修飾

Modification Complications - How to Japanese - November 2024

This is How to Japanese, a monthly newsletter with something about Japan/Japanese and a dash of いろいろ.

日本・日本語： Katamari Description

Just a short newsletter this month to give myself a break to come up for air at the end of a long, busy…trying year, the start of what will be another set of long, busy, trying years for many. And unfortunately my lesson this month is not the most positive: Sometimes you have to give up on something.

I’ve been running the USJETAA Japanese Reading Group for 10 years now in various forms, and we’ve read all sorts of writing from a wide range of writers. I have the full list online here. At one point in the past, we spent four months going over an Edogawa Rampo story and another four months looking at a Sakaguchi Ango story. So we know how to battle through tough writing. But I bit off more than I could chew with the November reading, which was an online essay by Kanai Mieko titled まずい (mazui, disgusting/bad/not good/inconvenient). In the essay, she looks at words like まずい and やばい (yabai, bad/badass/crazy/delicious), trendy, casual slang that have expanded from their original meanings.

When I pick the reading for the month, I generally give it a quick look to see if it seems interesting and readable, but I don’t read it all the way through because I like to experience the reading along with other readers. I wish I’d looked at this one more closely because Kanai’s writing is dense and occasionally impenetrable. She writes extremely long, complex sentences (some of which I feel could easily be divided into smaller more digestible chunks). But this is her style. I can appreciate that not all Japanese writing is as simple and straightforward as the sentences Murakami Haruki writes.

Initially we were going to divide the Kanai essay into two parts and finish up in December, but I decided to call it after one month. That was enough. We needed to switch to something more manageable for the end of the year. This is an important skill to have: the ability to know when to call it quits.

Japanese study is about balance. You need to look for challenge, especially when it comes to learning how to read. Each step you take should be more difficult than the last, but these steps should be challenging-fun. If you accidentally reach too far, you could accidentally end up in a challenging-painful situation, which is not ideal. The Kanai essay felt challenging-painful.

So this is a reminder from me to assess the level of your current Japanese study challenge and take it easy on yourself if you need to. Don’t be afraid to abandon ship and find something slightly easier or more entertaining or more fun. Don’t stop studying. You have to keep going. Just find an activity with a more suitable difficulty level.

I do want to look at a piece of Kanai’s writing here to see what she’s doing and why her writing is so complicated. Check out this passage in which she’s summarizing an interview with director Fukada Koji about harassment in the movie industry:

昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と語る監督は、これまで問題にされることなく当然視されていた問題が映画業界でも「ハラスメントや性暴力に対する社会の認識の高まりや業界の人手不足により「変わらなければまずい」との危機感が醸成されてきた」と語っている。

The director says that long-running harassment “is at the stage where it has finally become visible” and we’re “standing on the starting line.” He notes that the issue, which had been considered natural and wasn’t addressed as a problem, has “developed a sense of urgency that ‘things must change’ due to increased awareness within society of harassment and sexual violence in the movie industry and to the industry’s labor shortage.”

The key point I want to talk about is 修飾 (shūshoku, modification/description). This is a grammatical term used to describe when and how a word or phrase modifies or describes another word. In this case, Kanai uses a long expression to modify the 主題 (shudai, topic) of the sentence, which is 監督 (kantoku, director). Here is the 主題 and its modifying expression isolated:

昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と語る監督 (Mukashi kara atta harasumento ga “yatto kashika sareta dankai” de “sutaatorain ni tatta tokoro” to kataru kantoku)

How do we understand this? What’s going on? Essentially, the 主題 does the action in the description. We can turn this into a regular sentence in one of two ways.

We can make the topic of this sentence the topic (監督) of the description and isolate it into a new sentence:

監督は昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と語る

Or we can add the topic as subject of the verb and mark it with が (ga):

昔からあったハラスメントが「やっと可視化された段階」で「スタートラインに立ったところ」と監督が語る

And that’s essentially what I did with my English translation above. The Japanese is a single sentence, as you may notice, and breaking this sentence down to its simplest form gives us:

X監督はYと語っている (X kantoku wa Y to katatte iru, The X director said Y).

But English doesn’t have a convenient structure like a 主題 at the start of a sentence which can be piled upon with any manner of modifier. Japanese does, which gives its sentences a Katamari Damacy-like potential to roll into mammoth sizes; just keep making the modifier of the topic longer and longer. This just doesn’t work with English; 修飾 as hard as you might, you’ll never approach the potential of a Japanese 修飾.

Not that an extensive 修飾 is necessarily a good thing. If we explore the “X” above a little more closely, we can see that this sentence is effectively a double 語る (kataru, to tell/note) situation. X = Zと語る監督. Plug that in, and we get:

Zと語る監督はYと語っている。 (The director that said Z said Y.)

Which doesn’t feel like the most aesthetically pleasing combination of words.

So in English translation it’s a relatively good practice to divide 主題 sentences with extended modifiers into two sentences. Turn the modified 主題 into the subject of the phrase modifying it, and then sort out the rest of the sentence.

But knowing and appreciating how the Japanese is working is just as important a skill. And in this case I think it demonstrates a sort of forced density of expression on the part of the author. However, if we take into account the fact that she’s using this sentence to summarize and paraphrase a news article, maybe it doesn’t need to be the most aesthetically pleasing sentence. Maybe it’s doing all that it needs to do and that’s enough. Still, this was one of the easier sentences to grok, so I’m glad we’re moving on to an easier reading for December. Join us then!

いろいろ

• The English translation of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is now out, and the reviews are less than stellar. I re-ran my review podcast episode with 20 minutes of extra content on the beginning as a special emergency episode. Give that a listen here.

• I also cover a few more reviews on the regular episode this month, but my main goal was to cover the newsletter this month and add a critical usage of 伺う (ukagau, to ask/to hear/to visit) that I neglected to mention in the newsletter last month. Please accept my tremendous apologies. I wrote about it on the blog this month. The blog also has links to the additional Murakami reviews I looked at.

• This was a very interesting TikTok by a flautist talking about the Colin Stetson song “The righteous wrath of an honorable man” that’s gone viral on TikTok and the impossibility of notating it on sheet music. You can listen to the song on YouTube and read more about the trend here.

• I set my Twitter to private ahead of the change in block rules, but I plan to approve anyone who wants to follow me. I have been shifting more to Bluesky lately, so do follow me there, but you can find me on just about any social media platform that exists.