Bonus Translator’s Notes

Hello, reader! I’m Matthew Jackson, the translator of the book you just finished. But that’s a mouthful, so you can call me Matt, or even by my online handle, RoTsun, if you’re feeling spiffy. However, if you didn’t just finish reading this book, I’m gonna have to stop you right there and make sure you didn’t fly all the way back here by accident. What we’re about to get into will include spoilers, so as long as you’re aware of that...

Good? Great.

Now, I don’t want to ramble for too long before getting to the juicy bits you’re actually here to read, so I’ll keep the preamble as short as possible.

Fantasy Inbound is a light novel series heavy with East Asian imagery, symbolism, and allusion, primarily in the way of Buddhist and Hindu concepts and mythology. Those familiar with Joe Takeduki’s other work may already be aware that this is pretty much par for the course with him, but for those of you who aren’t (like me, hey, how’s it going), just know that this is not the author’s first time taking inspiration from these cultures. And where that makes my job difficult is the fact that these are cultures which, unfortunately, much of the Western world are uneducated about.

And when I say that, I of course include myself. So I’d like to take this opportunity to share some of what I’ve learned, as well as provide some insight into my decision-making process and how I wove these foreign concepts into something (hopefully) understandable to foreign audiences. Also, I’d like to make clear that I was, and still am, the learner in much of what I’m about to talk about. As long as you keep that in your surely open mind—I mean, I hope you’re open-minded if you’re willing to learn more about the worldviews presented in this text—then I would be glad to be your friendly source of information.

I’m going to format this into loosely connected sections of terminology—everything from monsters, to deities, to the very specific word for the endless cycle of suffering and torment of this mortal coil that we’re doomed to walk. And although there’s no way I’ll be getting to absolutely everything, I will endeavor to structure the things I do touch on logically and at least make it somewhat more entertaining than your average Asian Studies course.

Without further ado, our first word of the day is...

Asura

I know, too easy. But even though this is probably the least confusing thing referenced in the text, it’s so prominent and important that I thought it deserved its own section. And hey, if this is your first time even seeing the word “asura,” this one’s for you, pal.

First and foremost, the asuras are certainly not heroes. At least, not necessarily. They are an entire class of beings who are defined by their opposition to the gods, or devas in the context of Indian religion. Sometimes they’re good, but most times they’re incredibly moody and angry. You’ll most often see them depicted as big, angry, multi-armed men, but there are female asuras called asuri.

The term itself has a long history, at first simply referring to one in power, such as a lord, and the asuras went through many image changes over the centuries. But the key takeaway from the modern and evolved form of these deities is that they’re bad news, and you don’t really want to find yourself reincarnated as one.

Considering that, one might be able to draw some parallels to Yu’s hesitation. The Asura Frame is indeed an artificial god of destruction, very much true to its name. And you kinda don’t want to make it mad.

Shifting gears a little, so the Asura Frames are asuras, huh? “Prove it,” I hear you saying. “How come they’re named after devas?”

First of all, wow, you did your research. I’m proud of you. Second of all, that’s because it depends on which source you’re checking. Varuna and Mitra, for example, are considered asuras in the Rigveda (a super important religious text in Hinduism), but it’s only later that they become regarded as devas. Rudra also shares a similar lexiconical fate. So let that serve as an example of what I mean when I say our asura pals have changed over the years.

Rudra

On that note, let’s talk a little bit about who Rudra actually is. He seems pretty important, after all.

Short and simple, Rudra is, you guessed it, the god of storms. But what you might not have guessed is that Rudra is essentially the very same entity as Shiva, who you might recognize a little more readily. There are complicated religious, cultural, and linguistic reasons behind that, but when someone refers to Rudra, many times he is referred to as Rudra-Shiva.

Whichever name strikes your fancy, the deity known as Rudra is considered one of the most terrifying and destructive, often depicted with a bow and associated with disease. But what’s interesting is, at the same time, he is known as a healer. As much as he destroys, Rudra is said to be the greatest of physicians, and is sometimes depicted as a handsome and intelligent man.

Nagaraja

While we’re on the topic of entities and people, I think this is a worthy first entry into the monster compendium.

As you may have deduced by now, if you’ve been paying very close attention, Fantasy Inbound’s world is colored ever so slightly by Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Sarcasm aside, you may have already forgotten about Ein referring to a dragon as a “nagaraja” completely in passing during the destruction of Maizuru, or maybe you’re frothing at the mouth for an explanation. If you’re the latter, here, have some water, and let’s talk about what the heck a “nagaraja” is.

Anyone who’s played a JRPG or two may know that a naga is pretty much just a snake person—a lamia, if you will. It’s a little more culturally complicated than that, of course, but the important thing is just knowing that the naga are serpent-like minor deities, and that they can take many forms with varying degrees of humanness.

What we’re interested in are the nagaraja. Translated from Sanskrit, this literally means “king of the naga,” and with our newfound knowledge of what the naga are, suddenly it sounds pretty apt for a dragon, I’d say. One of the most interesting nagarajas (of the three referenced in Hindu texts) to me is Shesha, said to hold the entire universe in his coil, and his unwinding is what causes time to flow. Should he move backwards, everything would cease to exist.

Another nagaraja, and of a little more relevance to us, is Vasuki, who rests coiled around Shiva’s neck. If you’re wondering whether that’s important to Fantasy Inbound’s imagery, I’m afraid I have no answer. But pretty coincidental, eh?

The Eight Consciousnesses

Now we’ll get into some of the abstract stuff.

The Eight Consciousnesses are first referenced during Aliya’s awakening experiment involving the first Devicer Three’s ashes. Aliya explains briefly that the manas consciousness is the one her theory primarily deals with, but how? And I think we’re missing seven others there. Worry not, I’m here to elucidate you with surface-level explanations punctuated by slightly amusing banter.

Firstly, we have to establish the core six: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the mind. These are collectively known as the sense consciousnesses, and are largely uncontested by most schools of Buddhism. Why? Well, because there is no consciousness at all, no experience, without our senses, right?

All of these are self-explanatory enough, but what is the “mind”? The mind acts as a sort of mirror. It takes in the senses, interprets them, and reflects them back out as thoughts. But the thing about senses and thoughts is that it’s all transient. The moment you stop seeing, there is no sight consciousness. Et cetera, et cetera.

And that’s where the alaya-vijnana doctrine comes in. This is a theory proposed in Mahayana Buddhism in an attempt to explain consciousness in a way that allows for permanence, lasting impressions that in turn affect the flow of karma. And it does that with two extra consciousnesses: manas and the “storehouse.”

Manas is the concept of self. It is our ego, where our self-centered desires emerge and what keeps us turning in the cycle of samsara, the cycle of life, death, and reincarnation. But manas doesn’t appear out of nothing. It’s derived from something. And that something is the storehouse consciousness—essentially memory. A storehouse of every experience we’ve ever had, each one coloring our manas, our self. Or at least, what we perceive as our self.

Taking this back to poor Devicer Three, it is his manas, or the traces of it rather, that the Asura Frame reacts to. And perhaps you could say that it’s Yu’s developing manas that helps awaken it.

Samsara, Karma, Sunyata, and Enlightenment

I’ve mentioned a few fancy words so far, and you may be looking at the title of this section and going, “Okay Matt, or RoTsun, or whoever you say you are, some of those words aren’t even mentioned in the text.” And you’d be right. You caught me. But before you press those charges, hear me out.

Samsara, as I briefly described earlier, is the cycle of rebirth. Professor Chloe Todo mentions this when she passes, and when she does, she mentions it in the context of reaching the “end” of it. It may sound a little contradictory for a never-ending process to have an “ending,” but the ultimate goal is to escape the cycle and attain one of the four higher states of being (which I go into a bit more later on), because the cycle, samsara, is suffering. And the perpetuation of it all, what determines just how much some lucky fellow gets to suffer, is karma.

One way or another, I assume we’ve all probably heard of karma, whether you know its religious origins or not. The concept is present in many cultures in the form of idioms—“What goes around, comes around” in English, for example. When I said that our egos are what keep us in the cycle of samsara, I meant that our egos are the source of karma. Karma is born from the actions we take, the thoughts we have, and those determine the circumstances of our future lives.

So then the question becomes, how does one break free from suffering and reach nirvana? That is to say, how do we attain enlightenment? Well, the key is impermanence. And while translating this volume (and subsequent volumes as I write this), I’ve found that understanding the elves, the way they speak, and the way they think is grounded in understanding this one concept.

Impermanence is essentially the cornerstone of Buddhism. It’s present everywhere, from anatta (the non-self, dissociating from the subjective) to sunyata, and it’s the latter that I want to focus on.

At its core, sunyata is about emptiness, but it’s important to note that it’s not a negative emptiness. The zoomers out there may relate to the positive connotations of nothing ever mattering or meaning anything, but I’ll elaborate for the less hip, and for the sake of actually explaining this cultural concept in terms other than internet memes.

Basically, the absence of anything is just the potential for everything. Nothing inherently has any significance, we exist in a void, but it’s within that void that things happen, that we apply significance to the innately impermanent. Only through understanding that, the transience of the things we experience, is enlightenment really achieved.

The Heart Sutra

Now that we have a basic understanding of the general tenets of Buddhism explained by a fumbling translator, we can talk about texts. And really, there’s no better one to begin with than the most famous.

Sutras are, in short, collections of sayings and principles, and of them all, the Heart Sutra is easily the most popular. I won’t be discussing it in its entirety at too much length, because I have too much tokusatsu isekai to translate to do that. But what I will do is touch on the most famous line, the one quoted in Fantasy Inbound: “Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.”

Ha, you thought we’d be discussing Japanese translation, but it was Sanskrit instead!

First of all, a clarification. “Gate” is not pronounced like the English word “gate.” It’s pronounced gah-teh. Important. Anyway with that out of the way, what it means is simply “gone.” “Paragate” roughly means “gone to the other side,” and adding “sam” to make “parasamgate” means “everyone gone to the other side.” Lastly, “bodhi” is “enlightenment” and “svaha” is a special word that’s really just an exclamation of celebration.

Put together, the excerpt can be roughly translated to, “Gone, gone, gone beyond, everyone gone beyond, oh what an awakening.” As an obligatory disclaimer, this aphorism is so famous that you’ll likely find a dozen different translations with slight variations. This is just my own parsing of it, put together in a way that I think makes the most sense in the context of this book.

Five elements resonate. Ten realms speak. Six senses comprise the words.

“Okay, that’s all very interesting, but can you talk about Japanese translation please?”

Oh, fine. I was saving the best for last, because this excerpt is a doozy. I’ve got a lot to say about it and all the other Gospel Codes, but I think I’ll be a tease and save the others for later.

This passage, the Gospel Code for unlocking the Asura Frame, is not just fancy words. Let that be clear. They are fancy words said by an actual person. Yes, this is a direct quote from the Buddhist monk Kukai, or Kobo Daishi, in his work concisely romanized as “Shojijissogi.” Conveniently for me, it (as is the case for most Buddhist texts) has no official/readily-googleable English translation, making me the lucky fellow who gets to do it. Fortunately, however, I’m not translating an academic, historical text. I’m translating an edgy light novel. And context is king in any translation.

So with that background established, let’s take this in pieces. Even though Aliya pretty much did it all for me.

—Five elements resonate.

Here we have the “godai,” or 五大 if you made it through Japanese 101. And as Aliya’s narration so graciously explains to us (or as you brainiacs who passed Japanese 101 may have already guessed), there are five of these: earth, water, fire, wind, and void. The exact significance of these, why they all exist, how they interact, et cetera is of little importance to us (read: me) at this very moment, but what is important to us is how they’re described.

The godai—the five elements—are described as having “vibrations.” Hibiki. Sounds, voices, resonances. And each of them has its own respective noise.

To reiterate what Aliya tells us, and to succinctly summarize this sentence, the components that make up the universe are not static. They move, vibrate, and resonate.

—Ten realms speak.

So, we have five elements, and the elements make noises. The end result? The things they make up can make noises. They can speak. Language. But now the question is what speaks? Where?

In common Buddhist thought, existence does not take place on one simple plane of reality, but ten. The “jikkai,” or 十界 for the smarty pants out there (you’re killing it). There are six lower realms and four higher realms, each inhabited by their own forms of life of varying levels of enlightenment. The lowest of the realms is hell, and above that is the world of hunger (or the pretas, hungry spirits), followed by beasts and animals, then asuras (note how low they are in the chain), until finally we reach humanity, and above them is heaven.

Beyond even heaven are holy states of being, beginning with the sravaka (or disciples), and ascending to the pratyekabuddha, the bodhisattva, up to the highest of all: buddhahood. Complete enlightenment.

So now we have a myriad of beings and entities to populate our world of earth, water, fire, wind, and void. And because these elements resonate, the beings can communicate. Language is born.

—Six senses comprise the words.

But language does not exist in a vacuum. As we’ve made abundantly clear up to now, language would not even exist without interaction. While the elements give the world a voice, it is our senses that turn the chaos into order. Which is fancy talk for “our senses perceive and interpret meaning from the world.”

Our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, bodies, and minds (six senses—sound familiar?) decipher all the noise and turn it into words.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this, other than just imparting some of my findings to other fine human beings. And I do hope some of what I’ve shared has been at the very least interesting, but my real goal here was to shine a light on a part of translation that is often buried under the prose.

Translation takes a long time. In every sense of the word, really. It takes a lifetime to master on a grander scale, but on a smaller one, it takes months to translate a book, and sometimes days or weeks to translate a fraction of a piece of text. Behind the flashes of occasional genius, when you figure out that perfect way to render an “itadakimasu,” are hours and hours of simple, nose-to-the-grindstone research. And that’s something I’ve come to appreciate to a far greater degree during my work on this series.

It’s impossible to know everything, and that’s what makes translating hard. Language is everything. It encompasses the entire human experience. When you translate, you’re learning, and when you encounter something foreign to you, whether that be a new word or an entirely unique worldview, you take it upon yourself to understand it.

And the best translators are the people who can do that, who can see the world beyond themselves and internalize new ideas. People who have gone beyond their own egos and seek new understanding. You simply can’t experience language in a vacuum, both in the literal sense and a mental one. When you live in a box, you don’t see the entire picture.

I worked some hard days on this volume. I’ll just say that much. But I think it was worth it. I didn’t have to spend those nights reading about sunyata, tathata, and other Buddhist tenets to try and scrounge up a modicum of understanding for this culture I have no personal experience with. I could have looked at the words, written their meaning down, and called it a day. But I would have been missing the forest for the trees. It wouldn’t have been right to deny the fact that language is connected more deeply than the denotative meaning of the words that make it up, because I would have been denying the truth.

Everything is connected, and that’s what this particular Gospel Code tells us. That’s why this is the one that awakens the Asura Frame to greater power.

Thanks for reading.