Piano no Mori – No Discussion Needed

The Text
Characters: Kanehira Daigaku aka. Kinpira
K: あの森にはずっと前から壊れたピアノが捨ててあって (ano mori niwa zuttomae kara kowareta piano ga sutete atte)
K: もちろん、壊れてるから音は出ないんだけど (mochiron, kowareteru kara otowadenain dakedo)
K: ところが！そのピアノ… (tokoroga! sono piano)
K: な…何故か夜になると (na… nazeka yoruni naruto)

My translation:
K: In the forest, there is a broken piano that was thrown away a long time ago
K: Of course, no sound comes out because it’s broken…
K: However! That piano…
K: For some reason at night…

The etymologies
Lots of new kanji here. I’ll just go through the more interesting ones, and list the rest at the end.

前(jap: mae, chi: qian2) means front, or in front of. The ideogram started out as a foot in a shoe walking forward. The Japanese pronunciation found another way to portray this concept, with a combination of 目 (ma, meaning eye) and 方 (at the time, pe, meaning direction) – the direction you look.

もちろん(mochiron) is a super common Japanese phrase that means “of course”. The phrase is generally written in kana, but does have associated kanji: 勿論(chi: wu4lun4). The phrase literally means “without discussion,” or, in English, “to go without saying.”

出(jap: de, chi: chu1) means to exit. The character looks like two 山¹ stacked on top of each other, but these two characters are actually not at all related. 出 started out depicting a foot leaving a cave.

何故か(nazeka) seems to be one of those situations where Japanese took a multi-character phrase and then attached a sound to it as if it were a singular entity. 何故 cannot be broken down into na + ze. In fact, ze isn’t even listed as one of the possible readings for 故. Coming from a background where each individual character has a mono-syllabic sound, this is baffling. Anyway, these two kanji would be pronounced “he2gu4” in Chinese, and would mean “what story?” With the attached か, it makes sense that this phrase in Japanese means “for some reason.”

The rest of the kanji

• 壊 (kowa) is a variation of 壞(huai4), both meaning “broken”.
• 捨 (su) is a variation on 捨(she3), both meaning “throw out” or “relinquish”.
• 音 (jap: oto, chi: yin1) means “sound” or “note” (in a music context).
• 夜 (jap: yoru, chi: ye4) means “night”.

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.

^{1 山(jap: yama, chi: shan1) means mountain.↩}