Just caught up - this chapter was really engaging, gave a really nice setup for the upcoming arc and I just generally got absorbed by reading it
The art of the other world at the end of the chapter was fantastic - looking forward to seeing where this arc goes
Had a couple of questions:
Page 140
「境界っつってね」
Not sure what the っつ is meant to be doing here. The only thing I could find is っつ being similar to って but then the subsequent って feels weird
Page 148
「随分好き勝手してくれてんじゃん」
With this one, I just couldn’t work out what’s actually being said - it just feels like a jumble of words to me and I’m not sure who it’s directed at
I believe it’s the stairs he’s directing this at (and/or the entity in charge of the stairs, I don’t know how it works), continuing from “ミサキ階段ね (beat)”
I agree it’s a bit of a jumble… trying to break it down would I guess be something like
随分 - very much so
好き勝手 - doing what you want
してくれて - doing something for me
んじゃん - that fun kind of double negative contraction where it’s hard to tell if it means assertion or negation but I think in this case is assertion.
making something like “Misaki Stairs, you’ve really been doing your own thing for me haven’t ya” (I guess?)
I googled around for glimpse at the English panel, and they went with
“The Misaki Stairs. Looks like she’s really been going to town!”
which I think supports my conclusion, and also aligns with your note about it sounding like a jumble - it’s not like that English phrase really means much of anything!
With the main difference being the loss of くれる in there, but I think that’s just because it’s hard in English to phrase like, a more mild or passive connoting くれる relationship as casually as you can in Japanese. Like I feel like in the original the くれる is less saying that the stairs/whatever did something literally for him (since that doesn’t really match with 好き勝手), and more just color that he’s happy about it (as though it were done for him).
I think at the end of the day it’s trying to show that Hanako has interacted with this place/entity before, and that they had the kind of amiable relationship where Hanako would be impressed/pleased to see the changes said place/entity has made in the time since he last saw them.
It’s the other way around. He’s quite displeased with the Misaki stairs. It’s like a situation where you leave a dog at home expecting him to behave and then coming back and finding a pile of dirt and a corpse in the bathroom. This is kind of like a set phrase to mean “Well you’ve been doing your own thing unsupervised and i don’t like it” or something along those lines. The English translation is closest to the meaning i think.
Interesting! Do you mean the whole 好き勝手してくれて part is a set phrase?
I was mainly going off of the くれる + his expression when I described his reaction as positive – I do think there’s likely some irony in it but I read it (and in the English) as not necessarily saying the 好き勝手 stuff being all positive necessarily but him getting some pleasure out of seeing the state of it. Kind of like a “love what you’ve done with the place” (which you could say really no matter what they’ve actually done to the place). But I could be wrong?
Oh man this chapter was great, definitely a step up from the last couple. The conversation between Yashiro and Aoi at the beginning was hilarious, and I’m excited to see where this arc goes. As always the art accentuates the whole thing really well.
Quick question of my own.
Page 143
テメーの助けなんざ借りっかよ！！
It’s pretty clear from context that this means something like “I don’t need your goddam help!”. But like all Minamoto’s lines it’s filled with tough-guy anime speech. What’s the 借りっかよ？ And is なんざ just a more emphatic なんか?
One cool thing about this Manga is that every character speaks with their own sort of “dialect”. It’s totally over the top and sometimes tough to parse but I think it’s great practice in a way. The Mermaid from chapter 1 also had me reviewing some old-timey grammar that I would otherwise rarely have the chance to come across.
I know what you mean… I’ve been following the thread a little bit since I read the volume in English and thought I could answer questions but they’re all difficult parsing questions a lot harder to answer than I was expecting from a beginner’s book club.
For the 借りっかよ - I did manage to find this page talking about かよ as a trendy phrase ender originating from comic routines and this page defining it in a somewhat clearer way as like, a rough way to ask a rhetorical question.
I think the 借りっ itself might be a halted form of 借りよう.
So like, “借りっか” → “shall I borrow?”
“借りっかよ” → “shall I borrow?! (you idiot)”
“テメーの助けなんざ借りっかよ” → “you think I’d take any help from you?!”
…maybe?
This is another one I may well be overruled on.
I don’t think his expression is very pleased though. It looks a bit pained to me.
For what it is worth, I interpreted the sentence as “You have made quite the mess for me” (or more literally “You did whatever you wanted, and I am receiving it”)
I couldn’t find anything that would imply it is a set phrase
This was the one line that gave me trouble, I am kind of glad I wasn’t the only one
日常 had generally shorter sentences though, which I found easier to parse. Especially Hanako is giving me trouble
Him being ironic would fit his character very well.
てくれる usually means “doing something for someone”, so maybe that’s the irony part? I just don’t really understand how 好き勝手する can be done for someone… But maybe that is also part of the irony?
And the expression… Honestly I just don’t understand Hanako well enough to say either way
Yeah that’s what I was getting at I think with the irony part (and before the characterization of him being pleased about it).
I might be mistaken but I don’t get the impression a くれる phrase could have an unambiguously negative connotation. I could maybe buy like a, “you’ve given me a terrible mess to clean up” kind of thing but there’d be some irony in it, like “thanks for this terrible thing.”
I googled around a bit for “勝手してくれる” and “好き勝手してくれる” and while they’re certainly not common, I did find some tweets that use them, and the context is about like, kids showing independence or creativity, or bots performing automated randomized actions on their own.
And I think that may be a factor here - there’s some relationships where you DO want the other person to act willfully and on their own accord. And granted I haven’t been reading this series very closely, but that’s the kind of relationship I figured Hanako might have with one of the other seven mysteries. I don’t get the impression that he feels like he has to control and maintain the stairs, after all.
So I think those tweets are a bit of evidence supporting my initial impression that it’s more of a positive remark than a negative one, although with maybe some condescension in there too.
Certainly that impression may well change if I read more closely and more chapters though! (or with more discussion)
Honestly - the mysteriousness of context and character is I think the hardest aspect of the series, more than the dialogue! It’s hard to check your guess against what’s happening since the mysterious world is part of the fun.
I actually found reading Hanako much easier because of the almost set phrases they use which are hard to parse. They’re all phrases very commonly used in anime… And i watch a lot of that so the phrases just stick. That’s what i meant when I said it’s a set phrase, if you watch a lot of anime you’ll see it popping up everywhere. Same thing with how Minamoto (kou) (i can’t remember if they revealed his name yet) not senpai talks, and how Hanako does too. It’s very familiar to how many other characters in anime speak which makes it easier for me to understand. Fruits basket to me was much harder to read because of how Touru talks. It was unfamiliar so i had a hard time understanding a lot of it.
To be honest i haven’t touched a grammar book in years and only occasionally do I need to look up anything online, I’ve found that I’ve actually learned a lot through anime than any grammar book. Which is fine since the reason I’m learning Japanese is to watch anime and read manga. It’s fine if the Japanese i know isn’t useful in real situations because I’m not learning to use it like that anyway.
I could totally see voice acting and being able to hear tone of voice making a big difference for this series!
If you happen to remember any specific examples of 好き勝手してくれて being used as a set phrase elsewhere, I’d be grateful to hear them! Googling around I mainly just find this scene. 勝手 is definitely used all over the place, but I think the くれて is what makes the phrase here especially interesting (even if it doesn’t change the core meaning of the stairs being 好き勝手)
You gave me the idea to search for the scene in the anime - and that provided some interesting alternative English takes on the line:
English dub: “Well hello there Misaki Stairs… I appreciate an entity with a flair for bold aesthetics”
English subs: “Well, Misaki Stairs, you sure are doing your own thing”
The tone of voice sounds like it fits a wry chapter-ending stinger line to me.
I definitely find that manga in Japanese tends to do a good job of conveying general tone of voice a lot more than it does when translated over to English - all sorts of techniques like contractions and representation of slurring speech (like when characters slur あい into えぇ etc), and adding markers that show sounds being elongated etc. Makes it a lot easier to imagine distinct voices for the characters
a lot harder to answer than I was expecting from a beginner’s book club.
