"Can I help you, young man?" The lady behind the desk smiles. She does not mean her brisk manner to be intimidating (kowagaraseru tsumori wa nai, 怖がらせるつもりはない), but the "young man," uncertain and anxious (fuan, 不安), instinctively (honnōteki ni, 本能的に) takes a step back. "Am I ...
What a strange dream! The city was engulfed in a wave of random murders (musabetsu satsujin, 無差別殺人), and when my doorbell rang it was not the murderer (satsujinhan, 殺人犯), as I'd feared, but a high police official come to coax me out of retirement ...
Here's a beguiling irony: Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), architect of Tokugawa Japan's rigid class structure and the author, in 1587, of a firm ban (not firmly enforced) on surnames for commoners, was himself born without a surname. "Toyotomi," the family name under which his memory survives, ...
"How do you do, my name is Saito Ichiro Sama-no-kami Minamoto-no-Ason Tadayoshi." We can be grateful to the reformers of the Meiji Period (1868-1912) for cutting Japanese names down to size. Renaming the Japanese people was part and parcel of their overthrow of feudalism. The ...
A striking fact regarding modern Japanese surnames is their sheer number. There's no precise count, but the consensus is that there are more than 100,000. That will not astonish an American, whose melting-pot country harbors representatives of most of the world's ethnicities and is consequently ...
"Well, uncle, what did you think of him?（Ano hito no koto dō omotta? あの人のことどう思った?)" "I take it it’s Professor Keyes you’re talking about." "Who else?" Sakurai-san sighs (tameiki wo tsuku, ため息をつく). "I’ll tell you what I think of him, Madoka-chan. The next time you have an impulse ...
"Professor Keyes, you're drunk (yopparatta, 酔っ払った)! Ha ha!" "Well?" I say. "What of it?" (Sore de? それで？) "Nothing, nothing. Chotto shitsurei shimasu (ちょっと失礼します, back in a moment)." He staggers off (chidoriashi de aruku, 千鳥足で歩く) to the men's room; I catch the bartender's eye (b?ten no me ...
"Dad?" "Peter! Come in. What are you doing up at this hour?" "I couldn't sleep." "Sit, sit." I'm glad to see this unexpected visitor. Sometimes I see me in him — me as I was at 14. Yet Reiko says we don't look at all alike (zenzen nite ...
The sun was mortally offended — with good reason. Civilized progress deadens the impulse to see gods in the workings of nature. It's a price we pay, willingly or unconsciously. To the ancient Japanese, the sun was the goddess Amaterasu Omikami. She was gentle by nature ...
"Where's grandmother?" The little girl, just home from school, flings off her randoseru (ランドセル, school bag). "Ah, Kimika-chan!" The Keyes' home helper is in a panic (panikku ni ochiitta, パニックに陥った。). "I took my eyes off her for just a second . . . and she wandered ...
