I’m up to this line:
「舗装されていない道ばたの雑草にも駅の建物にも土ぼこりがあつくかかっている」
My initial reaction.
Manga never prepared me for this!
This is a very early sentence, but it’s still very early in the week. I wasn’t certain what I should “spoiler”, so I’ve put everything behind “details”. This whole post is about the above sentence.
Parts of the Sentence
Parts of the Sentence
Okay, I can break this down into clauses and such. The two にも help out with this.
- （（舗装＋されて＋いない）道ばた＋の＋雑草）にも
- （駅＋の＋建物）にも
- 土ぼこり＋が + （あつく＋かかって＋いる）
Core Sentence
Core Sentence
The very core of this sentence is:
土ぼこりが＋いる
土ぼこり (“dust”) is the subject. And its action is いる (“to exist”).
So the core sentence is “dust exists”.
Everything else is fluff detail that builds on top of that.
Building up the Verb
Building up the Verb
あつく＋かかって＋いる
あつい can be “hot” or “thick”; since I’ve never encountered “hot dust” but I’ve seen “thick dust” (it piles up everywhere!), context tells me that this is “thick”. And the verb あつい is an adverb when the い is replaced by く, so “thickly”.
The verb it’s modifying is かかる, which is the verb used when something covers something, such as dust covering. So, あつくかかる is “thickly covers”.
With the いる, this gives the verb as “exists (in the state of) thickly covering”.
Victims of a Cover-Up
Victims of a Cover-Up
The core of this portion is 建物にも・雑草にも. Everything else builds on top of these two nouns.
The second is straightforward: 建物 is “building”, but which building specifically? 駅＋の is “(train) station’s”. So, it’s the station’s building. This is one of the things which the “dust thickly covers”. “Dust thickly covers the train station.”
I was hoping that one would take longer… Okay, on to the first one.
The core of this portion is the noun 雑草 or “weed”. It also has a modifier, 道ばた＋の, meaning “roadside’s”. This is the “roadside’s weed”, which would be said in English as “weeds alongside the road”.
However, this is also modified, by 舗装＋されて＋いない.
舗装 is “pavement”.
されて is from される, which is the receptive form of する, so “to receive pavement”.
いない is the negative form of いる, meaning “to not exist”.
Thus, this isn’t just any “roadside”, it’s roadside which “is not (in the state of) receiving pavement”, or simply “unpaved roadside”.
“Dust thickly covers the weeds alongside the unpaved road.”
Finding にも
Finding にも
The particles に and も are combined here, but should be looked at separately.
に marks a target, and can be used to say things like “book on the table”. に tells us that the thick covering of dust is “on” the weeds, and is “on” the building. The dust didn’t start out there originally, but at one point in time these came to be the destination of the dust. The dust went toward these things and came to be there, so it is now “on” these things.
も is similar to は in being a topic marker, but it conveys inclusiveness. If the book simple said “dust is thickly covering” without setting the topic, then we might think リナ or the 女の人 is covered in dust. To avoid this confusion, the topic is set to the building, but it’s also set to the weeds. Since multiple items are inclusively set as the topic, も is used rather than は.
I will now re-read the sentence multiple times with this understanding, and hopefully it’ll start to become natural!
(of course not from that region of Japan…so yeah who knows)… haven’t interacted with the Japanese police so I don’t know if んです is something an officer would say or not
