I’m working on translating the subtitles to the film Step (ステップ) as I couldn’t find them in English, and have gotten stuck on this line which the protagonist says to himself:
片隅なんてないよ
It seems to be saying something along the lines of “there’s no such thing as a corner”, but I can’t work out the actual meaning… Could he be referring (see context below) to moving on from his wife’s death? I.e. “I can’t just turn over a new leaf” (turning the corner) / “Moving on is easier said than done”? Or am I completely off-mark?
For context, in case any of it is important: the main character says it while hanging some washing, late in the evening, after earlier talking to a coworker about how it’s the first anniversary of his wife’s death and saying that he’s getting over it, and also about transferring department at work, before then returning home, putting his daughter to bed, and now doing some chores.
“turn the corner” is an idiom in English, so odds are that it wouldn’t match with anything literal in Japanese, and also my impression of the “corner” in “turn the corner” was the corner of a street, which is not what 片隅 is, which is defined as 中心から離れた所 (a place far away from the center).
As far as I can tell, that whole phrase doesn’t have any broader idiomatic meaning, but maybe I just missed something (like maybe it’s usually slightly different or a play on something else).
If this was the first mention of 片隅 at all, then maybe it relates to something else that was ongoing.
The other thing that comes to mind is that 片隅 can be a metaphorically “distant” place, like if a person who was previously featured prominently is relegated to a less prominent role, 片隅 can be used that way. But I feel like in that case, someone would have said 片隅 earlier and you probably wouldn’t be confused.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense. For some reason I didn’t relate those two parts together at all, probably because there’s multiple minutes of a different scene in between…
So as far as I understand from that, after his former boss asks him to keep in mind (put in a corner of his mind) the possibility of going back to his department, then the protagonist is saying something along the lines of “there isn’t a corner in my mind to keep it…” i.e. he’s already got so much to think about that he doesn’t have any more mental space to keep it in mind? I.e. “I already have too much on my mind to also think about that”?
