Piano no Mori – The Absence of Order

The Text
Characters: Kinpira, Amamiya
K: それができたら俺達の仲間として認めてやってもいい！(sorega dekitara oretachi no nakama toshite mitomete yatte moii!)
A: あ… (a…)
K: もちろん男としても認めてやる！(mochiron otoko toshite mo mitome teyaru!)
A: む…　無理だよ (mu… muridayo)
A: こ壊れたピアノなんて弾けないよ (ko koware ta piano nante hikenai yo)
K: 弾けるさ！(hikeru sa!)
K: だって４歳からピアノ習ってるんだろ (datte yonsai kara piano naratte rundaro)
A: あ…こっこれは (a… ko… korewa)
A: もしかしてイジメ？(moshikashite ijime?)
A: 転校生の僕に対する… (tenkousei no boku ni taisuru…)

My translation
K: That will let us recognize you as one of us!
A: Oh…
K: Of course then we’ll recognize you as a man!
A: That’s… that’s impossible
A: I can’t play a broken piano
K: You can play it!
K: After all, you’ve been learning piano since you were 4 years old, haven’t you?
A: Ah…are th-they
A: possibly bullying?
A: me? The transfer student?

Thoughts and etymologies
One thing that makes a text great for language learning – but not great for blogging about – is repetition. There are a lot of repeated words and phrases in this first chapter that I’m starting to recognize on sight: 俺(ore – “I”), もちろん(mochiron – “of course”), 壊れ(koware – “broken”), ピアノ(piano – “piano”), 弾(hi – “to play”), 転校生(tenkousei – “transfer student”), and 僕(boku – “I”) are all words we’ve discussed before. Kinpira even repeats Amamiya’s sentence from the first page back to him as a way to taunt him. There are still a few things though. Languages are full of secrets.

仲間(nakama) means “comrade”, or “one of us”. We’ve talked about 間(jap: ma, chi: jian1) previously – it refers to the space between things. It’s worth noting that it’s pronounced differently here than in 人間(ningen). 仲(jap: naka, chi: zhong4) is an obsolete character in Chinese now, but it can still be understood through its parts 人 – person and 中 – middle. This phrase literally means “among us”.

男(jap: otoko, chi: nan2) means man. Broken into its parts, it refers to the 力 strength in a 田 field.

無理(jap: muri, chi: wu2li3) means “unreasonable”. Literally, 無 means “without”, or “the absence of”. In Chinese, it’s used more in formal contexts, and I associate it with Buddhism. It feels like a very spiritual kind of absence, rather than say, the vacuum of space. 理 means “order”, or “reason”. Compare with the Chinese phrase 物理(wu4li3)¹ with the same sounds and a different tone. 物理 literally means “the order or matter”, AKA physics.

Additional Kanji
認(jap: mito, chi: ren4) means to recognize.
対(jap: tai)/对(chi: dui4) means “directed toward” in this context.

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 物理 also means physics in Japanese, pronounced butsuri. ↩}