The Text:
Characters: Amamiya, Kinpira
A: 一ノ瀬海…という (ichinose kai…toiu)
A: 僕は最初に見た時一瞬…女のコかと思ってしまった (boku wa saisho ni mita toki isshun…onnanoko kato omotte shimatta)
K: で雨宮くん さっきの話だけど… (de Amamiya kun sakki no hanashi dakedo)
K: チャレンジするだろ？度胸試し？(charenji suru daro? dokyoudameshi?)
K: 森に行くって弾いて来るんだよ？(mori ni ikutte hiite kuru ndayo?)
K: そのオバケピアノ！(sono obake piano!)
A: え？(e?)
My translation:
A: Ichinose Kai… that’s his name
A: The first moment I saw him, I thought he was a girl
K: So Amamiya, what we just talked about…
K: Will you accept the challenge? The test of courage?
K: Go in the forest and play it?
K: The haunted piano!
A: Huh?
Thoughts and etymologies
Lots of kanji here again, but also a new 外来語(gairaigo) – a modern loan word. (The literal translation is “word from outside”. That word is チャレンジ (charenji) – challenge.
僕(boku) is another way to say “I” that is primarily used by men. It can also be used as a second- or third-person pronoun to refer to someone who would normally refer to themselves as 僕. In Chinese, 僕(pu2) means servant, and historically it was used as a first person pronoun much like “your humble servant”.
女(jap: onna, chi: nv3) means woman. Kids in the US drawing stick figures usually distinguish women by their long hair, but that was not the strategy employed when developing this character. If you really squint at 女, you can see that there’s arms, legs, a head, and a kind of bulge in the middle of the body. What is that bulge? (It’s a boob). Compare it to 母 “mother” from the same period, which emphasizes the boobs by including nipples.
思(jap: omo, chi: si1) means “to think” but also means “to miss or grieve”. 思 connotes a contemplative and meditative kind of thinking – the kind that involves both the brain and the heart. You can still see 心”heart” in the lower half of this character, but what you might not realize is that the top half of the character, 田, used to be 囟 – a diagram of the skull of an infant when it is still soft.
行(jap: iku, chi: xing2) means “to go”. This character used to be symmetrical and depict a crossroads. It slowly became asymmetric over time. Funny story: 行 is the symbol used in Chinese traffic lights to indicate that pedestrians can now cross. When I saw “xing” in the U.S. to indicate crosswalks, I thought it was referring to the Chinese word 行(xing2), not realizing that it stood for “cross-ing”.
オバケ(obake) means ghost, or haunted. When not spelled in katakana, the word is お化け. The お is honorific here (such as you might see in お酒(osake, alcohol) or お茶(ocha, tea)). 化け(bake) means “to change”. Something that changes for no reason, like a piano that plays itself, is what is considered “haunted”. 化 is also used in 化学(jap: kagaku, chi: hua4xue2), meaning chemistry, or the study of things that change.
The rest of the kanji:
海(jap: kai, chi: hai3) means ocean.
最初(jap: saisho, chi: zui4chu1) mean “most first”, or “initially”.
時(jap: toki, chi: shi2) means time. In this context, it means “occasion”.
一瞬(jap: isshun, chi: yi2shun4) means instant, as in a short period of time.
話(jap: hanashi, chi: hua4) means “words that are spoken”.
度胸試し(jap: do kyou dame shi) means “to put ones courage to the test.” It breaks down to “judge chest trial”.
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
Etymology Adventures 