You mean that it’s another Aozora typo or can ある also be spelled さる?
I too thought that 仕度 must mean clothes (or generally clothing arrangements), especially because of 解かれました. I suppose it’s actually untying, because the clothes they wore back then did need to be arranged rather than just worn, and tied in various places - more tying/untying if you had to carry something on your back.
Explain please. Another typo? That さる was driving me crazy!
1 Like
5 Likes
Yes. Yet again. This is copied and pasted from Aozora: そのぶつぶつといぼのさる
1 Like
Good point, that makes a lot of sense!
1 Like
Ugh. That’s not really helpful 
Now we had one in the other story and two in this one, iirc? How have the other stories been? It’s quite unlucky that we had two in the same story though 
1 Like
And I guess the furigana were あさいえ? Maybe they were added to clarify that it’s not 朝家 - Jisho.org ?
1 Like
The furigana is あさうち. The fact that there’s furigana means nothing though, all kanji have furigana in the Aozora text.
3 Likes
あさうち, but that makes a lot more sense, yes 
I was wondering about the imperial household for a brief moment as well, but well… That’s not とも様の茶わん
Didn’t notice any in the texts before so it’s fairly surprising that we get 2 in a story this short
1 Like
Oh, sure, because it’s a children’s story. (When I started to learn Japanese, I would usually read 家 as うち for some reason, until my teacher told me that it sounds childish and only small children would do that…)
4 Likes
Haha, I know I’m building a reputation for myself with all my misreadings 
, but at least this time it’s Aozora. It’s too bad that there are typos but, hey, that’s what you get for free 
2 Likes
That’s very interesting, I had not idea!
But now I’m wondering how much attention we should pay to furigana after all. Who put these in? Are they from the original text, or was it someone else’s interpretation of how the words were supposed to be read?
1 Like
I’m starting to wonder about that too.
I found a book report with some different spelling while I was searching for information about this story: 小川未明「大きな蟹」 whenever that author quotes the text, they use more Kanji (蟹, 蠟燭) and they quite deliberately seem to spell おじいさん as 「おぢいさん」 so that does makes me wonder if there are different spellings out there. Maybe it is not so strange for Japanese books to go through different spellings in successive editions?
2 Likes
The other author I’m currently reading from Aozora is Ranpo (currently on one of his books from the Boys Detective Club series). I haven’t seen any typos so far and he uses kanji very inconsistently (the same word can appear first with kanji, then in kana), but uses alternate readings for some words. Not all kanji have furigana, and furigana for names is usually given only when the name is introduced.
I might be off, but my hunch is that at least some of the books are scanned so there are likely to be errors. Not sure who adds the furigana, because it will depend on the edition. For instance, 怪人二十面相 is a children’s book as well and has close to no kanji, but I just found a version that has plenty of kanji and furigana:
EDIT:
Apologies for the confusion above. I checked the Wikipedia page again and it seems like 怪人二十面相 is a proper novel and the same title spelled in kana is a children’s novela, a completely different thing!
1 Like
It goes even further than that… Ogawa wrote the stories in the 1920’s (at least many of them), and back then different kanji and kana were in place actually! You can see that if you look at the list of Aozora stories:
After each story it says 新字新仮名 which means new kanji and new kana. That means somebody went in and fixed these after the author had written the stories. And it of course also applies to conjugations and spellings and stuff 
It seems that the Ogawa stories have all been transformed to the new kanji and kana (probably because they’re still aimed at children), but for some other authors this is not always the case, and sometimes you can find old and new stories side-by-side, like here:
The story in old writing
The story in new writing
Enjoy spotting the differences 
6 Likes
Well, that’s discouraging. So when kanji and furigana don’t match, that’s because…? Who knows. A lot must have been lost in translation.
The first thing that I spotted is that even in the new writing version there’s a kanji on the first few lines of text that’s an image instead of text. How fun. 
(Oh, I now notice it’s the kanji for うそ - I seem to remember some controversy about that one, how you type one version and the other comes up or something, maybe that’s why).
I just finished my second and more careful read-through. Some questions:
そして、だれが点したものか、幾百本となく、ろうそくに火をつけて、あちらの真っ白な、さびしい野原の上に、一面に立ててあるのでした。
だれが点したものか
What is this か doing there? I can’t quite make the parts of this sentence work together.
お母さんはいって、あちらから、おじいさんのしょってきたかにを、家のもののいる前に持ってこられました。
家のもののいる前に
The more I look at this the more confused I get…
太郎も不思議でたまりませんでした。
Is the verb here 堪る? Might it be 黙る instead?
不思議なことがあればあるものだ。
I feel like I’ve seen this construction before. It is if it is a mysterious thing? Does it boil down to just “it’s a mystery”?
また、降りた。早く、帰ろう。
The furigana for 降りた is ふりた. Nothing in the dictionary on ふりる. It seems to me he’s referring to the weather getting worse, but what is the verb?
1 Like
Breakdown below
I think it’s the in-sentence question mark か. Here’s how I would break it down:
そして、Also/Furthermore,
幾百本となく、- around hundreds of (となく adds vagueness to numbers)
ろうそくに火をつけて、- lit candles (に火をつける - to light something)
だれが点したものか、- lit by someone
一面に立ててあるのでした。- were placed on the whole surface of
あちらの真っ白な、さびしい野原の上に、- that pure white, lonely plain
But the more I look at it, the harder it gets to translate it into English.
Ah, but if one slices the sentence and puts only the grammatically relevant bits together, it does make some sense:
だれが点したものか、…、一面に立ててあるのでした。
The other ones I tried to work out from context, but I’ve no clue how to explain/translate them . The last one confused me as well.
EDIT: Hecking Aozora Bunko at it again 
EDIT2: I think I exceeded the healthy amount of Japanese for today as well.
1 Like
Sorry, technically I‘m already asleep, so I can’t investigate all your questions right now, but here‘s a quick screenshot to answer your last one (the green highlight):
3 Likes
Oh, come on, another one?
Also, no worries, I’m technically already asleep too 
2 Likes
Welp, three years later this story is still very confusing
This time around I feel that my understanding of the story can’t be that far off… I imagine that the problem is that I just can’t seem to grasp what all the heavy imagery that Oogawa-san uses is supposed to mean.
Random speculation
Given the title of this story, I would imagine that the Crab should be one of the most important aspects here. I can’t seem to find that many Japanese folklore articles related to crabs.
The main ones seems to be the Crabs that resemble faces in their shells (heikegani), which are believe to be reincarnations of Samurai fallen in battle. This seems unrelated, both because the crab in this story has no such pattern, and also because Heikegani are very small and not even edible.
Then there’s the Japanese Spider Crab (たかあしがに), which have really long legs, can grow pretty long (3.7 meters), and can live for very long. In some horror stories, they would use their strong legs to grab a person into the sea to drown him/her and then feast on their corpse. Not sure if this is the analogy here, that the Crab is somehow feasting on じいさん’s vitality while grabbing him from the back - and that’s why he grows weak at the end.
These crabs also change their whole exoskeleton from time to time when they grow, leaving their previous one behind, which would explain the scene when they want to eat it but find that it has nothing inside. Maybe the crab just feasted on じいさん and then escaped while everyone was sleeping just leaving their shell behind.
The other main element seem to be the foxes - these do have a lot of participation in japanese folklore and have fame of being sly and good at tricking people. omk3 already linked about the fox’s wedding. The whole story only provides this as a clue as to what happened to じいさん, and I guess it’s logical to think that the people that gave him alcohol and the crab were the kitsune.
The other element we have is the sea bird that じいさん rides back in the first of 太郎’s dream. I haven’t found any particular folklore entries related to 海鳥, so I have very little idea as to what this represents.
Then there seems to be a ongoing theme of transition that starts with the last storm of winter and ends with the birds chirping and spring horsetail sprouting in the end. No clue as to why there’s such emphasis about this in the story, but it does seem important.
6 Likes