Shiki Novel Translations 0.1 - Seishin's Essay

[sinnesspiel]

The prologue and part 1 of chapter 1 have already been done over here at creiz's livejournal. You may prefer their translations. They're less literal and have smoother flow. As best I can tell they're not doing any more.

I should note that at this stage none of these have seen an editor. This is me with the book in my lap at work between cases, calls, whatever. I might just plum fuck up. Chapters will be tweaked and changed as I scan through and see errors or remember things I think of to fix. Sorry about that.




Bible quotes are taken from the English King James version rather than translated due to propriety, but as I can see the argument for a re-translation even of a translated, famous, quoted work, here's a translation from Japanese (from which language their bible is translated I don't know) for good measure:



---End Translator's Intro---



To 'Salem's Lot'

Jehova spoke down, "What hast thou done?
Words of thy brother's lot calls to me from this earth,
thus art thou cursed and banished from this land.
This earth's open mouth has received thy little brother's blood,
by none other than your hand.
Thou shalt till thy lot on this earth without ever again reaping for thine efforts,
and a fugitive and a vagrant shall you become."

――Book of Genesis, Chapter 4 (Translated from the Japanese Edition)


And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.
And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;
When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

――Book of Genesis, Chapter 4 (King James Version)







Prologue



The village is surrounded by death. What closes the village built upon the mountain stream into a triangle like a spear's tip is the forest of firs.

The fir resembles a Japanese cedar, handsome, yet short and stout. If a cedar is a sharp knife's edge, the fir is firelight. They have the contours of flame, burning thick at the wick's edge.

The hearty branches grow off of the straight and true trunk, the canopy forming a cone, the leaves are simple needles, and the only complexity to be found is that they don't grow in orderly rows but spiral. ---In summary, an unremarkable tree.

And yet it is a forest made exclusively of these firs that surrounds the village in death. They are the boundary of the village and they along with the mountain range that close off each side of the village are not of this world; they are Higan, the other shore.

While they look down upon the village from the other shore with their forty meter stature, their lifespan is only a one hundred and fifty to two hundred years. These are firs of destruction. If other greenery should try to spread, it is slaughtered to make way for more still of themselves who that dominate the forest.

Those trees of destruction are raised for the dead, confined to the mountainsides alongside the village. Villagers toil making use of the fir forest's lumber for sotoba, and later they became used to make coffins. Ever since the village was born, its purpose was to craft for the dead.

And in that forest of firs are, most befitting of the land of the dead, grave markers.

The village still buries its dead. The villagers each have their own plot and it is there that their remains will be buried. There are no tombstones. The sotoba stand marking where the dead dwell. Upon the thirty third anniversary of the dead's memorial service, the sotoba are taken down and a fir tree is planted. Plant and forget. The dead have already returned to the mountain, there is nothing human left.

A forest made purely of firs, the firs themselves destroyed for the dead, is unmistakably a land of death. Closed in on three sides by firs, the village is isolated within death.

Actually, from the moment the village was opened, neighborhoods within that village have been isolated. The first settlers were a band of lumberjacks who had come in to clear out an area for their forest, a village with neither blood nor territorial ties.

Perhaps that's the reason that everything is settled within the village, without aid from those who live outside the village. The outside's influence is limited, like the bypass through the south rim of the village, only able to pierce through and continue on. Even if this road connects the village to bigger towns and to cities even bigger than those towns, as nothing stops, the village remains isolated.

All the same, the mountain village has mysteriously not suffered depopulation in recent years. The population neither grows, nor does it decline. Certainly, there have been families moving bit by bit from the more remote part of the village, but that number is offset by the growth at the southern part of town. The mountain village always has a heavy population of seniors but as the elderly set off into the mountainside forests, the young return from thin air.

Seeing it carry on however trivially, yet certain never to close completely, the village may be thought of as a hokora. No matter how abandoned it may seem, like the brand of faith that drives one to stop by the hokora when they happen to remember it, the pulse of the village will go on without end.

If that is the case then the stolidity of the inert mountain village may be intentional. A bridge between this shore and the other, it is surrounded on three sides by that other shore, by death that isolates this shore in solemnity, away from the common world.

There, people labor for death and pray for the dead.

---Really, that was what the village was for ever since it was born.