Merry Christmas! It's a small haul this year. Santa hates poor people.

[sinnesspiel]

Mostly a Christmas Present to let all the Shiki folk know I'm still about, still panning to do Shiki. 2015 turned into a really shitty year for me, and my set-up for translating Shiki took a bit of a hit. I do plan to resume come the start of the New Year. It's my resolution.

In the mean time, have some quicky seasonal Shiki goodness. I don't own anymore ToshioxSeishin doujinshi to do, alas.


First up is Ozaki and Seishin's seiyuu chatting about the Christmas season and who or what it reminds them of in Shiki.

"Shiki Radio Broadcast - Christmas, Short Portion" (Watch on YouTube)

Then the longer piece recorded closer to the start of the anime has both of them talking a bit about the actual novel.

"Shiki WebRadio - Seiyuu Discussion" (Watch on YouTube)

Also this year, I've gotten permission from linguistic research Kinsui Satoshi to translate and summarize/share some of his work on Japanese fictional speech styles (role language). I'll be pulling examples from various series, including of course, Shiki. Sadly, no luck finding any contact information for anyone regarding Shiki itself. That seems like quite the complicated process and it's been a terrible year for complexities for your translator here. Here's to 2016 being better. It wouldn't take much, tohoho...

If I'm able to, I'll try to create a post that focuses on the speech styles of Shiki characters in order to help everyone appreciate the original speech styles and see what's lost in translation as well as how I try to keep what I can. With any luck, spreading an understanding of these speech styles may lead to you readers making suggestions too, so I can best convey everything the original writers were trying to convey.

Merry Christmas and thanks, as always, for reading!

Comments

[sinnesspiel]

I've read conflicting reports that Fujiryuu used a town in the Aichi prefecture　（with clear photos of the references Fujiryuu used for things such as the Ozaki clinic/household, interior, etc.) or the Kouchi prefecture　(in the official animanga guidebook it mentions as much, and the Tohru household model in the manga specifically seems to be from there) as the model base, and that a lot of his backgrounds were in fact B&W altered photos of the sites. Granted, that's just the manga (and subsequently the anime). The novel does state, when Ozaki's reading the paper and mentioning a local drought that season, that they're in the Kanto region (I made this for the PDF version of the translator/cultural notes). I think as far as the intended novel base, you and another reader have made the best supported guess with the Kagoshima prefecture. A quick Google search of Kagoshima + Shiki in Google suggests that this hasn't been brought up by any Japanese fans, curiously. At least not that I could find.

...Ah, and I just realize I got too caught up in exploring the Google Maps town link the other reader provided to respond to them properly then. Gaaah.

---

As for your language questions, Ozaki and Seishin both "omae" each other. Ozaki doesn't omae his patients or such of course. I don't remember if he antas or omaes his wife Kyoko. I'll do a media survey of it and an official post some time soon here.

Omae is generally more rude than "anta," but I don't think there's any aggressive meaning to Seishin omae-ing Ozaki; it's common between male friends (at least particularly so in fiction--I suspect it's so in real life but perhaps not quite as much as in fiction; none of my friends said anything about me omae-ing them, though I found myself reflexively anta-ing some girls, though I don't know why myself).

I think it's more of a reflection of the general nature of their relationship than Seishin's mood at the time. I think he omaes him when not angry at times but I'll need to do a scan over again to get you any good data. Definitely tell me any things you have interest in so I can do such a scan! Let's work together to get something everyone can get some good info on!



Due to way too much fictional exposure, in Japan I had the habit of omae-ing everyone if I wasn't consciously thinking about watching myself and casually asked a group of girls in a class what they thought with "Omaera wa dou da?" and got a hilariously scared reaction from them, as if I'd just went: "What about youse bitches?"

I got the "gaijin pass" a lot on my rudeness.

At any rate, here's a rough order of common second person pronouns:

Most Polite

Name
Anata
Kimi
Anta
Omae
Temee
Kisama

Least Polite

Omae is still extremely rude, but it's the last one on the list that could also be "intimate" rather than rude. I can't think of any girl characters off the top of my head who use it fondly/intimately, it's a pretty male thing, but I'm sure they exist. I've heard girls use it, but as an insulting thing. The last two I've only heard as explicitly insulting or hateful/rude. For some reason I have the impression of males using "kimi" more than women, but I have no formal support for that yet. Again, I'd need to do a media survey. Kimi is generally used towards those of lower social status or ones you have some protective obligation or tendency to--children (when I do hear women use it, it seems to be towards children), men to women (it's a pretty common one for men to use towards their girlfriends, though I hear omae a lot too from the rougher types), towards one's subordinates, towards one's equals.

For an example of Omae as an intimate thing, consider Roy Mustang from FMA; he kimis almost all of his subordinates (Hawkeye, Ed, Al (technically not a subordinate). In general, he's quite formal and general proper if militarty-style brusque (watashi, no da). But with his somewhat vitrolic old buddy Hughes, also a subordinate in a sense, they mutually omae each other. Hughes omaes more people in general including Ed, being a rougher talking, but ultimately much friendlier, "warmer" and thus more habitually intimate character.

I could be wrong on some this impression stuff and it's a largely informal summary of what my feeling is on it from watching/reading a lot of stuff. I'll be sure to translate Kinsui's in the future for a better sourced take on it, and I'll look to provide lots of references from various series.

[severia]

Did you mean 1.4? It said Toukai region, however -- I initially thought the paragraph meant that the drought was a national scale news, but perhaps I was wrong.


Yeah, there is high possibility I just missed other omaes when looking through book 1. Because as far as I know he only uses omae in that chapter, it looks to me he uses it in a rather condescending manner ("YOU did x, YOU did y"). Because of my limited knowledge on Japanese, I currently have the impression that somehow Seishin is too polite to use omae (when not angry), but I'll be surprised if he ends up anta-ing Toshio because their relationship is definitely on 'omae' level. (I think it would be weird if Toshio omaes him but he antas Toshio) I'll also do some survey on book 2; after all it's holiday!

So it's not weird when guys who use boku also use omae frequently? The impression I have is boku guys tend to use kimi more than omae. The boku character I told you about kimis just about everyone who's the same age or younger, and only uses omae when he's cornered, stressed or wants to be a bit insulting I think. He refers to his enemy (the ore guy who refers his superior woman as anta) as kimi a lot but sometimes omae when they're fighting. I'm thinking that probably this character uses kimi a lot because he likes to mobilize people by being persuasive/appealing to their desires (he provides ways for them to achieve their aim), so he uses kimi a lot to appeal to them. If not, it's then just part of his nature.

But then again Seishin might only use omae to refer to Toshio, so it's probably nothing weird. I think it would be much weirder if he omaes other people. So it's probably not really the matter of ore-omae or boku-kimi pairing, but more the matter of how close the people one is talking to to them.

When Seishin learns that Sunako is basically older than he is, will he retain that kimi tho? I'm curious.