Piano no Mori – A Real Heart has Chambers

*This post is in English, Japanese, Chinese, but I will include phonetics (romaji for Japanese, pinyin for Chinese) so you can follow along. 

The Text: Piano no Mori, Chapter 1, page 3-4
Characters: Narrator, Amamiya, Kanehira
N: 必ず心してかからなければならない　―”転校生の心得”より―
(kanarazu kokoroshite kakaranakereba naranai – tenkousei no kokoroe yori -)
A: 森のピアノ？(mori no piano?)
K: そ！森のピアノ！(so! mori no piano)
A (thinking): 確か彼は金平大学くん (tashika kare wa kanehira daigaku kun)
K: 学校のそばにでかーい森があったろ！(gakkou no sobani deka – i mori ga attaro)
A (thinking): あだ名はキンピラ (adana wa kinpira)
A: 森？ああ。。。あの森 (mori? aa… ano mori)

My translation attempt:
N: He has to be careful of the “transfer student rule”.
A: The piano of the forest?
K: Exactly! The piano of the forest.
A (thinking): He’s definitely Kanehira Daigaku-kun.
K: Next to the school, right? There’s a forest
A (thinking): His nickname is Kinpira
A: Forest? Ohhh, that forest.

Brain-blab
Guess what Google translate does when you paste whole sentences in? It identifies word breaks. Now when grammatical structures that I haven’t learned yet elongate words to oblivion I no longer have to guess when the next word begins! Hallelujah. 

There aren’t that many new kanji here. We’ve got 必, 心, 森, 確¹, 彼, 金平大学, and 名.

At first glance, 必 (kanara, meaning must) and 心 (kokoro, meaning heart) look very similar². Tracing the evolution of the character shows however that they actually started out as two completely different characters and converged over time. 必 started out as a depiction of a weapon, while 心 was a picture of a heart, complete with chambers.

森 (mori, meaning forest) is another character that depicts exactly what it means – in this case, a lot of trees. What drives me crazy about this character is that, while it is pronounced “mori” when alone, it is suddenly pronounced “shin” in 森林 (shinrin), though the meaning stays the same. The character takes the Old Japanese pronunciation when there are only three trees in the forest, and the Chinese pronunciation (shen1lin2) when there are five. 

彼 (kare) can mean both “him” and “that” in Japanese. The sound actually comes from a compound of あれ, meaning “that”. I’d never seen this character in Chinese before. Researching this one, I learned that it is still used in the Min Nan dialect/variety of Chinese (spoken in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Singapore, among others) for both “him” and “that”. 

I don’t have too much to say about 金平大学, except Why is 平 pronounced “hira” in Kinpira’s name and “hei” in Amamiya’s name??? That, and Kinpira’s first name is “College”⁴ Poor kid.

名 (jap: na, chi: ming2) also had a glyph origin that I loved. It started out as a mouth next to a crescent moon, meaning, and I’m gonna quote Wiktionary here, “to say one’s own name to identify oneself in the dark.” As a picture of the concept of a name, I think this is brilliant.

References:
Jisho is Japanese dictionary I am using here.
MDBG is my all-time favorite Chinese dictionary.
Wiktionary is where all my etymology info is coming from.
An English translation of Piano no Mori can be found here, and I use this to check my work.
This IPA Chart helps me guess what words sounded like historically

^{1 確 (jap: tashi, chi: que4) means certain in both languages.↩
2 The Chinese definitions for 必 (bi4) and 心 (xin1) are the same as the Japanese.↩
3 We’ll ignore that fact that by 1000 B.C., 心 looked way more like a penis than a heart.↩
4 大学 (jap: daigaku, chi: da4xue2) literally means “big school”.↩}