FINALLY found Barbara Ikai

[snarp]

Yes, I could have bought it off Amazon.co.jp, but where's the challenge in that? Anyway, I now own volumes 1-4.

I also bought my back-to-Japan plane ticket yesterday. Procrastination is magic - the price had dropped $150 since last time I checked, and there was a flight with only one connection. It's Northwest again, though. I hear if you collect enough We're Sorry We Suck vouchers from Northwest, they give you one of those little carts they use on the tarmac!

I have presents for everyone but Papaw. It is impossible to buy presents for Papaw, especially in Japan.

-

There's a mangaka called MATO I like, because she did the art for the weirdly-dark but still-insanely-cute Pokemon comic Pokemon Adventures and shut up I hate you all. And a while ago I was looking blankly at the doujinshi section in Book-Off, and somehow - despite the fact that I still haven't memorized the kanji for Okano Reiko, despite the fact that I've expended a lot more energy on her - recognized MATO's name on one of the spines.

This was a Gundam Wing doujinshi called "Kaze no Yukue"/"Where The Wind Is". I've also been very slowly watching Gundam Wing recently. So I can affirm that, in context, this doujinshi is extremely hilarious. There are slight Quatre-related spoilers under the cut.

I can't scan stuff myself right now, but I found some scans from a couple of the stories on other people's pages - this page has stuff the "Shinigami-kun" stories, which chronicle the travails of a tiny Shinigami version of Duo attempting to prey on the normal-sized Duo, Heero, and Quatre. Parts two and three have translations, but part one - which features the Shinigami's rapture at discovering Heero's affinity for exploding - is obviously the most awesome. I have thus made my own very-crappy translation of it.

Edit 1/2/07: The scans below have been updated with some corrections from szzzt. Thank you, szzzt! May all your tiny Shinigami in the new year be cute and ineffective!



(Note that this is seriously a very crappy translation - there are a lot of places where I wasn't sure of stuff, and I completely made up Quatre's dialog on the last page. He's obviously raving, but I can't figure out what he's raving. (It involves eyes.) My notes with the raw text are in this .rtf file, if anyone wants to explain anything to me.)

Wow, this post has a lot of tags.

Comments

[szzzt.livejournal.com]

I see no one has commented! I pounce!


オレにとりつかれた
奴　（やつ）　はみんあ
死めず～
All whom I touch/take must die.../I take those who die...
=>All whom I possess will dieee! (cf 取り付く、取り付かれた)

まず
こいつを
自爆　(じばく)　させて
First, the target self-destructs...
=>First, I make him self-destruct...

（unreadable kanji）　かく　(unreadable kanji)　作
=>遠かく操作 Re-mote Con-trol! (the first word is 遠隔 enkaku, half in kana)

おれが
オレの任務　（にんむ）　だ。。。
That is my mission.
=>I am my mission.

早いモン
勝　（？　課？　まち？）　らだもんね～
I got here first, so he's mine!
=>Probably "First come first served," as you have it (早いもの勝ちだから）. Hard to tell for sure without seeing the characters.

ちっ
?
=>(noise of disgust i.e. Che! Feh! Tsk!)

くそ。。。
ひでえな～
[no idea]
=>Dammit... What a bastard / That was so mean! (ひでぇ＝酷い）

目には目を！
アッラーもお許しに　（ゆるした）
なるだろう。。。
[no idea - probably should watch the episodes where he goes crazy]
=>An eye for an eye!
Allah will probably forgive me, I'm sure... (お許し：おゆるし）

I could comment on some of the tls you have in blue, but it would be hairsplitting and anyway you are doing very well. Nice job.

[snarp]

Agh! Thank you so much! If you have time/feel like doing it, please do hairsplit - I'd like to know where I'm doing stuff that sounds weird!

Do you mind if I update the scans with your translations in them?

That one was, in fact, "早いもの勝ちだもんね～" - I now have no idea what I was doing there...

[szzzt.livejournal.com]

Go ahead and update the scans, but don't feel you have to stick with my wording for anything, just use it for reference. This is your project after all. If you want to credit me just credit szzzt.

Let's see hairsplitting... you should probably take a second look at every line with とりつく in it. Shinigami Duo's MO seems to be to actually possess his targets and make them act suicidally/lose the will to live and waste away. In the process they get lots and lots of bad luck, making him something like a 厄病神 (I think). Anyway, a bunch of lines ought to make more sense with that in mind-- for example, he blames his failure with Heero on the fact that people like Heero are good at slipping out of bad luck (悪運いい～＞悪運が強い).

On a different note...

なんて
奴だっ
What kind of person...?
=>This is a colloquial phrase. I'd tl it as "What a stone-cold [bastard]..." or similar in this context. It's said (often admiringly) whenever a person way way outperforms your expectations in some (usually negative) way.

Post more scans! :D

[snarp]

Thank you very much! (Sorry for not responding for so long - I've been alternately insanely busy and asleep for the whole of the last two weeks.) I updated the scans with credit to you.

(I've found the raws for the whole doujinshi here. I'm still glaring at my translation for part four. I think I might need to give up on it until I've finished the series and the OVA...)