Bonus Translator’s Notes

Fantasy Inbound — LNCrawler · All chapters

Translator Notes

So we meet again. You just couldn’t get enough reverse-isekai tokusatsu. Or maybe it was my eloquent voice, here in these note sections, that lured you back once more. Regardless, dear reader, you’re here now, and that means it’s time for...

Culture lessons! With me, Matt, the translator! Please, hold your applause.

Okay, I’m done amusing myself. In volume one, we talked generally about the most fundamental concepts of Hindu mythology and Buddhist thought that underlies much of the isekai aesthetic of Fantasy Inbound. I picked those subjects specifically—Rudra, samsara, karma, sunyata, asuras, et cetera—in an effort to create a decent-enough foundation that I hope educated the uninitiated on at least the bare minimum of the cultures this series pulls from.

I’d like to build on that in this entry and discuss some of the less...nebulous ideas. Of course, if you’re coming into this having not read my first bout of surface-level rambling, I’d obviously encourage you to grab the premium edition of volume one off of J-Novel Club’s website and check it out because I’m a narcissist. But if you’re just in this out of a mild curiosity, don’t worry. This isn’t a Kingdom Hearts spin-off game, and my oh-so-enlightening explanations from the last volume shouldn’t be necessary to understand anything here. I’ll also do my best to sprinkle in information where it’s relevant to avoid confusion.

As always, I want to preface this section by stating that I am a foreigner touching on cultures that are distant to me and my everyday life. Much of what I’m going to talk about is as new to me as it might be to you. We’re all learners here, so my only goal is to highlight said cultures and to offer a little bit of context in relation to Fantasy Inbound’s plot as a whole.

With that out of the way, let’s begin with...

The Holy Shroud

Coming right off the coattails of me prefacing a discussion about South and East Asian cultures, we have Fantasy Inbound’s most prominent allusion to western culture. I know, I’m too good at this.

The Holy Shroud refers to the Shroud of Turin, said to be the cloth used as Jesus Christ’s burial shroud after his crucifixion. Legend has it one can see his face imprinted into the fabric. There’s not too much for me to touch on in this regard (and obviously Excalibur Mode is a direct reference to the Arthurian legend), but what is interesting is another name it goes by: the sacred sarira. So we’re going to talk about that instead.

Truth be told, this is a little complicated on the Japanese side of things. The kanji for the Holy Shroud is 聖骸布 (read as sei-gai-fu). The components break down to 聖, the kanji for “holy,” 骸, the kanji for “corpse,” and 布, the kanji for “cloth.” Put together, it makes sense, right? Holy corpse cloth. A holy burial shroud. The Holy Shroud. The complicated part is the Japanese term for its other title—シャリーラの聖骸 (read as shariira no seigai). If you consider how the kanji that get shared between the two are the ones for “holy” and “corpse,” it would almost seem like the Shroud’s defining characteristic comes not from it being a cloth, but from death.

聖骸 is not actually a real word in Japanese, but that never stopped anyone before. So we have to look at the other part of the term to really understand it—the sarira part.

A sarira is just a Buddhist artifact, really. Mostly beads or pearls or things like that, but not exclusively. Supposedly, they’re often discovered in the cremated remains of Buddhist monks, and they’re revered as spiritual relics, said to essentially embody the essence and teachings of the people they came from. Another interesting point is that the Japanese word for cremated remains (舎利—shari), particularly in a Buddhist sense, actually originates from this word.

Whatever we can gather from this is largely subjective, as currently we have little in-universe knowledge as to what exactly the Holy Shroud is, but its connections with death are certainly interesting.

Yaksha/Yakshini and Gandharva

Jumping topics a bit, if these words look familiar, that’s because they probably should. In Fantasy Inbound, the elves refer to themselves as the “Yakshia.” And they refer to the mages as the “Dharva.” Huh. Must be a coincidence. Anyway, moving on to the next topic...

What? You want me to do my job and actually provide information? Oh, fine, if you insist.

Ahem. Anyway. It’s pretty clear that the word “Yakshia” is derived from “yaksha” and “yakshini.” Both of these Sanskrit words refer to the same thing, the former being the male variant and the latter being female. The yaksha (as I’ll call them for the sake of convenience) are nature spirits in Indian mythology. Generally, they’re pretty chill beings, but they can sometimes be a bit rambunctious depending on your source, as tends to be the case for all brands of spirits. They’re considered minor deities, and they encompass a wide range of beings.

On the other side of the spectrum, the mortal enemies of the Yakshia are the Dharva. In the context of this series, the Dharva are a chosen people whose sole purpose seems to be conquering Earth. Their namesake, the gandharva, actually share some of these characteristics.

The gandharva are a class of beings who are closely related to the yaksha, but are primarily considered entertainers. Singers and dancers. People with a flare for the dramatic, let’s say. Notably, in Buddhism they’re considered kind of a nuisance, and in early Vedic texts, they would travel between the divine world and the human world as messengers. In some cases, they’re even part animal, much like our lovely friend Scullchance was.

As tends to be the case with broad classifications of deities, there are many depictions and descriptions of both the yaksha and the gandharva, which makes them a little difficult to summarize here. So I won’t attempt to. But what I will say is that these guys gave me a bit of trouble early in the translation process. Their original names in my notes were “Yaxia” and “Dalva” respectively (given katakana’s tendency to not be very good at distinguishing between letters in the English alphabet), and it wasn’t until I ran into the yaksha in my research later on that I considered that the archmages were probably related to something in a similar way.

Honestly, to this day, I still have no idea how I made it halfway into volume one without making this connection, and I note it here as a reminder that we all forget that we have a brain sometimes.

Kumbhanda

Let’s talk some monsters now. Counting the naga from last time, the second term worth bringing up actually comes from the end of the first volume, when Ein refers to the kraken monster as a “kumbhanda.” Now, for people who have played the Persona or Shin Megami Tensei series of video games, that probably sounds weird, because kumbhandas don’t really look like krakens. What they do look like is a lot more fun, so allow me to elucidate.

In Buddhist mythology, kumbhandas are dwarvish spirits, and their name can mean “gourd” or “pot-egg.” The hilarious part, though, is that “egg” was a euphemism for “testicle” in its source language, so these guys are sometimes depicted as having, well, let’s just say rather large family jewels.

The part about them related to the kraken enemy (at least in the context of this series) comes from none other than the data entry of previously-mentioned video game series Shin Megami Tensei, which states that they suck the life and vitality out of people. That’s right—my first time citing a source, and it’s from a video game.

If I must get academic, though, these monsters are a pretty good example of how difficult it can be to really pinpoint mythology when it’s being colored by different generations and cultures. Most of what you’ll find if you google “kumbhanda” will likely be from video games, and none of them are really, uh, packing what linguistics tell us they were (though maybe that’s less a factor of cultural drift and more a factor of rating systems).

This brings to mind how Japanese kobolds and ogres are often depicted as dogs and pigs respectively due in part to the different ways Dungeons & Dragons and other western fantasy tropes spread overseas. I’m not actually going anywhere with that, but it’s an interesting tangent that I was looking for an excuse to throw in.

Kinnara

So another monster that we see near the end of volume one are sirens, or what Ein calls “kinnara.” We’ve got another case of a lack of family resemblance here, but those are always the more interesting ones, right?

In Buddhism and Hinduism, the kinnara (or kinnaris for the female variety, which I absolutely should have used in volume one, thank you for noticing) are celestial musicians, sort of like the gandharva. But that’s where the cultural similarities between Param and the real world stop. Real kinnara are actually part bird or horse, not fish, and they’re far more liked than sirens. They’re symbols of love, exceedingly harmless, and even benevolent, it seems.

Sirens, as I’m sure most of the western world knows, are decidedly not well-liked. Well, I’m lying, because sometimes they are, but most depictions have them luring sailors to horrible deaths with their songs. What we can gather from this is that however close Param’s language seems to be derived from Sanskrit, the culture is evidently not one-to-one.

Prajna and Prana

Before we get to the last topic, I ought to clarify something before I inevitably see some smarty pants try to call this a typo—these are totally different things.

Prajna (silent j) is a Buddhist term meaning “wisdom.” You might see it translated as “Perfect Wisdom” sometimes, but we’re not talking “don’t lick cold surfaces” wisdom. This is “understand the nature of the universe” wisdom (bonus points if you can guess what that is. We’ve talked about it before). When Ein speaks of prajna, she often refers to nanomachines in the same breadth.

Prana, on the other hand, is “life force.” You might see it used as a common buzzword for yoga or, you know, normal stuff like rejecting the notion that bodies need food to live so you subsist entirely off of “pranic energy.” That sort of thing. Note: “pranic” is a fake adjective that was created for the specific purpose of being a buzzword, so if you ever see me use it, you have permission to call me out.

Ahem. In Fantasy Inbound, prana is essentially magic. It functions in much the same way, and it can also be used as a unit of measurement. In the real world, prana permeates all the elements, and we can see that in the story as well. Portal-keeps need a lot of magic to materialize, so much that when they vanish, the surrounding area consumes the energy of the dead, turning corpses to dust. We see that very phenomenon in volume one.

The Pandemonium Gospel Code

Okay. It’s that time again. The big one.

Like last time, our final topic is going to be one of the Gospel Codes, specifically the one used to summon the Pandemonium droids. We had a lot to cover for the first Gospel we did, when we talked about the prose Ein recites to access the Astral Library, and we have even more for this one. Because this, reader, is probably the passage I’ve spent the single longest amount of time and effort on out of all the light novel work I’ve done thus far. So we’re gonna break it apart in chunks like last time, and I’ll explain how I reached the translation decisions I did.

—Witness the truth. Envision vajra.

I’m going to do something crazy now and include the original Japanese source text, thus opening myself up to complete, unabashed criticism from strangers. But I’m going to do it anyway for the sake of conveying just how loaded it is. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know what it says. This is for purely comparative purposes. The first Japanese line reads: 汝、自心の月輪に於いて、金剛の形を思惟せよ。

Firstly, the translated line we’re focusing on right now does not convey the entirety of the nuance of the Japanese text above. All of the Gospel Codes so far have only been two sentences long, but I made the decision early on to give myself three in English because of this specific passage. So “witness the truth. Envision vajra” is only covering a part of the first half of the Gospel in its entirety, but anyway, let’s get into it.

The first word I had to dig into was 月輪 (read: gachirin). These kanji together simply refer to the full moon, but there’s clearly more going on here. On its own, the beginning clause of the source text roughly translates as “by the full moon in thy heart.” But we’re not talking about a literal full moon. We’re talking about the full moon in Buddhist terms as conveyed by Kukai himself, which symbolizes purity and enlightenment. To yearn for such an ideal within oneself is called 月輪観 (read: gachirinkan). So what this bit—汝、自心の月輪に於いて—means when it says “by the full moon in thy heart” is to seek enlightenment, the true nature of all things within oneself. Or in the way I chose to render it, to “witness” it.

To further expand on this idea and why I ended up seemingly condensing it so heavily, I want to touch on what I mean when I call enlightenment “the true nature of all things.” The main problem I faced was that I failed to really find any succinct way to include the imagery of the moon when English cultures are simply lacking in the Buddhist connotation department, even in a cryptic sense. I had to understand the idea behind it all to be able to convey it in English in a way that doesn’t sound like a Kingdom Hearts villain rant.

In order to do that, I had to understand gachirin better, and my dictionary dives took me to yet another symbolic moon-related term: 真如の月 (shinyo no tsuki). And what this essentially points to is the nature of the moon and how it relates to the nature of the world. The moon is permanent in its impermanence—it rises and falls unfailingly, but its form forever changes. In other words, the moon represents enlightenment: tathata.

Tathata is connected to sunyata (emptiness), which I briefly touched on in my last write up, and it literally means “thusness.” It’s simply the way things are. And...that’s really it. It is to simply be—the truth of all things. Enlightenment is understanding that things just are, and that’s the beauty of it.

So, all of that combined lends to my reasoning for why I translated a clause loaded with symbolic and connotative meaning for the essence of the universe into three words: “Witness the truth” (I’m lying but we’ll get to that later. Hold your pitchforks). And that leads me into the second half of this line: “Envision vajra.”

The most important part of the Japanese line for us here is: 金剛の形を思惟せよ。

Our fake, rigid translation of this down to its components is “envision the shape of kongou.” And no, I’m not talking about the warship, in anime girl format or otherwise. Kongou is the reading for the kanji 金剛, and it means a few things, but the most important one to us is the Sanskrit word “vajra,” noting that it has connotations of being indestructible like the Buddhist truth.

As you can probably tell, this translated rather nicely, but what tripped me up on this part were the implications for the usage of the word kongou throughout the rest of the series. If you’ve read volume one, you might remember many uses of the word “vajra” in all sorts of contexts, implying that what Scullchance means when she calls Yu “Vajra One” isn’t to do with the actual ritualistic weapon called a vajra, but the Sanskrit word “vajra.” I struggled for some time on how I wanted to render this recurring theme, because English isn’t very kind to me in that “vajra” most often refers to the weapon, but ultimately I decided the symbolism I needed was there regardless.

What kind of symbolism? Well, in Sanskrit, vajra is a word that means “thunderbolt” or “diamond,” and if you Google it you’ll probably come across a strange, dagger-like instrument. In Fantasy Inbound, we’re more so talking about the meaning and what it represents, rather than the actual weapon itself.

In short, a vajra is a ritualistic item in Vedic religions, said to be the most powerful weapon in the universe. It’s sort of a small club, with big, round end and pointed tip, and it’s commonly associated with Indra, the king of the devas. Important to us, though, is that, like a thunderbolt, it symbolizes cleaving through ignorance, and like a diamond, it’s as invincible as the truth. In that sense, it also symbolizes sunyata—the innate emptiness in everything that implies infinite significance. A key component of enlightenment.

To put this into context with Fantasy Inbound, when Scullchance calls Yu “Vajra One,” she’s associating him with great, immutable power, and possessing it seems to be equated with having experienced or undergone some great feat. In the Japanese text, she refers often to having opened a “door” of vajra of some kind. In my own translation, I chose to render this in a more metaphorical sense, often referring to vajra as “truth” (as previously stated it represents), and the act of opening said door being more akin to having witnessed it. I’m ranting now, but this ties in a little with the way I translated the poem that I’m supposed to be talking about.

Okay, one last interesting tidbit about vajras (the real-world weapon, not the concept) is that they’re often paired with a bell called a ghanta, which represents prajna—wisdom. And the two of them together symbolizes the dichotomy of male and female. It’s something interesting to know, given how our Vajra One is accompanied by a keeper “of the key of wisdom.”

—See, says the Enlightened One, true strength in tathata.

Over two full pages in my document editor later, let’s move on to the next line of the Gospel Code. Thankfully, we’ve covered most of the elements in this line already, so we can just break this apart and use our new knowledge to understand it. The second Japanese line reads: 覚者は言う。我、月輪の中に金剛を見ると……

We’re going to focus on the second half: 月輪の中に金剛を見る. Two things might stick out at once if you’re good at memorizing kanji: namely that we have both gachirin and kongou here. In an untranslated sense, this is saying “to see the kongou within one’s gachirin.” Immediately, I hope this makes it a little clearer when I say that the way the word “vajra” is used is a little tricky and goes beyond simply referring to the ritual instrument.

Here, the Enlightened One (the 覚者, read kakusha), is telling someone to see vajra inside the full moon within oneself. As I described before, gachirin is deeply connected to the concept of shinyo no tsuki, which in itself is a metaphor for the idea of tathata. Similarly, vajra is an invincible, immutable strength that derives from truth, as Indra uses it to strike down the ignorant. Thus, we get “see true strength in tathata.”

My train of logic for this one was pretty simple, and I almost left it at that. But I asked you earlier to hold your pitchforks. Although we’ve covered, I think, the core of the meaning, it still feels a little...lacking. It’s not very colorful for something that’s supposed to sound mystical, and what about the whole moon imagery?

—Give form to invincible serenity, flawless as the full moon.

That takes me to the last line of this Gospel. The purpose of adding this third line was to sort of...pepper it. Would I put this translation in an encyclopedia of Buddhist quotes and sayings? Probably not. But to quote myself from last time: Fortunately, however, I’m not translating an academic, historical text. I’m translating an edgy light novel.

The goal here was to reintroduce the imagery of the moon while sprinkling in a little more of what vajra means beyond a cursory glance. Although the Japanese Gospel Codes are consistently two lines long, the reason I expanded it to three in English is largely because of this one in particular. Whatever old, obscure mantra the original lines are from, there’s a 99% chance it’s not going to be in English, so rather than attempt to follow the reference by searching for translations that don’t exist, I wanted to do it by capturing both the message and the spirit. Adding this extra line gives me a little more room to do just that.

Something interesting to note is that my original draft of this line was “give form to pristine fury,” rather than “serenity.” Pretty big jump, but I ultimately made the change after doing something crazy: asking for help.

Now is when I reveal the twist that over half of what I just talked about came about thanks to discussions with J-Novel Club’s excellent managing translator, Kristi Fernandez. She helped me work through so many of my thoughts and ideas regarding the linguistics of the Holy Shroud, the real-world origin of the Yakshia and Chosen Dharva, and this entire Gospel Code. Our back-and-forth helped me refine this final line in particular.

My idea behind using “fury” was that the vajra seemed like a very violent device to me. It’s easy to see it that way with all the thunderbolts and smiting, and the fact that this is a chant used to conjure an army of massacring robots. But anger is kind of contrary to the core message of the entire rest of the passage, isn’t it? The center of Buddhist thought is serenity, having a clear mind. Fighting to protect what you love doesn’t equate to blind rage, and in fact Yu’s own character growth is all about finding inner peace. The fact that he is not at peace is what causes dissonance between him and the Mark III.

But I wouldn’t have made that connection (or been confident in half of these translation decisions) if I hadn’t had someone to talk it over with and point me in a different direction. Sort of like how Yu needed to have a few heart-to-hearts with his friends to truly find his answer.

So remember: It’s always okay to ask for help. Even professionals do it. Wait, I count as a professional? Huh. You learn something new every day.

As always, thanks for reading!

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