Translator’s Notes

Chapter One

Mr. Popular

In Japanese, the title of this chapter is Moteki Tourai? This four-character expression refers to the arrival (tourai) of a particular time (-ki) in the life of a person, usually a guy, at which this person allegedly suddenly begins to attract the romantic attentions of others (moteru means “to be popular,” especially with the opposite sex). Guys in manga (and anime and light novels, as Shinichi might say) spend a lot of time wondering why their moteki hasn’t come, if it ever will, and if the latest act of kindness from one of the female characters indicates that it has tourai’d at last.

Be It Ever So Humble

This English expression has a close but not exact parallel in Japanese: “Mazushii nagara mo tanoshii wa ga ya,” or “Our home, lots of fun even though it’s poor.” The two proverbs are very similar, and we chose to go with the more natural version in the translation, but the word mazushii (poor, inadequate, lacking) does recur throughout the Japanese of this scene in a way that doesn’t quite happen in English.

Money Makes the World Go Round

The Japanese version of the expression is “O-kane ga nai to kubi ga nai, or literally, “No money, no head.” The implication might be more or less literal (“If you have no money, you might as well have no head”), or it might rely on the figurative sense of kubi, which can refer to something primary or fundamental.

“We Are Expecting”

In the original, Petralka says simply, “Dekita no ja” (from dekiru, to do/make/finish/etc). In Japanese, dekiru can mean euphemistically “to conceive a child,” and there’s even an expression, dekichatta kekkon, that refers to a wedding that takes place because the woman got pregnant (what we might call a “shotgun wedding” in English). So it should be pretty clear what she’s saying, but Shinichi (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) takes the expression in its literal meaning and says “What’s dekita (finished/ready)?”

Sa**e-san

That is, Sazae-san, an extremely long-running comic strip and later anime about the domestic life of a Japanese family. (How long-running? Although the comic strip ended when the original artist retired in 1974, the anime has gone on, and holds the Guinness record for longest-running animated television show, having run continuously since 1969 and accrued over 2,500 episodes.) Gently humorous and humanely observed, its popularity has been undiminished by decades of changing Japanese life and politics.

Class Trials

Gakkyuu saiban, from the game Danganronpa.

We Call It Moteki...

See the note for “Mr. Popular,” above.

A Wizard... A Thirty-year-old Virgin

Reference to an internet meme/legend which holds that a person who reaches thirty years old without having sex can become a wizard. (In the source here, the kanji mahou-tsukai, or “wizard,” are glossed with the furigana sanjussai doutei, or “thirty-year-old-virgin.”)

Exchanging Diaries

Koukan nikki (“exchange diary”) in Japanese. Just as advertised, you write in it like a diary, but then give it to a friend (or romantic partner) who can read it and write in it themselves.

A Mark of Status

This reference also came up in the previous volume, where it was translated as “The smaller the boobs, the bigger the deal.” This time, it made more sense to translate it more directly. It remains a reference to a line from Shuffle!, as popularized by Lucky Star.

Nice Boat

One of the routes in the visual novel School Days culminates (spoiler alert!) in one of the love interests killing the MC, putting his head in a gym bag, and then floating away with it on a boat to be together forever. After the finale of the anime version was delayed due to a violent crime that was felt to be uncomfortably similar to the killing depicted in the show, the expression “nice boat” became a meme, on account of the boat shown in the placid replacement footage that was aired instead.

A Tiger at the Front Door and a Wolf at the Back

This is the literal translation of the Japanese expression “Zenmon no tora, koumon no ookami” that occurs in the text here. (I added the other two expressions, whose meetings are equivalent to this one, for a bit of momentum and spice.)

Talk About a Rich Taste Without (Etc.)

The complete line goes something like “Talk about a rich taste without being overwhelming,” and comes from Oishinbo, a cooking manga by Kariya Tetsu and Hanasaki Akira that ran from 1983 until 2014, when it was put on indefinite hiatus..

Apples to Oranges

In Japanese, Shinichi says of the two lunches, “Dohyou ga chigau” (roughly, “They come from completely different places.”) Myusel objects that she didn’t use dojou, which is the water loach, a fish much better known in Japan than someplace like the US. We switched over to fruits to make something like the original pun work in English.

Diary Ends Here

A lot of Lovecraft stories (that would be the reference to “cosmic horror” in the next line) seem to take the form of diaries in which the writers evidently scrawled right up to the moment they were being dragged to their doom by some pan-dimensional squid god.

God or Godzilla...

In the Japanese, Shinichi puns on the expression “Achira wo tatereba kochira tatazu,” which literally means, “If you stand that one up, this one will fall,” but has the force of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Except Shinichi says “Agira wo tatereba gojira ga tatazu.” It’s a simple enough play on words in Japanese, but a pain in the neck in English. We admittedly had to stretch to keep the joke in touch with the original at all.

Windom or Miclas

Except for Godzilla (and in the translation, Akira), all of these creatures are “capsule monsters” from Ultraman.

Waste-Not Ghost

In Japanese the phrase is “mottainai o-bake.” To describe something as mottainai means it’s a waste or a lost opportunity. When used in relation to food, it’s usually meant to induce a touch of guilt (“How could you waste that?!”). The Waste-Not Ghost was a character invented as part of a public service announcement in the early eighties, who appeared at night to scare children who refused to eat certain foods due to petty personal preferences. Although mottainai can be used in reference to a wide variety of things, not just food, Shinichi’s using it here to refer to “wasting” one of the beautiful women who care about him is certainly facetious.

You Two Are My Wings!

The reference is to the character Alto, protagonist of Macross Frontier. In this story, he’s the disowned son of a famous kabuki actor, and does kabuki himself.

“No, No, NO! Stop That! (Rim Shot.)”

A “rim shot” is the technical term for that drums-and-cymbal flourish, ba-dum-pishh, that concludes a joke in so many comedy routines. In the Japanese here, Shinichi says, “Iya iya iya! Nande ya nen!” That second sentence (roughly, “What the heck?!”) is a standard interjection-cum-conclusion to comedy bits, especially in Osaka. (He goes on, “I ended up doing self-tsukkomi [quipping] in Osaka-ben [dialect]...”)

Robot Doubles

In Japanese, kopii robotto (“copy robot”). Although this term is associated with a device from Doraemon, it wasn’t actually created by that series, and the expression has a wider usage than merely as a reference, so we didn’t treat it as one.

Sneezing

There’s a belief in Japan that when you sneeze, it means someone’s talking about you. (Or possibly vice versa.) Hence all the scenes in anime and manga, like this one, where a mention of a character will be followed by a brief cut to that character going “ah-choo!”

Chapter Two

HARMOR

The Japanese title of the chapter is Noroi no Yoroi; it literally means “The Cursed Armor,” but the little rhyme is almost certainly supposed to be part of the fun. We wanted to represent that there was some wordplay here, even if the exact nature of it is a little different in the English.

Wildly, Wickedly, Out-of-This-World Cute

Shinichi describes the girls as mongee kawaii, “mongee” being Okayama dialect for sugoi (incredible/amazing).

I Am a Boy!

In the Japanese, the line “Datte, otoko no ko da mon” sounds very feminine, and would normally be spoken by somebody’s female friend or girlfriend. (“You’re a boy, aren’t you?”) Hence why Shinichi describes it as “kind of creepy” to be saying to himself. The effect is somewhat less pronounced in English.

Mangling Foreign Languages

In the source text, Shinichi describes Petralka as dera-kawaii. Dera is Nagaoya-ben (dialect) for sugoi, and the usage obviously parallels his use of Okayama-ben earlier. What’s more, the word “translated” as kawaii is プリチー (purichii) in Japanese, derived from the English pretty.

The Judgment of Solomon

In the Japanese, Shinichi uses the expression “Oo-oka sabaki” (“Ooka’s judgment”), which originally referred to Ooka Tadasuke, an Edo-era lord who became famous for sensitive, thoughtful judicial decisions. In this sense, tradition treats him very much like Solomon, and the expression “Ooka’s judgment” has come to mean a canny legal decision.

Supposedly, Ooka once faced a case very much like the most famous one associated with Solomon, where two women both claimed to be the mother of the same child. Rather than suggesting the baby be cut in half, though, Ooka said the two women were each to take an arm and pull. When one woman, distressed by the infant’s cries, let go, Ooka awarded the child to that woman.

“No! And Again I Say, No!”

This line (“Ina! Danjite ina!” In Japanese) hails from Gundam Wing, where it’s spoken by Zechs Merquise. In the official subtitles, the line reads “Of course it didn’t!”, in response to the rhetorical question “Did that ridiculous organization [a group on earth] eliminate wars and make world peace a reality?” That rendering didn’t quite fit in our context, so we changed it.

Knifehand

Shuto, a martial arts technique that involves striking with the edge of an open hand.

“We Are Not the Empress”

Despite this proclamation, Petralka continues to use the antique first-person pronoun warawa, so we decided to maintain the royal plural.

Yakiniku

A thin-sliced, grilled meat (usually beef), often dipped (or, less often, marinated) in a distinctive sweet sauce.

The Sanma of Meguro

This is a rakugo (traditional Japanese comedy) routine concerning a feudal lord traveling in the then-rural area of Meguro. Very hungry, he smells something delicious cooking nearby. It turns out to be sanma, a humble fish dish a person of his rank would normally never eat. As hungry as he is, though, he insists on having some, and finds out it’s delicious. He later demands his kitchen produce the dish for him, but as the chefs try to make the meal more suited for such an august personage—getting rid of the fat so it won’t be unhealthy, taking out the bones to make it safe but limp—the food becomes tepid and uninteresting. The lord is left with the impression that “You can only get sanma in Meguro,” when in fact the real problem is that his food is overprepared. Astute readers may recall this same routine being referenced in Volume 9.

Three Bags

The notion that a man has “three sacks/bags,” including his stomach (ibukuro, or “belly bag”), salary (kyuuryou-bukuro, or “salary bag”; think “purse strings”), and his scrotum (tama-bukuro, or “jewel bag,” referring metaphorically to his sex life), and that a woman can and should “grasp” them in order to be with him, seems to be a common one in Japanese thinking about marriage.

Anorexically Thin

Shinichi and Hikaru both use the katakana word surendaa (slender). Deliberately using a foreign word seemed to emphasize the concept, hence why we went with this translation.

A Woman’s Fiftieth Kilo Is Mere Self-Indulgence

Despite the use of heavy brackets in the Japanese, this line doesn’t appear to be a direct reference to anything, or even necessarily a common saying. There is, though, a strain of thought that seems to hold that 50 kilos (about 110 pounds) is the dividing line between “thin” and “fat.” Petralka describes this number as “amae,” a broad term that often means to give in to someone’s desires or to spoil someone.

“I Knocked Twice”

When announcing yourself at a door in Japan, it happens to be the custom to knock exactly two times; no more, no less.

Chapter Three

Believed Forbidden

In Japanese, Sono Yoroi, Kinki ni Tsuki (“Because that Armor [is] Forbidden”). As with the second chapter of the previous volume, this most likely refers to Beat Takeshi’s movie Sono Otoko, Kyoubou ni Tsuki, which was known in English as Violent Cop. Interestingly, though, the original title of the film appears to come from the Japanese translation of a 1968 novel titled Believed Violent in English. In this case, we chose to translate the chapter title a bit more in line with the probable English source.

Overboost

This word—which occurs in katakana in the source text—refers to when a car’s turbocharger forces more air than usual into the engine. (A turbocharger, in a word, uses exhaust gases from the engine to spin a turbine that draws in additional air, enhancing engine output.) This results in a power gain, but isn’t sustainable, and will eventually detonate the engine.

Lurking Ghost

In Japanese, haigo-rei (lit. “behind-ghost”). These are literally ghosts that appear behind people. Some claim they’re a sort of guardian spirit, but in any event, there doesn’t seem to be a good direct English translation. (We were real tempted to translate it as “like Slimer,” though.)

Alie*s

In the movie Aliens, the main character uses a large exoskeleton (the famous “power loader”) to do battle in a crucial scene. As a point of interest, this sequel to Alien was simply called Alien 2 in Japanese.

110mm LAM

LAM is short for Loitering Attack Munition, a system in which the weapon (such as a drone) stays in one area (that is, loiters) until it finds a suitable target, which it then attacks.

Shura ** Mon

That is, Shura no Mon (Asura’s Gate), a manga from the late 80s and early 90s.

Grappl**

This is almost certainly intended to refer to Baki the Grappler, known in Japanese as Gurappuraa Baki. Shinichi doesn’t actually include the entire title, so we felt free to do the same in English.

Super S**yan

Refers to the Super Saiyans from Dragonball Z.

Killer Boobeams

The Japanese is hissatsu chikubiimu, and—stay with us here—is probably supposed to be a pun on chikubi, meaning “nipple; tit.” Sakaki-sensei is hardly the first creator to mount weapons in his suits’ chests: Nagai Go famously featured female-shaped robots in Mazinger Z that boasted “Oppai [boob] Missile Systems,” known to posterity as “boob missiles.”

Helmets

Although not exactly the same, it’s conceivable that the items of armor Shinichi mentions in connection with these suits are inspired by Berserk’s Berserker Armor, which influences its wearer’s mind to enhance their abilities in battle.

FN P90

A personal firearm designed for NATO vehicle crews and other support personnel who, while not primary combat troops, might nonetheless find themselves in a firefight. It, too, is referred to as a Personal Defense Weapon (PDW), the same term Shinichi uses for these suits.

Mob**E Suit... The Lo** ** the Rings

That is, a mobile suit—from the Gundam franchise—appearing in the midst of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. Interestingly, Shinichi refers to Tolkien’s story by the name Yubiwa Monogatari (Ring Tale), which is the title under which the books were originally published in Japanese. When Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy was released, it was known by the strictly katakana title, Roodo obu za Ringu. It’s possible there are still some Japanese viewers who think the franchise is called “Road of the Ring”—although that wouldn’t be strictly inappropriate either...

“Moe—I Mean, Uh, Mournful”

The word play here is actually a minor invention of the translation. In the original, Shinichi simply backs off of moe and goes with nageitari (from nageku, “to lament”).

Most People Are About As Happy...

The Japanese reads, Odoru ahou ni miru ahou, onaji ahou nara, “Some fools dance and some fools look on, but we’re all fools.” The line continues “—so let’s dance!” and is the opening of a song sung during the Awa Odori festival. We substituted this quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln so that English readers wouldn’t struggle to get the right idea.

Say Cheese

There are two common ways to prepare for a photograph in Japanese. One is the method used here: say “Hai, chiizu!” (Okay, cheese!), after which the subjects all exclaim “Chiiizu!” This is, of course, borrowed from the English expression “Say ‘cheese.’” Alternatively, there is an option that doesn’t rely on a katakana import. The photographer says, “Ichi tasu ichi wa?” (“One plus one equals...?”) and everyone responds, “Niii!” (“Two!”)

Sky Tree

Although the red-and-white Tokyo Tower probably remains the most recognizable structure on the city’s skyline, it has so many high-rise buildings around it that it’s no longer able to fulfill its duties as a radio broadcast tower. In 2011, it was replaced by Tokyo Sky Tree, which is twice as tall. As Shinichi says, Tokyo Tower, which was completed in 1958, was sometimes viewed as a sort of symbol for the aspirations of postwar Japan. This is a central thread, for example, in the lovely Japanese film Always: Sanchome no Yuuhi (directed by Yamazaki Takashi), which is well worth a watch if you can track down a copy.

Yamato

Yamato was the ancient name for Japan, and still occurs in some expressions that hark back to the country’s ancient past. Here, the phrase is Yamato nadeshiko, which, as Shinichi explains, refers to a woman who is delicate and demure, as was considered ideal in the days of the Heian Court. (The nadeshiko, which CLAMP aficionados may remember as the name of Sakura’s mother from Cardcaptor Sakura, refers to a flower known in English as “the little pink.”) The battleship in Space Battleship Yamato, by the way, was named after the largest battleship built by Japan during World War II, which was itself named in honor of the ancient state of Yamato.

Such Obvious Bait

This line might be a reference to a bit of 2chan ASCII art about a bear who swears he isn’t going to be taken in by something, but inevitably is.

Lucky Sukebe

Taken directly from the Japanese (rakkii sukebe), this refers to a situation where someone gets some pervy (sukebe) gratification through sheer chance.

Denpa People

Denpa is a wave, broadcast, or transmission. In anime, this refers to one of those characters who claims to get information this way, or just generally seems spaced out and tuned into something no one else is aware of.

PDWS X03AD-F

National Defense Agency

The Japanese koku-bou-shou (“national defense agency” is basically the literal translation) is ambiguous about exactly which nation it is.