Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220117 
Tanuki Scroll XVII: 千匹オオカミ 
Read today’s 百物語, from Yamanashi Prefecture!
About a merchant who encounters some wolves on his travels and escapes by hiding in a tree. The wolves speak (they can speak human and wolf… and cat it seems) and say that they’ll go get a big old cat (called 孫太郎ばあさん) to fetch the merchant down for them. The cat says it can’t climb the tree because it doesn’t have hands (but 孫太郎ばあさん… you have claws) so the wolves stack themselves on top of each other to make steps
The merchant scrambles further up the tree but there’s a nest in the way so he stabs it with his short sword. But that’s no nest! It’s a big bear butt (!!) The bear rolls down the tree and the wolves attack it thinking it’s the merchant then run away in fear at the merchant’s apparent inhuman strength.
Gaming in Japanese
I played Nioh 2 last night for about an hour or so in Japanese.
Conclusion: I was not ready for this level of kanji 
The game is basically a retelling of the three unifiers of Japan (mid-1500s to early 1600s) but including demons, magic, spirit animals and all that awesome fun stuff. There’s a load of historic figures and places and armour sets and weapons… so I knew it was most likely going to be hard going Japanese-wise, but even in the regular text parts there was very little hiragana (basically the only hiragana was grammar particles most of the time). All kanji, kanji everywhere, no furigana (though I did see some hiragana next to some of the more obscure names). I’ve played this game a lot but even then I got pretty confused.
It was hard not to get a little disheartened, knowing that even after all this time studying Japanese I’ve still got an insane high mountain to climb. I did manage to recognise quite a lot of the demon names, even if all the rest was highly confusing. But! Butttt, I did learn one fun thing from all this: すねこすり！
Cute little demon cats that like to rub against people’s legs and trip them up. The game just calls them “scampuss” in the English put I really like the Japanese word:
脛「すね - shin」+ 擦り 「こすり - rubbing」, and there’s a little ねこ hiding in the middle.
☆ Learnings ☆
New Words
ブスリ ー Onomatopoeia for the sound of something soft being stabbed
Places
甲斐の国「かいのくに」ー Kai Province, an old area of Japan that used to occupy the Yamanashi area (also just: 甲斐国)
静岡「しずおか」ー Shizuoka
Forgotten Meanings
このまま ー (Like this; as it is) [Rare kanji usage: この儘 / 此の儘]
The cuteness is too strong tanuki-friend! I cannot…
oh no
We’re surrounded!