Btw, note that verbたことがある is a well-established pattern.
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The next sentence, c1p1s3, is
なぜそんな
無闇 をしたと聞く人があるかも知れぬ。
With additional furigana, it is
なぜそんな
無闇 をしたと聞 く人 があるかも知 れぬ。
Yasotaro Mori’s public domain (available on Wikisource) translation:
Some may ask why I committed such a rash act.
I would interpret the first part, なぜ そんな
First of all, there’s a ぬ at the end of
According to Tae Kim’s website:
「かもしれない」 is used to mean “maybe” or “possibly” and is less certain than the word 「多分」. It attaches to the end of a complete clause.
There’s also an ある here, but it’s talking about an animate object (people). I think this is because it’s conceptual, as the Tofugu blog says
In old-fashioned and literary Japanese, ある can be used to describe an animate object if it’s being viewed more as concept than a physical entity.
I also think the particle と here is interesting. It seems like this could either be interpreted as indicating an indirect quotation or thought, or as indicating a natural consequence. I think the latter is probably correct, in the sense of “because (I) did such a reckless thing, there may be people ….”
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The conditional と is verbる+と, it can’t be verbた+と. And the quotation is quite natural here? It’s literally quoting what the writer think many people are asking. 「 なぜそんな無闇をした？」
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Your translation has introduced a passive where there is no passive in the original. Mori’s “why I committed such a rash act” is a straightforward translation of the Japanese here. I mention this because I think it’s important. Japanese very frequently drops the subject when it is obvious in context, but that doesn’t mean it’s a passive voice sentence; it’s the equivalent of where English uses a pronoun (in this case “I”). If you translate active voice Japanese sentences into passive English then (a) you lose sight of information about who is doing what that is present in the original and (b) set yourself up for confusion when you run into a Japanese sentence that really is in the passive.
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Yes; Botchan is both a work of literature and also over a hundred years old, so qualifies on both counts. This ぬ is negation, which is the only kind of ぬ you’ll see in something that is modern Japanese and not classical Japanese. (It’s basically a survival from classical.) As you’ve found, it goes on the end of the same verb stem form as -ない and you can treat it as “old fashioned/fancy way of saying the same thing as -ない”. Note that it used here in narrative, not in dialogue.
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The other hint that this is quotative と is that it’s immediately before 聞く, which is a verb which very commonly takes と to say what is being asked. (It can mean both “to hear” and “to ask”, and can take と in both senses; but here it means “to ask”.)
Other verbs that take と include いう 思う 考える.
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The next sentence is c1p1s4,
別段深い理由でもない。
With additional furigana, this is
別段 深 い理由 でもない。
Mori’s translation is
There was no particular reason for doing such a thing …
and this is the first instance where the translated sentence differs from the original in scope (in this case, the full sentence Mori gives is longer; while I haven’t read further than this sentence, I assume it is a combination of c1p1s4 and c1p1s5).
Vocabulary:
別段 : particular深 い: profound or deep理由 : reason
I think the only part of this sentence that is particularly interesting is the use of でもない. I’ve read that this (with も) may have the effect of “softening” the sentence. However, I think it’s possible that it may also serve to connect this sentence to the next, given Mori’s translation continues as
There was no particular reason for doing such a thing except I happened to be …
According to ChatGPT, in this case, it “[signals] a shift in the narrative. The second sentence provides a specific example or scenario related to the lack of a deep reason mentioned in the first sentence.” ChatGPT also suggets an alternative is “別段深い理由だけどない,” which it translates as “There’s no particularly deep reason, but …” with a note that this is more casual or conversational.
ChatGPT is talking rubbish here because that is not grammatically correct. It’s true that sometimes you can replace でも with だけど, but not here.
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ChatGPT strikes again! I shouldn’t rely on it for explanations.
I appreciate the correction. You’re right, and I apologize for the oversight.
I found a website with the text based on the original magazine publication; there the first sentence is
親譲りの無鉄砲で小供の時から損ばかりして居る。
so ばかり was not kanjified but いる was. (I don’t recommend you try reading that text as a beginner, it is historical kana spellings.)
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Incidentally people following along might find the Soseki Project Botchan text helpful – built-in popup dictionary, audio, broken into short sections, each with a “study guide” page with full furigana and a rough English translation of the section.
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c1p1s5 is long relative to the previous sentences. It is
新築の二階から首を出していたら、同級生の一人が
冗談 に、いくら威張 っても、そこから飛び降りる事は出来まい。
With additional furigana, it is
新築 の二階 から首 を出 していたら、同級生 の一人 が冗談 に、いくら威張 っても、そこから飛 び降 りる事 は出来 まい。
Mori’s translation, with context of surrounding sentences:
There was no particular reason for doing such a thing except I happened to be looking out into the yard from the second floor of the newly-built school house, when one of my classmates, joking, shouted at me; “Say, you big bluff, I’ll bet you can’t jump down from there! O, you chicken-heart, ha, ha!” So I jumped down.
新築 の二階 から首 を出 していたら: “I had put my neck out from the second floor of the new building” (出 す: I found that -いたら can indicate a “continuing action or state,” though I don’t know how this differs from the -ていた form)同級生 の一人 が冗談 に: “One of my classmates, jokingly/in jest, …”- いくら
威張 っても: I’m not exactly sure how to interpret this, so I’d appreciate input! - そこから
飛 び降 りる事 は出来 まい: “(You) probably won’t jump from there” (with出来 まい as something like take place-probably won’t)
With the last sentence ending in -でもない, I think I understand how Mori continues from c1p1s4 with “except” in the English translation.
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威張る is to boast, to brag. いくら~ても is “no matter how much you ~”.
I think Mori mostly joined his two sentences together because he felt the English flowed a bit better. They are not particularly grammatically linked in the Japanese; the でも in the previous sentence is just a softener that suggests “strong reason” is not an exhaustive definition of what is being negated (you could translate it “I didn’t have a strong reason to do it or anything”, for instance).
できる means “can, is able to”, so できまい is (in a literal translation) “probably can’t”. In more modern Japanese this is できないだろう. Either way, “I bet you can’t” is a good translation of the sense here, even though English “probably can’t X” doesn’t encompass that meaning.
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The next sentence is almost as long as the last one. c1p1s6 is
弱虫やーい。
With furigana, it is
弱虫 やーい。
This sentence is just like saying “chicken” or “coward.” It seems like やーい may be implying the speaker is teasing the narrator.
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c1p1s7 is another short sentence.
と
囃 したからである。
The only kanji has furigana in the text.
The verb
“It is/was because he taunted me ‘…’”. This ending tells us that this is a reason, the answer to the earlier question “why were you so dumb as to jump out of a window?”.
The と here is the quotative one again, by the way, and the thing being quoted is the previous sentence and a half. Looking at it another way, you could say that this is in fact the end of a single sentence that started 新築の二階から, and the two full stops we just encountered are in the quoted speech. Japanese orthography is not so strict about using quote marks to mark off directly quoted speech as English is, in general.
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I’m now wondering about the conventions for quotation marks in Japanese literature. Is it common for quotations to be written this way, without any (initial) indication that they are somehow separate from the rest of the text?
Thanks, as always, for your comments! That makes sense.
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My impression is that modern novels mostly will use quotation marks for dialogue, especially for cases like this where there are actual multiple sentences in the dialogue, but it’s not compulsory. Japanese doesn’t have the clear grammatical distinction between direct and indirect quotation that English has, so there are some blurry edge cases. It wouldn’t surprise me if conventions had changed over the last hundred years on this point.
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I’ve noticed that in older books quotation marks for direct speech seem to be way less common than in newer ones. But that doesn’t mean that newer books always use quotation marks - there are counterexamples as well. My impression is that in newer books, it’s kind of a stylistic choice or might carry some sort of meaning (e.g. in a book I recently read, one person was at some point hallucinating a conversation, and that hallucinated part was written in direct speech but without quotes) while in older books that’s just a way of writing things, is my impression. (I mean, it’s clearly indicated by the と that this is direct speech, seems to be their reasoning). Also, in older books, line breaks in direct speech seem to be far less common, further adding to the confusion for the learner. 
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