Shiki Novel Translations 2.2.0

[sinnesspiel]

Links to Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - 1
Chapter 2 - 2
Chapter 2 - 3
Chapter 2 - 4
Chapter 2 - 5
Chapter 2 - 6


No cultural notes this chapter, unless I've overlooked something!

So instead I'll give a visual progress report:




These are the two volumes of Shiki, with a roll of toilet paper beside them for size reference.
The bookmark shows where we are in Volume 1 right now, at the end of Part 2, Chapter 2.6, page 351.


This is an internal shot; pages are double-layer printed. Keep this in mind when comparing the time it takes to translate light novels that don't look so much thinner.


These are a Knights of Ramune & 40 Fire novel and a Sotsugyou II (Graduation: Neo Generation) novel, respectively. Print size and spacing is typical. In terms of sheer physical thickness, the average light novel looks to be about 3/4ths the length of a single Shiki novel and they usually come in at 250-300 pages, but the print size and spacing makes the difference in volume more pronounced than that. In the 5 volume larger print version, each part comes out to about 500 pages. In typical light novel printing standards, we'd be around 700 pages.

Coincidentally this is why I predict another two years or so to completion; you might look at the current rate of progress and think "We're more than halfway through book 1. By June, couldn't we be done with book 1 and maybe even have a start into book 2, which could then be conquered in about another year for a year and a half?" Those extra 200 pages that make book 2 longer than 1 are nothing to scoff at, since they come out to about 4x as much volume per page as a typical light novel.

Comments

[sinnesspiel]

You can either download the game and play it yourself (with the voice patch, you're looking at I think about 5GB?) or check out the playthrough on Youtube. If you go to Xerblade's channel you can pick which route you follow. It was meant to be read Fate (Saber), Unlimited Blade Works (Rin), Heaven's Feel (Sakura). You normally can't go to the next until you finish the first. I downloaded a completed save and played in reverse order just due to being contrary and followed along just fine, though. Due to Youtube's policies, the smut scenes are not uploaded. While it's a relief to miss them, they're also hilarious and as you're a completionist, you'll probably want to see it all.

That friend sounds more than insufferable... I work more than one job, but the one the ghost print out is for is the DV shelter. I get disgusted at how many clients come in there believing in ghosts, believing the shelter is haunted, trying to make up a haunted history for the place when the building is only 15 years old. I thought they were just using it as an excuse to stay up late often. Eeeek, ghosts, too scared to sleep, eek. The last straw was when some kid came into my office crying about being afraid to use his bathroom because of ghosts; I'm terrible with children, so I drug his mom in to take care of it, and she refused to just man up and say there are no such things as ghosts because SHE believed in them. I started writing on the dry erase board, explaining physics, photons, matter, energy, e=mc^2, everything to explain how the laws of nature don't work that way, and anything interacting with the physical universe to produce visions, sounds, tactile sensations, etc. have specific, definable properties, in an angry fit wanting mom to do her damned job and calm her kid down.

....In the mean time, the kid, 8 years old, way too old, pissed on my floor while sobbing because he held it in too long.

The next day I prepared a simple one page print out explaining in simple terms how ghosts can't exist, or at the very least can't manifest in the ways people are claiming. If you want to claim they exist on some spiritual level fine, but anything visible still has to reflect protons, anything making noise has to cause vibrations. They may break the laws of physics themselves somehow, exist on another plane, whatever you need to tell yourself for spiritual reasons, but the rest of the world they would have to influence still operates by them, including you, so there's nothing to fear.

I do that about 30~ hours a week, sometimes a full 40. I also do dojo stuff where they believe in unscientific things like chi, but I don't own the place, and that kind of mystic claptrap sells. My usual full time always 40 hour a week job involves investigating abuse of the old or retarded, including in hospitals, nursing homes, etc. Thankfully most investigative and court matters aren't prone to humoring supernatural answers, but I have had to sit and grind my teeth very, very, very hard to keep from continuing to argue with superstitious medicinal/diet claptrap. Telling women in your office they're wasting their time on a diet they feel like martyrs for suffering on tends not to go over well. Gaaah, we're a branch of the Health Department, can't you read a damned scientific study on some health craze...?! We can have any journal or book brought to us from anywhere in the US, we practically have State Alchemist Library style access, we can assign a secretary to go scrounge up studies for us, you have no excuse for not reading up on this if it's important enough to take action on!

The point is, I'm not even a professional scientist like medical professionals are, and I get this pissed at bad science and supernatural answers. I can definitely imagine how one might expect Ozaki to respond to such things and hold off on bringing them up in his presence, especially as they notice he's already on edge looking for a "real" answer. All the more if one is also a medical professional trained in the scientific method and evidence based medicine.


I dunno. I kinda like Masao sometimes... I think sometimes because they make him so detestable. Likewise, I often hate characters a work tries too hard to make me like--often the pure, but boring, vapid love interests, but also often the too good to be true perfectly moral, somehow always ultimately heroes/heroines who just happen to be dense enough to never have to make a decision on the many love interests they accidentally acquire, because that would hurt someone and make them less perfect. I think a lot of people have such a negative reaction to a work trying too hard to tell you to like someone. So I still wonder why flawless, utterly sympathetic and admirable Ricchan doesn't trigger the same response from me.

[airlynx]

Thanks for the link! I'm a hands-on person so I'll try looking at some places to download it from to play it. I had heard parts of it were kind of inappropriate...but I'll watch them for the plot.

My friend also went so far as to get into a relationship with a ghost, too. She started about two years ago and when we stopped talking 9 months ago the relationship was still going strong. I guess you can call it pretty serious; they used to stay up late into the night chatting over the Ouija together...yeah, I wish I was making this up. That experience with the child makes me vicariously horrified. I can't really deal with kids either; whenever I see any, I either try to avoid them or go the opposite way and try to be super-friendly, in which case I think I come off kinda creepy too. But that sounds like it would suck telling off, or being strict to, the inhabitants of the shelter. Cause they've been through a lot so you'd wanna be nice to them, but if they're ranting about ghosts it would take almost inhuman patience not to snap at one point. I can't stand parents who won't reign their children in; even if that lady believes in ghosts, that doesn't mean she can't keep her child from harassing someone who's just doing their job! Has your printout proven useful?

Aw, I kinda feel bad now...I have to admit I kind of like ghost stories, and am a little scared of empty dark places (although that doesn't necessarily have to be ghosts). I'm not sure if I believe in them though, or at least the popular way they're portrayed, Ghost Hunt-style. Souls of dead people lingering unseen somewhere? Maybe. Not stuff like hauntings, though.

Your jobs sound pretty cool, actually; you said before that you lucked out finding them, and it certainly sounds like it. Although it also sounds like you have to deal with a lot of frustration at work. I had been thinking you worked in the SPR to have to deal with ghost complaints! With the medicinal/diet stuff, I feel like you and Ozaki could bond over the pain of dealing with patients' beliefs in home remedies.

I'm even less educated than you two, but even I kind of roll my eyes at home remedies. One time when I was sick a relative bought me a necklace of stones that are supposed to 'suck away negative energy' from the body. I mean, I'm already sick, why do I need to put up with having a bunch of rocks around my neck too!? Of course I didn't get better, and then later it turns out I had pneumonia, so...that could've ended badly.

Especially with that new chapter, it seems like Masao exists just to be hated. In the anime I thought he was annoying and tried to copy Natsuno, but now I know he's annoying and abusive of his own volition. He's a good character I guess though, because he's actually realistic and those are the types of personages that I end up liking; sad as it sounds, there really are a lot of people like him around everywhere. As for Ritsuko, there you go--she doesn't do things that are too good for a normal person (maybe some people, but there are definitely people who'd behave the same way as she does), and love interests don't dominate her storyline. That's why I personally like Ritsuko; she's a pretty strong female character whose inner strength is shown without having her romantic feelings or lack thereof be the main focus. I really dislike heroines that are supposed to be 'strong' by dealing with their love interests in a way that shows they are smart and/or independent, but they're otherwise basic in all other aspects. It's refreshing to see her being awesome just by being herself!

[sinnesspiel]

I'm not very sympathetic to most of my shelter clients. That's a long, bitter, politicized talk, but nothing has made me more jaded and against funding anything to do with DV than working at our shelter and with our state and national DV councils. I know I'm working there willingly, but it's not for any love of the clients or the cause.

I'm just no damned fun at all on supernatural things. Horoscopes, birth signs, Ouija boards, talking to the dead, dousing, mystic medicine, chi, any of them will get me eye rolling and breathing fire. As you might expect, I don't get invited to a lot of parties. In me and a buddy's LP of a video game where you raise a magical girl, I refuse to let her touch faith and magic skills, even in a game where magic is explicitly real, on principal.

The neat thing about Ritsuko was they added a little love story with Tohru without taking anything away from her. Granted, I'm not sure she had any romantic interest in him or was just being kind, but she wasn't defined by romance, and also wasn't an "I DON'T NEED NO MAN" type. She was just Ritsuko, and that's enough. A lot of romances in anime/manga seem to take away from the character as a stand-alone character, which I guess is a given in some degree as when you're in a relationship like that it's normal to have your lives merge, but it doesn't mean I don't find it dull. It's not unrealistic that Tamahome has pretty much no other drive or anything else going on or inspiring his in life besides Miaka, but it sure does make him bland as hell.

[airlynx]

Aw well, I guess if you work with them long enough they can start getting annoying. I'm not in your situation so I don't know exaaactly your reasons for being against them, but I can kinda relate because a lot of patients with pretty serious illnesses come into where I work, and some are so snobby and snappish and curmudgeon-y that I start hoping that they'd trip on their way out. Being afflicted with a hardship in your life just doesn't pardon you from being a royal douche.

Then do vampires and shikis and the like also rub you the wrong way like other supernatural stuff? A party where invitation is based on how much you enjoy Ouija-boarding isn't one most people would want to go anyway.

I think the problem with the "I DON'T NEED NO MAN" types is that they try so hard to make them seem independent (because of course, normal-acting girls are hated by fandoms for being doormats) which makes them come off really annoying. Both guys and girls can be in a relationship without being fiery and independent; believe it or not, it's okay not to push away your love interest when they're admitting their feelings! Who knew? I think that might be a factor in why people who watch that kind of stuff all the time have a reputation as being loners who nobody would date, because they assume that all relationships should be like what they see in anime with the tsunderes, while that would actually be pretty weird in real life. Back to Ritsuko, yeah, it's so refreshing that she interacts with a number of guys, but they don't throw her off or keep her from being a generally good person. It actually indicates a greater strength of character because even if she might feel flustered around Tohru, she hides it pretty well, and keeping control of yourself is a good trait to have. She's actually a stronger character for not tsun'ing out, she doesn't let no man change her awesome self.

[sinnesspiel]

I don't mind supernatural in fiction presuming it's not dues ex or anything like that (which annoys me even when non-supernatural), but I do find myself unable to experience it as horror. Even unknown horror--and a lot of horror relies on the unknown--as soon as it's decidedly supernatural, bam, at worst I'm in suspense for the characters, but the sense of fear won't be with me personally. I can be in horror of serial killers or illness or natural disasters or conspiracy no matter how unlikely, but the supernatural... eh.

Shiki would probably be a lot more effective as horror if I didn't know it was vampires. Drugs, serial killers, conspiracy; right now, I could probably still write up a possible (if improbable) explanation for everything.

It's still very successful as a suspense series or a character drama, and I can recognize scenes as very atmospherically creepy which makes it horror, I just do not personally experience the horror.

[airlynx]

The only thing necessary to make me feel horror is cicadas! Once they're there, I'm cowering.

I think it's really reiterated that a horror story becomes scarier if you feel like it can actually happen. I wonder how I'd feel if I was reading Shiki without having seen the anime? Probably still kind of enjoying the slow horror. But it can be argued that the true horror of Shiki comes from the fear and reactions of the characters? Or rather, that the shiki are only catalysts for displaying the real horror. For instance, we're already how far into the book and everyone knows about this scary illness that's killing people and it's impossible to pin down. That could happen in real life, and although it's caused by the shiki, it could very well be the situation with a new illness being discovered in some isolated village. Also the paranoia of the people, and even the dysfunction of the village as a whole is very 'horror' if you think about it, because it brings suspense that with all that tension, something will happen. And of course, all those creepy empty characters (I'm looking at you, Monk) that rely on lolis to keep them going too. So the shiki are all but absent so far on, and the author probably wrote it that way on purpose to add a dose of horror that doesn't rely on just the supernatural but is created by a group of people with high levels of paranoia.

Hmm, at this point my explanation could be that Ozaki was involved with the mafia at one point during college. Then he got the leader mad, and escaped with his life back to Sotoba. Now the gang knows how important the village really is to Ozaki, so they're trying to kill it off, one by one, to inflict as much suffering on Ozaki as possible. Their weapon of choice is a new poison that induces the illness that causes all of the deaths. They can't possibly kill everyone, so some people they bribe to cut all ties, quit jobs, and move out etc. And Ozaki recognizes that it's the work of the gang somehow (he either a) recognizes the poison which has been a trademark of this gang since he was a part of it, or b) sees a gang member and guesses the truth). That's why he doesn't want these cases to be made public, because his past with the gang is kind of shady too, and doing so would put the blame on him too. The person who attacks Masao is a gang member.
How'd I do?