極主夫道 | Week 3 Discussion

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Chapter 5 and 6

Start Date: 18 December
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極主夫道 ・The Way of the Househusband Home Thread

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P. 72, I never knew about yakuza members cutting off their little fingers (指詰め) to atone for messing up. Another new discovery!

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Finished chapter 5 so far. A couple questions. Mainly because this chapter has me thinking, “did he really just say that?,” and “did he really just do that?.”

First on page 63: 声は出すな 目線も外せ. Is 出すな actually 出すない or kansai dialect for 出すね? Either way, does Tatsu actually walk up to a store clerk and say something like, “Don’t speak. Look away from me.”

Second, on page 65: Does Tatsu actually slap the store clerk in the face? The first panel certainly might suggest that. However, in the follow-up frame the clerk’s face hasn’t moved at all?! Moreover, to me it looks a bit like air particles coming off and around the clerks face. Perhaps suggesting that Tatsu threw a slap very close to the clerks face and intentionally missed? I failed to find the カヒ onomatopoeia listed in any of my usual digs, so that isn’t helping me out either way.

Edit: Forgot to mention the last panel on page 68. Just a single 顔 going on outside of a bubble. This is the author saying Miko is reacting to Tatsu’s facial expression? I feel I’m not completely getting the conveyance here.

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Here it’s not really 出すない or 出すね, but it is “Don’t speak.”
Appending な to the normal non-past form of a verb is a rough command form. For example, the original title of the manga/anime “Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!” is 映像研には手を出すな！(with 手を出すな being the “keep your hands off” part)
A note about that form is the form of the verb before な is important:
食べるな - “don’t eat!”, a rough command
食べな - “eat (please)” - a shortened request (because it’s a contraction of なさい)
Just another fun thing to get used to!
(and yeah, the joke is he’s approaching this and talking about it the same way you would a drug or arms deal)

I don’t think the art is very clear here, but I think he hit him in the throat (either by throwing something or by moving so quickly the movement didn’t register) just to interrupt his talking and nothing more. カハ sounds to me like a cough type of thing. And I figure it didn’t cause more of a reaction because he applied technique more-so than force and controlled whatever it was he did very precisely (I guess). I don’t think he meant it violently, he just wanted the clerk to stop talking and was apparently able to make that happen.

Yeah, I’d say so. Just reacting to his intense facial expression lit by the candles but not forming a coherent sentence about it. In English it would have to be like, “his face…!!” but if you similarly contract Japanese (even more than it usually is)… then, well, just 顔 is enough in context, and much much more natural than just “FACE” would be in English. (その顔…！ would have worked too and been a little more clear but might have conveyed the deadpan shock a little less)

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Thank you very much for you help. な as a rough command form, huh? Probably something I learned and forgot. Having never seen it out in the wild before now. This kind of character(Tatsu), I imagine, will be using this a lot.

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I’m stalling out on a couple things here …

p.80 イモひいてんちゃうぞ … pulling potatoes? I got nothing.

P.81 所詮は美久が義理事（結婚式）でもうてきた素人やの … best guess … Miku brought some amateurs to our wedding after all, didn’t she?

Thanks in advance for the help! :slight_smile:

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I googled the phrase and it appears to have confused Japanese readers as well! Here’s an official definition of what イモを引く means: ビビる. I’m not amazingly great at parsing exactly what contractions boil down to, but it sounds like he’s admonishing the vacuum for being too timid about the cleaning. Looking around a bit more, it sounds like it’s yakuza slang.

I thiiiink the もうてきた here is a 関西弁ish もってきた and you’re along the right lines! In that I think he’s saying that the vacuum was brought as part of their marriage (i.e. it was hers beforehand), and the joke is that he’s treating the vacuum like a yakuza underling who got brought in as part of an alliance but isn’t up to snuff. So the amateur that Miku brought is in this case… the roomba.
Could always be wrong of course though.

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Seconding these questions and adding another:

p.80 もっと角ん所カチコまんかい!! - I see that 所 can be used as a suffix, and I think the ん is an abbreviated の, so I guess 角ん所 means “corners”. But what is that verb? I can’t find anything for かちこむ, but maybe I’m not “unconjugating” (is there a word for that?) the verb properly.

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p.81 I got the feeling it was a wedding gift, rather than something that was hers before, since it mentions a wedding 結婚式 (although I don’t know what 義理事 is. Presumably some Yakuza slang that he used in place of the word 結婚式). But this sentence has another verb I can’t figure out, so I’m not sure.

EDIT: Story comment

We’ve seen Tatsu’s capabilities a couple of times now, but here we see that Miku is quite formidable herself when she knocks Tatsu off the second floor. It’s nice to see that somebody can play straight man to Tatsu’s Yakuza antics :stuck_out_tongue:

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カチ込み is going to come up a lot from Tatsu, because it’s the word for a raid, like one yakuza group raiding another. So I figure that’s probably it here, as カチコミ with the tail getting unkatakana-ized because his rough contractions and conjugation. Again not… the best at reconstructing what the contractions would originally have been but I think he’s saying roughly “aren’t you going to attack further into the corners??” again, like a yakuza yelling at an underling for being timid

I agree her getting it as a wedding gift is probably right.
I think the verb is 結婚式で持ってきた although I’m not sure, and I don’t know exactly how で modifies it if so. And when I parsed it in my last response I swapped 盃事 in my head for 義理事 and rationalized it the way I did thinking of yakuza 盃事 scenes I’ve seen in media…
Since it’s not that though, I’m curious about 義理事… I googled around a bit and it seems a little trickier to pin down since I don’t think 義理事 itself is a slang phrase the way 芋をひく turned out to be (as far as I can tell) but I think it’s a mix of 事 in that sense of a ceremony/event and 義理 being used for the double meaning of the duty/obligation to the family you marry into (like it’s 義理の父 / 義父 is stepfather, etc. ) and in the yakuza sense the duty/obligation to your group/brothers.
So I’m not sure if it’s exactly yakuza slang exactly, but phrasing “wedding ceremony” like that makes it sound especially yakuza-ish, at the very least.

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Ah, before カチコミ had come up as a noun, but here it seems to be a verb. That’s what threw me off. Thanks!

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Thank you so much! I feel somehow honored to have not understood the thing that native Japanese speakers didn’t understand. :joy: And the website you linked looks amazing!!! Definitely bookmarking it for future reference.

:joy: Classic.

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I’m not 100% positive, and this is just speculation, but 持つ is closer to already possessing something as opposed to receiving something as a gift, right? So that doesn’t seem to fit to me…

Could うてきた be this word (2nd definition) combined with 来る, with vibes of “to come to receive”?

That would make the particleで + も, though, and I’m not super happy with trying to fit that into the sentence… で is easy enough as the location particle, but でも can be a little tricky to directly translate into English, and often, I just don’t bother, if we are being totally honest, if it’s not one of the uses that fits cleanly into a translation.

Potential interpretations of でも that I know of:

“Also with/at”

“Even with/at”

“But/however/even though”

“Or something”

If I had to pick one to try and shoehorn into the sentence, it would be the “also at,” maybe…

所詮は美久が結婚式でもうてきた素人やの

“After all, (it’s just) an amateur that Miku came to receive also at the wedding.”

I’m not especially happy with that shoehorn, but it makes more sense to me that this is some combo of 得る and 来る than 持つ. I could be way off-base, though.

Edit: I suppose it could be “to come to possess,” actually, after some thought, and that possible Kansai-ben 持ってきた would work in that case, and that would eliminate my discomfort with the でも…

“After all, (it’s just) an amateur that Miku came to possess at the wedding.”

Either interpretation would ultimately have a similar meaning. Is there anything that indicates that the 持ってきた would make sense as もうてきた instead in Kansai-ben? It feels odd that a shortened syllable would shift to a long syllable, but I definitely wouldn’t be completely shocked to find that is the case.

Edit 2: There is. Kansai-ben: 1. て form Formation

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I see what you’re saying… However, the definition of 得る you’re referring to is listed as a formal or literary term, which doesn’t seem to fit very well with Tatsu’s general communication style. On the other hand, one definition of 持つ on jisho is “to take charge of; to be in charge of”, which I think could work well with the “roomba as amateur recruit” theme. The particle で if I’m not mistaken would be indicating the location or the means by which the roomba was recruited.

On the other other hand, sometimes Tatsu speaks in weirdly formal ways so…

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Yeah. I was arguing with myself in my post edits and came to a similar conclusion. I do like using the “to come to take charge of” definition in place of “to come to possess” better, though. Agreed that で is definitely the location particle (the only question I had was if it would have had the も or not, depending on which verb was correct).

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Honestly, that’s why in my original post I went with her from Tatsu’s perspective bringing it due to the marriage - i.e. it was hers, and due to to wedding she brought it and now it’s in his/their house because they got married. I agree 結婚式で持ってきた doesn’t sound like a sentence that’s about her receiving something. I could still buy that the reason it was hers in the first place is it it was given to her though (since it seems like the kind of gift you’d be given at a wedding, and that one panel has her with it still in the box. ). It could maybe just be Tatsu’s odd phrasing and perspective in general that makes him say like, “the amateur Miku brought in as part of the 義理事” instead of “the roomba we were given as a wedding gift.”
But I’m not really positive about that enough to not waffle back and forth on it myself!

One thing that sinks でも for me is in the original panel, the linebreak is between で and も.
Manga linebreaks can often be super helpful to parse sentences because they’re generally (or always?) in logical places for breaks. Unlike in translated manga where the poor translators have to do whatever they can to cram the words into the existing balloons, the Japanese team can make sure the balloons and the breaks all look natural.
So I think it would be unusual for でも to be bisected like that… maybe not impossible? But unusual.

One last thing I’d mention is I’m not sure “came to posess” or “came to receive” fit for me with 持ってきた. It feels like it has a sequence the other way to me - “possess and came” so to speak. Which is where I’m getting “brought” from.
And then thinking of it with で as more “brought via” than “brought to” or “brought at” is how I’m rationalizing it’s place in the sentence.

Definitely an interesting one to parse!! And I definitely relate to the stages of the thought process across the edits! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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While it definitely can have that meaning, my understanding is that verb+てくる can also have a meaning similar to “to become;” which I’m just rewording slightly into “to come to possess; to come to take charge” so that it sounds like more natural English.

https://jlptsensei.com/learn-japanese-grammar/てくる-te-kuru-てきます-te-kimasu-meaning/

The first example on that for てくる words it the same way: 見えてくる being translated as: “to come into view”

That said, I can definitely see your way of interpreting it, too; it just takes my brain some extra steps to wrangle it into a translation, which is why my thought process ended up going the other way.

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That’s fair…

I think 持ってくる in particular though I see often as like, “持って来てください” (“please bring (it)”) and other variations like that. Like if I were gonna bring you a cake I might conceivably say “ケーキを持ってくる”
Maybe it’s just from seeing it used that way so much, but the “to do… and come back” meaning that’s more about physically 持つ and くるing listed on that page feels much more appropriate for 持つ to me than “to become; to continue; to start” which feels like it fits more with states like the お腹が空いてきたexample. (to the point I don’t think I really connected the two in my head)

I definitely see the logic though, and I’m certainly not confident enough to not possibly be wrong!

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Just for fun, here are the hanging scrolls from the page 67 and 69:
寿
春日大明神
天照皇大神
八幡大菩薩 here the 4th kanji does not look exactly the same, but it came up when searching the other ones

Also, in front of these scrolls, it seems there are some offerings? Including very cheap cabbage from Chapter 3 :slight_smile:

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p. 85 when the wine bottle breaks over his face :joy: The first time I watched this scene in the anime I was DYING.

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