殺人出産 🤰🔪 Book Club ・ Week 14

Japanese Language Reading
#1

殺人出産 ・ Week 14

Week 14 31 July 2021
End page 186
End loc (Kindle) 1688
End phrase して辛そうにしていた。
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Vocabulary

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Discussion questions

  1. What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!
  2. What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?
  3. Was there any passage that you found particularly intriguing? Did it resonate with you (either positively or negatively)? Was it surprising? Offer any insight or new perspective? Was it just beautifully written?
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殺人出産 🤰🔪 Book Club
殺人出産 🤰🔪 Book Club ・ Week 15
#2

Omg this is so hilarious! Murata is playing so nicely with our protag‘s feelings and hopes and fears. The author remains super neutral all the while but clearly shows how stupidly Mizuki behaves. Also, well done on the business people who found this niche business and who are now milking their customers in two ways at the same time :grin:

And now if you please excuse me, I think I‘ve got a book that needs being finished…

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#3

I lolled so hard. :smiley:

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#4

Nice one, @NicoleRauch :joy:

I have a question about the translation of this story that can be found at the Granta website (legally, as far as I can tell):

‘He fondles my butthole and begs me to do the same to him’

Is it just me or is this quite a liberal interpretation of

「彼は私に肛門を触られると、『ママ、もっと』っておねだりするのよ？ あなたにそれができる？」

Doesn’t the Japanese imply that he is having his own anus fondled and not fondling hers? It seems like quite a substantial change; in the Japanese he seems to be an exclusively passive party to all of the baby play.

I never thought I would one day be posting anything close to this on the Wanikani community :joy:

The translation diverges a bit in other places as well. It seems to leave little things out occasionally, including the whole bit about Mizuki receiving a text message from her friend. I had the same experience with the translation of コンビニ人間. I wonder how a whole paragraph can end up just being left out :thinking:

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#5

Yep, that’s my understanding as well. He is the receiver of the passive verb.

That was my impression as well.

I must confess I usually don’t look at translations (the only exception being the first few pages of the German translation of 1Q84 which was amazingly verbatim) but from some comments in the Advanced Book Club I get the impression that I should consider myself very very lucky that by now I can (roundabout) read the Japanese originals of various books…

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#6

Yes, I was amazed and mad about that bit in the Tapley-Takemori’s translation. It doesn’t even make sense, because like you said, it’s not consistent with his fetish.
I admit I had thoughts about mailing Granta about this, since it’s on the website and easy to fix (you don’t have to print a whole new book), but didn’t have guts to do it :grin:

The rest is mostly shifting things around, I don’t always agree, sometimes I admit that the flow in English seemed to be nicer after a change, sometimes not, but eh, the above mistake was a serious offense :stuck_out_tongue:

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#7

What an amazing mis translation. :man_facepalming:

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#8

I still don’t really get the に particle yet and all websites I read about it can’t really disperse my confusion either. Just too many uses.
How is it working in this sentence.

彼は私に肛門を触られると

Is に stating the source of the anus fondling?

Btw, so If I got the plot right, they’re basically getting scammed by the hospital, right? All they seemed to have done is “milking” the husband and inserting it into the protagonist with a special (or special-looking) onahole?

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#9

In this case に is marking the action performer of the passive verb 触られる. So the whole thing breaks down as:

彼は: As for him
私に: by me
肛門を: anus (を is still the direct object marker)
触られる: is touched (passive form of 触る)

More smoothly translated: His anus is fondled by me.

This makes for a great example sentence because the action performer, action receiver, and a direct object are all included. The action performer is often left implicit (thus the に marking the action performer is left out as well). One place where things get weird is when the passive verb phrase has a direction indicated by に, in which case the に marking the action performer is replaced with によって so as not to conflict with the に marking direction.

This Imabi article lays it out better than I could. I recently brushed up on passive/causative with Imabi and it’s definitely smoothed out my reading a bit.

Edit: Originally I accidentally wrote that “に marks the action receiver” instead of the performer in the first paragraph. I think what I meant was clear from the breakdown but that typo might have made things confusing.

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#10

Basically, yes. They really should just get a regular artificial insemination, but were worried about a price, about finding an understanding doctor and generally just wanted something better, more “natural”.
So they just got a fancy-looking equivalent of getting sperm into a syringe (without a needle :wink: ) and spurting it into the vagina. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#11

Thanks! :bowing_woman: That makes a lot of sense. I’ll check out that site too, didn’t know about it.

@Aislin Alright, I understood it right then, yay. I re-read a couple sentences and I think what confused me were a few sentences that were meant for the near future (when the Nurse told him to say when he’s ready) not what happened at that point, so I was kinda confused when they started the procedure.

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#12

I had the same confusion! The nurse had such a roundabout way of announcing events that I was never sure what she actually referred to, and like twice or so I thought he had already come, but then it still dragged out further :joy_cat:

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#13

It seemed strangely ritualised for something that’s ostensibly a purely medical procedure. Like, referring to ejaculation with 命が生まれる rather than by the actual word? As much as they were selling it as a medical treatment, it felt a bit theatrical to me.

I really felt for the poor guy, trying to his best to ejaculate, all while being told repeatedly to 頑張ってください. The pressure of it all :joy:

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#14

I’m so happy we’re reading this as a club. I wouldn’t even know what to do with myself if there was no one to share this ridiculousness with.

And like it clearly is a scam but with all the theatricality going on it is almost as far removed from “normal” sex as possible. Well… without any actual medical (and invasive) procedures. But in the end they could have saved a lot of money with a simple cup and turkey baster.

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#15

It reminded me of the other translated-and-posted-on-Granta’s-website Murata’s short story, “Faith”. Premise is about starting a cult, and it seems the basis for said cult can be really shabby and you can expect people to still fall for it…? This clinic sounded very similar to the cult ideas from “Faith”, in my opinion, at least :stuck_out_tongue:
(“Faith” is that story that still wasn’t collected in any collection afaik so I know it only from the translated version.)

2 Likes
#16

Made it! Glad to hear that I wasn’t the only one who got confused. I thought he had ejaculated about three separate times before I understood what was going on, ha.

Reading the posted translation helped, as questionable might be in places. Though I don’t understand why they got rid of the section breaks - really messes up some of the flow of the story, as you get some unexpected jumps.

Also found Miseki’s reactions to getting the pictures interesting - a somewhat morbid curiosity. Almost felt like the decision to finally pursue “clean breeding” was just to spite the girlfriend…

7 Likes
#17

I am still a bit confused about whether he actually came inside of her or not? To me, it sounds like they actually put his penis inside her:
まるでコンセントにプラグでも入れるように、夫のペニスだと思われるものが私の膣へと入ってきた。私はぼんやりと、ビデのように無機質に夫のペニスが自分の中に入ってくる感触を覚えていた。どういう仕組みなのか、夫の性器にもこのゼリーが塗られているらしく、ペニスはひんやりとしていた。
She feels his penis entering her, and feels rather indifferent to it, and compares it to the sensation of a bidet. And she says that it feels cold, and how that must be due to the jelly they put on his penis.

I just checked the translation, and it says this:

When the chair came to a stop, something was inserted into my vagina, as if being plugged in.
I had a vague sense that it was my husband’s penis entering me, still cold from the jelly, but it felt more like a machine transmitting his sperm.

This feels awfully shortened? It’s like 5 sentences in Japanese.
I don’t really see where they get the “more like a machine transmitting his sperm” from. The sentence afterwards says 夫の性器はまるで精子を排出するための機械のように感じられた, which I interpret more as “His penis felt like nothing more than a machine for ejaculating sperm.”, but to me that’s more referring to the fact that everything about this procedure feels very mechanical to her, and not that it’s the actual “device” (the オナホール) that’s transmitting the sperm.

So, in my understanding, they only used this “device” to jerk him off, and then inserted his penis so that he ejaculates inside her.
Which would make this whole “procedure” even more absurd.
Or am I just misinterpreting this part? :sweat_smile:

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#18

In my opinion it is supposed to be vague about how far the scam goes, but I like the idea that the procedure was 100% absurd. Unless someone would actually feel mentally better with the all extra steps, as a sort of placebo effect :wink:

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#19

I did wonder about that as well, but… sticking her husband’s penis in there didn’t seem as realistic to me, logistically. Penises aren’t that long; they’d need to line the bodies up quite precisely to get it to go in, right? And they have a small time window to do it in. So just on account of the logistics of it all, I’m on #teammachine.

Everything about this is so absurd.

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#20

Aren’t there some kind of long distance sex toys that are supposed to emulate your partner’s genitals’ movements? I’m imagining that some technology like this was used during the procedure for some reason because I have the same doubts as @Phryne about the logistics of any other options. Still seems pretty absurd though :sweat_smile:

Also, I just realised that the ブリード in クリーン・ブリード is breed, not bleed…shouldn’t have been lazy about looking up kanji when that was being explained, I kept wondering just how brutal the procedure was going to be :man_facepalming:

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