Rakuin no Monshou I – On a Twilight Star, a Dragon Roars

(As a note, all romanizations are works in progress – these names are actually kind of a pain to guess at.)

Now here’s a post that’s been a long time in coming.  I was originally introduced to this series courtesy of the wonderful Wyatt Salazar (whose stuff you really should look at) probably a year and change ago, when he asked me if I knew anything about it because he found the artwork interesting.  Likewise interested, I finally had a chance to delve into it when I came to live in Japan.  I’ve had this book since I bought it from Kinokuniya in Matsuyama back in August of last year.  I kept telling myself “I’ve got to read this book” and true to form, I read it piecemeal for so long, that finally this past week I finished the first book.  Hopefully I can get the rest read in a more timely fashion, or I’ll never ever catch up.

For the uninformed (not hard, this title is pretty low-key despite having a good number of volumes), Rakuin no Monshou is a fantasy/sci-fi series by Sugihara Tomonori.  The central plot is as follows: the Kingdom of Garbera and the Mephius Empire have long been enemies.  However, after the most recent war, the rulers of both countries decide to try their hand at peace by arranging a wedding between Imperial Prince Gil Mephius and Princess Vileena Auer.

Then, things get complicated.

Driving in Japan

It’s been a while since I last posted here.  I’d apologize but I’m not really sorry.  I haven’t had anything to talk about.  Fortunately for me and the one person who reads anything not VN-related on this blog, I’ve got something to talk about.  In my previous post I’d mentioned that I had been accepted into JET as an alternative.  On the 11th of May, I got a call saying that I had been upgraded to short-list, which essentially meant I was going if I so wanted.

Since July 27, I have been living in my assigned area.  I currently live in a tiny town on Shikoku.  It has been a hell of an experience just moving here, let alone settling in, starting my job, and all that jazz.  It has been a total blast and I am so glad to have had this opportunity, and as long as they’re willing to keep me around (though granted contracts can only extend out to 5 years) I’d love to stay here.  Of course, I’m only two months into my appointment so that may change, but I’m not anticipating it.

This is not to say, of course, that everything has been completely awesome and super duper.  There are issues here.  Driving is one of those issues, and it is my hugest tick in this place.

I am not dead.

It has been over four months since my last post, but I am not dead.

School has kept me far more occupied than I expected; between applying for graduate school in Hawaii (accepted), my thesis defense (passed), and applying for JET (alternate), as well as a bulk of classwork, I’ve been rather busy and haven’t had time to do much of anything that would get posted here.  I might try to throw something up as school winds down and I start finishing my papers instead of watching deadlines march ever closer with little forward progress, but for the time being, I can’t commit to anything major.

In the interest of continuing to blog about shit related to schoolwork and my interest in Japanese, I might throw up a post on utamakura in early May for people interested in Japanese literary devices and literary history, and then I can get back to enjoying more base things like VNs and light novels.

Poetry

Allow me to start this article off by acquainting my readers with a few core concepts of Japanese poetry.

Japanese poetry originated in two forms, the tanka (short poem) and chouka (long poem).  However, they were very strictly metered – a tanka consisted of five lines, with 5/7/5/7/7 syllables.  A chouka could go on as long as it wanted, alternating 5/7, but the last three lines had to be 5/7/7.  For the observant, you will notice that the 5/7/5 is the same syllabic arrangement as haiku; haiku rose out of renga poetry, in which any number of people would take turns composing parts of a tanka (the first would compose 5/7/5, the second 7/7 relating to the first, the third 5/7/5 relating to the second, and so on).

This semester marked my first descent into classical Japanese, and I have to say, it is an entirely different beast.  Fortunately, under no circumstances am I ever really expected to be fluent in classical Japanese, I just need to know how to navigate a dictionary, and over the semester I have gotten very proficient at doing so.  But as part of the class, and part of the honors contract I took on for the class, I decided I was going to translate the smallest chapter in the Genji Monogatari, that being the chapter Hanachirusato.

I did not quite realize how hard it was going to be to translate the prose, but the poetry in the chapter was a whole different beast.

I’m going to talk translation for a moment.  I mentioned in my second post that Dr. Royall Tyler, in his translation of Genji, took pains to try and keep the same syllabic format of the poetry, and after talking with a few classmates about it, I decided I would too.  Why not, after all?  It would be fun.

And it was, but let’s take a look at the results, shall we?

TLWiki Release – Hanachirasu

So imagine my surprise when I check TLWiki and discover that the same folks behind the Kikokugai release just recently released Hanachirasu.  As a Nitroplus fanboy, it’s my duty to report this and urge you to go give this game a shot.

You can find the patch here.

Problems in Translation

I don’t know if I’ve made it apparent by now, but translation is hard.  I didn’t really go into the field expecting it to be gumdrops and easy sentences, but sometimes it’s like a punch in the balls.  The worst part is that a lot of the problems come from my own immaturity as a translator, and my immaturity in the language, so when I make stupid, stupid errors that are blatantly obvious a few hours/days after I’ve made them, while I do learn from them, they also make me rather angry at myself.  It’s a vicious cycle of getting angry with myself over a mistake, leading to my making another mistake, leading to more anger, and so on and so forth.

But enough of that, time for some facts.

Teaser

Whispers of a Nightmare teaser, since I have nothing else to post right now.  As I wait for ILL to get me the books yet again, I’ve also distracted myself with volume 3 of Sword Art Online, and I snagged scans of Rakuin no Monsho after a friend suggested I look into it, so that will keep me entertained for a while yet.  I’ll have a full translation posted before the end of September if all goes well.

—

“You probably started reading this letter with some suspicion.  And as you keep reading, I bet your face is changing color.  But you can’t throw this letter away right in the middle of it.  But then, there isn’t a person who can stop in the middle of a letter like this…”

Sword Art Online

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  School’s started back up, theoretically killing my ability to do anything but I’m really just trying to get back into the school rhythm and it’s taking me longer than I want it to.  But since I have nothing translation-related to bring to you at the moment (I hope to have a first very, very rough draft of one of the short stories done by next week, which I will share here so people can look at my inadequate abilities), I want to take a moment to recommend something, which I find I’ve been doing quite often lately.

And that something is a light novel series by Kawahara Reki, titled Sword Art Online (translated by the awesome Sharramon, hosted over on Baka-Tsuki.

Awww yeah.

Nitroplus

So I think by now I’ve made it fairly apparent that Nitroplus is my preferred VN creator.  Maybe it’s my twitter profile, maybe it’s the relatively unique spot that Muramasa has on my blog, but something probably gave away the fact that I like Nitroplus more than the others.

I haven’t played a great number of VNs, in all honesty.  Most of it stems from the fact that most of what’s been translated already is either straight eroge without a story to speak of, or just a story that doesn’t really spark my interest.  I’ve noticed that my preferences seem to lie in either straight or urban fantasy, in the same vein as, say, Fate/Stay Night or Utawarerumono Underwater Ray Romano.

It was actually nothing like this.

If you’re new to the VN scene, I have to throw up a warning here for courtesy’s sake.  Nitroplus is not what I would consider entry-level in any fashion, be it story-telling or the h-content in the games.  Nitroplus stories generally explore the dark side of fantasy, and everything tends to follow.  Not to say that the games are full of rape, but rather that some of the stories tend to have rather fetishistic or controversial (it’s not the right word, but I can’t think of the word I want) content.

I’m going to go into detail on the Nitroplus games I have personal experience with, in hopes that maybe I can inspire a few other people to read some of his stuff.

The hard thing about writing a post like this for people who are either curious about Nitroplus or had no idea who he was is that it’s hard to really get down to the nitty-gritty without recycling wikipedia.  I obviously don’t want to spoil anything, but then it becomes a matter of talking around the big stuff while still presenting a good idea of what the game is like.

Anyways, let’s get to it!

Danmaku Yuugi -Flowers-

Or

Why mimicry without understanding is a bad idea

I’m going to put it out there.  I like Touhou.  Not as much as some people, but I have Normal 1CCed my share of the games, I have a small but appreciable portion of my pictures folder dedicated to Touhou images, and well, let’s just say that crow’sclaw and Demetori are in good standing on my last.fm profile.  So when I say that I have an interest in a Touhou Pen & Paper RPG, this gives you an idea of where I come from.

I first encountered Flowers probably a year and a half ago on a trip to one of Pooshlmer’s sister sites.  It was in a very incomplete status then but I remember thinking “Wow, a Touhou RPG.  That could be really cool.”  Well, just recently with the release of Flowers, I grabbed it, opened it, and within ten pages wanted to die.

I am not an RPG snob.  I enjoy games with odd concepts, I had a relatively short-lived Wushu campaign with a bunch of players who managed to enjoy themselves in spite of the system.  So being around RPGs with mechanics that are a little unsound or unwieldy is nothing new.  But that’s not what Flowers is.  Flowers is mathematically obtuse.

When I say obtuse, I don’t mean dense.  There actually is not a lot of math to do.  Most of the numbers are given to you, which some people might like but which bothers me a little.  The biggest offender here is character creation, which I will get to in a little bit.  No, the math is just confusing.  The first time I looked at the skill cost chart, my eyes glazed over because of how poorly laid out it was.

What.

But let’s start at the beginning.