About a Place in the Kinki Region Translation Notes 1-8

These translation notes cover content in parts 1 to 8 of About a Place in the Kinki Region. The translation notes are ordered per part, but please be cautious of reading ahead due to spoilers.

Part 1

Honorifics 

This translation preserves most of the honorifics used in the original Japanese web novel. As seen in part 1, the engineer is referred to anonymously as A-san, with 'san' being the honorific. Usage of honorifics suggests a kind of relationship between the writer and the subject. Examples used in this translation are below:

San - Often used as a generic honorific, and shows a baseline level of respect. It can be compared to the English 'mister' or 'miss.' Calling someone X-san is incredibly common when no other honorific is particularly relevant.

Chan - Used primarily for young children and women. It has a diminuitive, affectionate, and cute quality to it, which leads to it being used to refer to cute things or kids. It is typically only used to refer to girls and women, but it can be used to refer to very young boys—when discussing someone's young children, it's not unusual to use 'chan' regardless of gender. Sometimes it can be used to endearingly refer to the elderly.

Kun - Typically used for people 'beneath' you socially. Sesuji refers to Ozawa as 'Ozawa-kun' in the original Japanese, but I elected to cut this out from the translation; Sesuji does this because they are Ozawa's senior in both age and experience. Teachers use this to refer to their students, seniors at work use it to refer to their juniors on occassion. It is also generically used to refer to young boys in the same way 'chan' is used for young girls. When used improperly it can come across as rude, but it is not disrespectful on its own.

Sama - Essentially a more respectful version of 'san.' It is typically used to refer to people above you socially, but is not the inverse of 'kun.' It is often seen used when referring to a customer at a business or store, or somebody the speaker would like to be very formal and deferential to, such as a business contractor. It is also used to refer to higher powers, like gods.

Persimmons

In the comments left on the adult video website, the commenter frequently tries to entice the actress by claiming to have persimmons at their house. The actual relevance of this will be discussed much later, but for now it's worth noting that the comments are actually intentionally vague about this. It is decisively about persimmons, but the commenter writes the word for persimmon as かき (kaki) in hiragana, a phonetic script of Japanese. This leaves it somewhat unclear what the commenter is referring to, as multiple words in Japanese are heard as かき. From context, it's easy to conclude the commenter is referring to persimmons, but this vagueness adds to the odd quality of how they write.

Shinto Shrines 1

This Shinto shrine will be relevant again later, so I wanted to clarify the layout. Firstly, we have the torii gate, a large free-standing gate which signifies the entrance to a Shinto shrine. Torii are sometimes considered to symbolise the boundary between the mundane and the sacred. In this case, the torii sits run-down at the bottom of the stairs. After climbing the stairs, one arrives at the main hall (本殿) of the shrine. The main hall is the most sacred building of the shrine complex and is expected to house the shrine's patron kami (essentially the deity revered there) or a representation of them. In cases where the patron kami is something like a tree or a mountain, the shrine may lack a main hall as the kami is already physically present to be worshipped. I'll explain more when this shrine comes up again.

Part 2

Mountain Pass

It's unclear to me exactly whether the 'pass' the truck driver refers to is an overpass or an underpass, or some road around the mountain. While there is a tunnel in the area which could serve as an underpass, it could very well be an overpass instead, which is more suitable to large trucks. It's not very materially relevant, but I didn't want to decide one way in the translation. I believe it is referring to the tunnel, though.

Part 3

Sesuji

The author's pen name is written as 背筋, which translates to 'spine' or the area of the upper back muscles close to the spine. They aren't simply a character in this work, though. Sesuji has published several works in real life as of writing, including many contributions to scary story collections and similar horror media. For the sake of this work, it's best to consider the Sesuji that speaks to the reader as their own character, but the actual author also goes by this name.

The Kinki Region

The Kinki region is brought up frequently in this work. Obviously so, as our mysterious 'place' is located within it. The Kinki region is a region of Japan containing the Nara, Wakayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyōgo, and Shiga prefectures. It can also be considered to contain the Mie, Fukui, Tokushima, and Tottori prefectures, but which of these prefectures is included varies from perspective to perspective. It is also known as the Kansai region. Due to the fact Kinki is homophonous with the English word 'kinky,' many places and institutions with Kinki in their Japanese title choose to use a different term when written in English, such as Kansai or Kindai.

A Place Which Spans Multiple Regions

Japan is split into 47 local governmental prefectures, such as Nara prefecture and Osaka prefecture. You can think of these similarly to counties. They split up the land of Japan across government-decided borders. The fact that this place in the Kinki region covers multiple prefectures is relevant to the story, but the important part to consider is that it isn't a formal zone with clear borders, unlike the prefectures. As Sesuji explains, this can lead to different names being used for the same location.

Japanese Magazines

Throughout this work, a lot of references will be made to magazines. For the sake of readability, I've fiddled with how the names of magazines are presented to be a little more natural to how they're named in English. In Japanese, however, these magazines tend to include their frequency in their title. For example, a magazine might be titled Monthly Magazine X or Weekly Sports X. I've chosen to refer to these mostly as 'the monthly magazine called X' instead, as it's easier to read. Similarly, the 'special edition' seen in the title of the MOOK detailed in this chapter is part of its name, but I've left this one as-is for clarity now and later. It's also relevant to note that Japanese magazines are often categorised based on the approach they take to their content alongside the content itself. In this part we see mention of a magazine focused on 'entertainment', which means things like stories or gossip columns. You could also have a magazine focused on news, which leans into true stories and contemporary issues. A literary magazine, as referenced by Ozawa, is one focused on publishing and discussing literature such as stories, poetry, essays, literary critiques, and so on. 

Part 5

Masshiro-san

In the original Japanese, this name is written in hiragana as まっしろさん. At this point in the story, the meaning of this name isn't exactly clear. A Japanese reader would userstand masshiro to mean 'pure white' and thus it could be understood as Pure White-san. Of note, the specific hiragana representation of masshiro using a っ kana (depicted in English using a double s) is a more modern version of mashiro. The meaning is the same. 

Substitute

This is a contentious translation for me. The child chosen to be Masshiro-san asks the captured girl for a 身代わり(migawari) which means a substitute. It can also be understood as a 'scapegoat.' On its face, the word is often understood to mean a person who takes responsibility or blame for someone else. But as we can see in this chapter, it's not necessarily related to people and could refer to objects—which makes it more appropriate to call it a substitute. However, the word can also be understood to mean 'sacrifice.' Keep these various meanings in mind. Sadly there's no way to convey both the subtitute and sacrifice interpretation at the same time in English, but a Japanese reader could infer both from the same word given the context.

Part 6

Haunted Spots

In Japan, fans of horror are very familiar with haunted spots. The term can also be translated as spiritual spots. These are specific places, such as a dam or a tunnel, where something spooky is supposed to happen. For a long time, it's been common for people to visit these spots as a means of 'testing their courage.' With the dawn of video websites like YouTube and NicoNicoDouga (a Japanese equivalent), recording your trips to these haunted spots became trendy. Western YouTube has had a similar phenomenon since its inception, too. I've elected to translate this term as 'haunted location' usually, as other alternatives often sound a bit too stilted. 

Family Restaurants

The livestreamer says they're going to drive to a diner. In Japanese, they use the term 'family restaurant.' These restaurants are pretty similar to the western concept of a diner—open at most, if not all, hours, and having a kind of homey atmosphere. But unlike the west where diners are less common these days, family restaurants are still very popular in Japan.

Part 8

Tama Cemetery and the Ikoma Mountain Tunnel

These are two famous haunted spots in Japan. Strangely, you can't find much about Tama Cemetery as a haunted location when you search in English, but there are plenty of stories found in Japanese. Tama Cemetery is a large municipal cemetery in Tokyo, and contains the gravestones and remains of many people. While it is actually quite a scenic location and well-maintained, its ease-of-access to Tokyo citizens is likely responsible for its haunted reputation, much like Sesuji discusses with ghost stories being proportional to potential visitors. As you can imagine, most tales about Tama Cemetery involve encountering the spirits of the deceased. The Ikoma Mountain Tunnel, on the other hand, is an abandoned tunnel through Mt. Ikoma. Its actual name is the Kintetsu train tunnel, named after the company that constructed it, and was built in the early 20th century to connect Nara and Osaka prefecture (quite similar to the tunnel in this story.) While trains today are very safe, back then the technology wasn't quite as refined. A number of accidents and tragedies occurred in and around the tunnel, including a collision that claimed almost fifty lives. This history of tragedy and its current abandoned state easily led to ghost stories cropping up regularly.

Ghosts and Haunts

So this is a bit of a terminology issue. Frequently in this work, the terms 幽霊 (yūrei) and お化け (obake) will show up—often attached to things like 幽霊マンション (yūrei mansion; lit. ghost apartments; translated as haunted condominium) or お化け屋敷 (obake yashiki; lit. obake house; translated as haunted house.) While yūrei isn't as clear cut as 'ghost' and can have a broader meaning, it's easy enough to equate the two. Obake, on the other hand, is a little more complicated—this typically describes a being which has been 'altered' and changed significantly from what it once was. In the context of horror, it includes things like a huge monstrous animal, a werewolf, or even a spirit which has grown deformed and malicious. Obake is also often used to refer to spooky beings in general so it's hard to really pin down the best way to translate the term, and any translation resource will list a wide array of applicable translations. In this chapter, I elected to go with 'haunts' as it fit the sentence quite well.