After a long absence I’m back with another “educational” Japanese language post.  Unexpectedly, I’m really enjoying this particular anime.  It features a believable romance story with characters that are actually well developed.  The honest romance should keep the ladies happy and the ridiculous fan service will make men happy.  The fact that it does both well and both are relevant to the plot is what makes the story work.

Wakana Gojo is a first-year high school student who dreams of becoming a hina doll craftsman. One day during his first semester, his popular classmate Marin Kitagawa sees him making doll costumes in the school’s clothing room. Marin, who has wanted to cosplay for a while and has observed Wakana’s skill in sewing, asks him to create the costume of a character from a video game that she adores. Despite the fact that Wakana has no experience making a costume on a human scale, he is inspired by Marin’s tenacity and agrees to make one for her.

Source: Wikipedia

ビスクドール

その 着せ替え人形は恋をする

The words ビスクドール should be directly on top of  着せ替え人形 and in a smaller font, but I’m absolutely stumped how to make the English version of WordPress create what is called furigana in Japanese.

“Furigana… is a Japanese reading aid, consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters, printed either above or next to kanji… or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. ” – Wikipedia

And why, you might ask do we need such a thing here?  The answer is because of today’s lesson something called “ateji“.

“In modern Japanese, ateji … principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters… Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.

For example, the word “sushi” is often written with its ateji “寿司”. Though the two characters have the readings ‘su’ and ‘shi’ respectively, the character ‘寿’ means “one’s natural life span” and ‘司’ means “to administer”, neither of which has anything to do with the food. Ateji as a means of representing loanwords has been largely superseded in modern Japanese by the use of katakana… although many ateji coined in earlier eras still linger on.” – Wikipedia

First, let’s format the sentence the way the title would be spoken in Japanese.

その ビスク・ドールは 恋を する

sono bisuku dooru wa koi wo suru

その – sono – this

ビスク・ドール – bisku dooru – bisque doll.  You’ll note it is in katakana because “bisque doll” is a foreign word.

は – ha (pronounced in this usage as wa) – a piece of grammar that marks a topic of a sentence or thought.

恋 – koi – love – specifically romantic or passionate.

を – wo (but sounds more like “o” here in English) another piece of grammar that marks the object of a verb.

する –  suru – the verb to do.  In Japanese one “does love” here.

The bisque doll falls (or is falling) in love

 

Here is where it gets both interesting and ridiculous.  The title is written:

その 着せ替え人形は恋をする

sono kisekae ningyou wa koi wo suru.

着せ替え  – kisenkae – changing clothes (specifically on dolls)

人形 – ningyou – doll

着せ替え人形 – kisenkaeningyou – changeable clothing doll

The doll that changes clothes falls in love

 

So a reader of the title of this work will get a double meaning.  This meaning isn’t present when somebody just hears the title of the work.  This is a common literary technique in Japanese, but it used much more broadly as well. It’s common for certain words like the way sushi is written as mentioned above.  It’s also used for Japanese names.  When used in names it can frustrate older Japanese people the same way odd spellings and bizarre pronunciations for trendy names are now used for younger people in the US.

The English title, My Dress-Up Darling borrows more from the underlying meaning than the actual Japanese title, but is mostly unique to the English translation.

YouTuber otaku extraordinaire and squishy apologist for the left, Mother’s Basement, has a good review here – Why We Love My Dress-Up Darling.