Hey there, I’ve decided to test my knowledge of the Japanese language by reading the first volume of Re:zero. I’ve been breaking my head over the following sentence:
“自分を殺すような相手、そんな相手にすら傍観を決め込むほど日和見主義だった記憶はないのだが、心はその相手の素姓など欠片も興味を払っていない。”
Anyone out there with a bit of free time that can help me puzzle out this sentence? Particularly the middle part.
I’ve checked the (now pretty old) re:zero volume 1 thread, but it isn’t much help.
Yeah, that’s not an easy sentence. I had to look up a couple of words and double check that すら meant what I thought it did…
Here’s how I would break it down:
自分を殺すような相手、
“The sort of opponent who will kill you”. This is a kind of conversational tagged-on-the-front remark in a not strictly formally grammatical way, specifying the kind of opponent that そんな相手 is about to refer to.
そんな相手にすら傍観を決め込むほど日和見主義だった
“so much of a wait-and-see opportunist as to take an indifferent attitude to even that kind of opponent”. This whole clause up to ほど is specifying just how much of a 日和見主義 we’re talking about. 日和見主義 is one of those words I had to look up, but I think the meaning we want here is someone who sits on the fence and watches and waits to see how things develop, not committing until they think there’s an opportunity for them. Somebody who takes a bystander attitude to an opponent who’s out to kill them would certainly be an extreme proponent of a 日和見主義 philosophy.
~記憶はないのだが
…and in fact the narrator is saying that they don’t have any memory of being that much of a 日和見主義, but…
心はその相手の素姓など欠片も興味を払っていない
…emotionally they have absolutely no interest in that opponent’s identity.
So the narrator is basically saying that their lack of interest in this opponent isn’t an intellectual/logical decision (it’s not the product of a conscious choice to follow an -ism, a 主義, on their part), it’s just that as far as their 心 / feelings go, they don’t care at all.
By the way, if I ran into this sentence in an LN I was reading myself, there’s at least a 50% chance that I wouldn’t bother doing all the lookups and the careful attempt to break down the sentence structure, but instead would take 自分を殺すような相手 … 心はその相手の素姓など欠片も興味を払っていない and trust that that was enough meaning to be able to keep moving forward with the reading. (And as you can see from the above, that optimistic assumption would be correct.) This kind of sentence that trips you up by having multiple things you don’t understand all at once is usually not one you can usefully learn from by careful study – in my experience it’s better to pass over it, and wait until you find a sentence that only has one of the unknowns in it to learn about that unknown grammar/vocab/etc.
You made something finally click for me! I always feel like I have to fully figure out every single sentence I read, because I feel like I am leaving learning opportunities on the table if I don’t, but I think you’re right that all that effort probably doesn’t have as much of a pay-off as I think. If it’s way above your pay grade it just won’t stick, will it?
is a really good resource for breaking down sentences without giving you an explicit translation
Thanks for the thorough answer! I agree that sometimes it’s best to move on from sentences that are way above what you can understand in a reasonable amount of time. I just like the puzzle tbh, and was curious if others got to roughly the same answer as me.
I’ve read your explanation and I still don’t understand this sentence. Who would even say something like that? 
As someone reading the English translation of Re:Zero right now…I think it’s just the way the author writes?
Yeah, I gotta be honest, I’m not crazy about the written version of Re:Zero. I know a lot of people enjoy it but I just find it a little uncessarily wordy. But that’s fantasy light novels for you I guess.
Why use a big word where a diminutive substitute would suffice?
T-T I have not grounded my axioms enough for this diluted discussion on wordplay and it’s interpolations between subjects.
Right? That’s also the thing that gets me; why say it like this? haha
Now that you mention it. Did the official translation even bother to translate this sentence? It’s from the prologue and I can’t find it lmao
Switching from ‘light novels’ to actual novels the first thing I noticed was the massive drop in unnecessarily pretentious sentences. The second thing I noticed was the similarly large reduction in ordinary words spelled with kanji marked as “outdated or obscure” in the dictionary.
It’s not every light novel author, but it’s a lot of them.
I’m a big fan of the 青ブタ series for that reason. Super straight forward, no run-on sentences, obscure kanji. Just plain simple quantum physics.