoned houses near the Murasako household, there was the sight of officers looking at the porches and in the houses themselves. So he trudged down the road to Yamairi's entrance, sitting at the three-pronged road, watching over the neighborhood's manner of demise. Recognizing that Yamairi was dead, the clamor before his eyes would seem contrary but it bore resemblance to the service for Shuuji that he had just been at. ---Evidently, this was what a funeral service for a neighborhood looked like.
The road up from the village, from where Seishin was sitting just then, turned left to enter the neighborhood of Yamairi. To the right was a rather wide, empty space, and deep into that emptiness the village road continued on to the right. It was a mountain road that was pushing it to be as wide as even one truck but two lines of track marks continuing on the earth showed that the village road was still just barely alive.
The distinct tread-marks on the earth discolored by the blazing sun contrasted the summer grass, for an all the more summer like complexion. There must have been a spring in the far corner of the vacant lot as before a small hokora were muddied tracks in every direction, brightly colored butterflies gathered about seeking water. The hokora was so small it was merely an enclosure with a roof, storing a stone pillar and a sacred Jizo, but the latter was toppled, broken with the Jizo's head having rolled aside the mud tracks. Its red apron was last year's (and it was probably Mieko who had put it on him) or so. It was a lonely, faded color. The injured and exposed Jizo's head was surrounded by dragon flies, their wings gleaming like glass.
A neighborhood that had died out and the clamor of living beings, the voices of the cicadas and the birds, the vivid colors of summer and its vitality, intermingled there with death and ruin. Yamairi now could be thought of as being over-saturated in things until it would snap apart.
Becoming unable to bear looking at it, he sighed and rose. He climbed the hill being warmed by the sun and its reflections, walking without purpose along the road towards Gigorou's house. ---He'd thought about how he'd lost his head, if he did say so himself.
He lowered himself onto the stone steps down from the Ohkawa house's estates, sitting facing straight ahead to the Murasako house, idly seeing the patrol car stopped at the Murasako household, and beside it Fuki and two investigators talking.
"----Yo."
A voice called out to him from behind; he turned as Toshio came down the steps towards him. He looked towards the Murasako house with eyes narrowed against the glare, holding onto the railing of the steps and stopping in the shadow of a fig tree to light a cigarette.
"What a catastrophe, huh?"
Seishin subconsciously pursed his lips. From Gigorou's house, he immediately contacted Toshio. Per instructions, he'd searched for Gigorou but, without thinking he found himself wanting to blame Toshio for the state he found the old man in.
"I see Fuki-san is here. ...Is she all right?"
"With what?"
"The body... she identified it, right?" Seishin started to say, with a gurgling noise in the back of his throat. Unfortunately, he had nothing left to puke up.
Toshio shrugged.
"If it's that, I already took care of it. Old lady Murasako aside, the two old guys don't look like anything besides two old bodies. They'll probably have to be positively IDed by dental records."
Seishin nodded.
"It's this hot weather," Toshio said, looking up at the radiantly clear sky. "I don't know how long they've been dead but they were left like that in this heat wave. Well, it was a hell of a sight-seeing. Thanks to that, I still can't smell anything else."
Seishin nodded to that too. He was the same from only peering in through the doorway. There was probably no comparison to Toshio who had stood in during the autopsy.
"Why.... did that..."
"Don't ask me the cause of death. They brought in a crew to do the autopsy, you know," Toshio said with a wry smile around the cigarette still in his mouth. "But then, with a parts deficit like that, I wonder if they'll really be able to tell."
"Deficit?" Seishin asked, to which Toshio responded bluntly.
"I tried counting their parts but there's not enough."
Revived in his mind were Gigorou's remains scattered around the room. Since the bedroom had been similar to the way things were in the Murasako house's kitchen, he had thought that they were more animal remains.
"That's..."
"By the time they could round up all the wild dogs and dissect them, it'd probably be long digested."
"Then, what did that to Gigorou-san was..."
"Probably wild dogs. At least we know they weren't cut apart with anything bladed. Old lady Murasako at least didn't have any external injuries. They're saying it might have been a natural death."
That's good, Seishin murmured without thinking. Toshio turned to look at Seishin.
"That's good? That it's not a case?"
"Yeah, well. ...That was imprudent of me, wasn't it. Sorry."
"I wonder about saying that to me. S'nothing even a little good about it, though."
"It was a natural death right? At the least, for Mieko-san."
"That's just it," Toshio said throwing away his cigarette. "The two old guys died a few days ago. At the very least we know they didn't die just yesterday. Mieko-san on the other hand probably died right around yesterday precisely."
"That's..." Seishin started to say, then closed his mouth. "Yesterday....?"
"Right," Toshio said with an ironic smile. "Isn't that interesting? Old lady Mieko was here, who knows how many days, living with a corpse, in other words."
no subject
One thing that caught my attention was the bloodstains found around the victims, especially Fuki's son. Aren't those kind of bites clean in the anime?
The part with the Mourning Crew was so confusing. the main thing I was unsure about is the (seemingly?) big difference between the temple and the shrine, I always thought they kind of worked together? I get that the temple is for Buddhism and the shrine is Shinto, but I always kind of thought that in Japan, the two sort of merged hand in hand.
Maybe along with the translation notes, you should incorporate medical notes. I remember that Toshio has a habit of going into medical babble at the drop of a hat, and I can feel it coming already (when he's talking about medicine that patients need to take). Well, little things like the name of the medicines aren't that vital for understanding the story, but when he starts talking about reticulocytes and stuff, that's more important. I always Google the things I don't understand though, just to get a general idea before the translation notes come out.
I hope I didn't forget to mention any other thoughts I had...oh, finally, I just wanna say I really enjoy the little funny descriptions you have on the chapter links sometimes :D I lol'd at Infodump Hirosawa!
no subject
Don't worry, culture notes are coming. I could probably put them up now, they're mostly done, but I'm going to try adding some funeral basics to this post since we're going to move on into a lot more specifics with death rituals, having already started with the bedside sutras.
Right now that Meiji Restoration/Edo period blurb is practically a term paper so I'm trying to shave that down. In summary for now; the separation is a mere relic of a Meiji Restoration split, when blending Buddhism and Shintoism was forbade. The faiths are fully merged by the general public now. City boy Yuuki is just gobsmacked by that split still influencing anything somewhere.
As for the medical terms, I'm debating whether to note those. Admittedly if you know what he's saying and translate his medicalese to plain English... Ozaki kind of comes off as an idiot. Reticulocyte counts tend to be high when the body is making more blood due to a shortage of it, and low blood pressure with tachycardia (fast pulse in plain English) also suggests low blood levels to anyone who thinks about it from a basic physics standpoint, since the heart is pumping blood quickly but it's not actually putting much pressure on the veins. So that he waits so long to try a transfusion but gives vitamins, etc... Well, it's like someone noticing their car seems to be burning through gas quickly and, while looking for the problem, doesn't think to put gas in the car so it can still get him where he needs to go before he can fix it properly. It makes sense not to want to waste gas, but when you realize it's just a metaphor and it means saving a life, which is his goal...
I can buy it because as a doctor he's surely considering a swath of outliers those of us without a medical background don't have clouding our minds from the raw basics for treatment ("I don't know why he's losing blood but I do know when someone's dying of blood loss you give them a transfusion"). The nurse meeting where they discuss many of them helps illustrate that. I'm still not sure if it's intentionally showing that he's more of a diagnostic doctor than a treatment oriented one (supported by the fact that his main role is to determine if they need a "real" hospital in Mizobe or not; he may want to do more, but he's given up) or if the authoress was banking on going over most reader's heads so they would assume they had hindsight bias through knowing it was vampires (supported by the fact that we are told Ozaki *wants* to do more than screen patients for Mizobe and his clear sense of responsibility towards them).
no subject
I had no idea the Shinto and the Buddhism were split apart in Sotoba until Infodump-sama mentioned it. I don't fully get it still, but I don't think the split between those two is vital for understanding the novel.
I remember while watching the anime, thinking what a total moron Ozaki seems to be for only trying a transfusion with one patient..well, two, because he gives himself a transfusion at one point. I could understand at the beginning, when he doesn't think the epidemic is serious, he probably shrugs the transfusion off as a drastic measure. However, he also finds out about the okiagari before very long, so after that maybe it's like he thinks that the trick is keeping the person away from the Shiki, like with Setsuko, who regained blood after a few days. If he can't keep the Shiki away, then the transfusions would be just a waste of blood.
Was there ever any mystery in Shiki that it was vampires? They seemed to make it obvious from the beginning that that's what it was, not that it detracts from the story. Reading the novel, I'm trying to make myself think like "what if this was my first time reading it, would I figure out what was happening?"
no subject
The failure to give transfusions may be because he realizes it's just feeding the Shiki more, or he thinks they'll swarm, but I do wonder how that would have effected things with Seishin, if it'd been emphasized through such methods that the Shiki fail to engage in "crop rotation" and can definitely not be said to just be doing what they need to survive. I don't think Seishin would see it as a crime for a species to seek to also thrive even at the expense of another species inclined to fear and kill them, so probably not much, really.
In the novel it still seems pretty clearly mystery at this stage. Lots of the anime promotional materials already said vampires so the mystery there was more "now how are they going to figure it out before it's too late?"
no subject
That doesn't excuse his actions at first, though! I thought that he didn't know about the Shiki before he tried the transfusion, so what took him so long?
'Crop rotation' wouldn't have worked out...it is a possible, ideal solution, but I think the reason it was never an option is because it's not really realistic. I, for one, if someone told me about the Shiki and asked me to donate blood I'd be like "hell? no? i'm leaving" and then I'd leave. a lot of people would just be against that. Could you imagine Old Man Ookawa offering to give blood?
Another hypocrite Seishin instance: it's okay for the Shiki to kill others to survive, sure, but not the humans. The humans know that they'll die if they don't kill, but that's not okay for Seishin! I just...really dislike Monk -_____________-
I wish I could somehow erase my memories of Shiki so I could get the mystery effect from the novel. I feel like I'm missing out on so much!
no subject
Voluntary crop rotation is probably out, but if they can kill them without being noticed, presumably they could feed on them, make them forget, and come back to them a week later when they've gotten over their anemia for another bite. Use villagers as dairy cows rather than beef cows. They had Ozaki on the ropes for months; if they'd asked him to pull strings for a blood supply while having the villager's lives hostage, I bet he'd have ponied up. What's he gonna do, threaten to go public with their extortion? One of his most exploitable flaws is his refusal to allow anyone else to deal with his problems. He couldn't do that when they were actively killing people due to 'vampires' sounding bloody crazy. They had options that didn't require them to kill, much less on the wide scale level they explicitly endeavored to. Mr. Popularity, Tohru-chan, probably could have lived off of his family (+Natsuno, very willing) exclusively by crop rotating, but Tatsumi demanded the full kill on victims, to carry out Sunako's desire to have an entire village of them. He used people's families as hostages to make them kill others, but he was Sunako's proxy, nothing more. Sunako was more concerned with having a place to call her own and playing around like Chizuru, not being lonely, than she was with food, so I have a very hard time approving of Seishin having such sympathy for her as one just trying to survive. I do think that's how Seishin sees it, as just wanting not to die, but I also think he's an idiot.
Some things are very different between the two, so there are still some mysteries left! Such as: how will Ozaki get the best of Chizuru without Natsuno's help?
no subject
That'd be an awful ending, though, if they just blackmailed Ozaki and started walking around like giant mosquitoes!? Besides, that's a disaster waiting to happen like what if someone slips up? What if they're seen? And I refuse to believe that Toshio would not retaliate so I would be waiting for Shiki 2: Ozaki's Counterattack to be released.
But, exactly: if it was a matter of Sunako just wanting to stay alive, I'd be sympathetic towards her too. But she would be alive regardless if she came to Sotoba or not, she can feed basically anywhere. She doesn't just want to survive, she wants to go be out and about and play, and I guess instead of wanting to be alive, she wants to LIVE, which brings us to another argument entirely because her going after the opportunity to LIVE isn't so wrong after all; I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my days skulking around the shadows in the midst of puberty either!
So saying that the Shiki "just want to survive" is stupid and not entirely accurate.
And if we continue the motif of wanting to live, I guess that's what Seishin wants as well? He wants to be out from under the temple's thumb, because in Sotoba he's alive but not Living.
That's very true! I'm looking forward to that part so much! I absolutely cheered when he pwned Chizuru, I bet it'll be even more epic if it's 100% Ozaki.