Golden Time

[rpapo]

That's seriously short. The prologue for this story is perhaps a little longer, but not by much. Anyway, first thing's first. Let's see what it looks like before creating something around it.

[Darklor]

k ^^

[rpapo]

Well, I finished translating the prologue two days ago, and I am awaiting feedback from several other translators and Japanese speakers. In the meantime, I found an interesting blurb at http://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... racted-me/

Toradora! author Takemiya Yuyuko’s newest light novel Golden Time (illust by Komatsu E-ji) debuted last Friday. During university orientation, Banri loses his way and meets Mitsuo who was also lost. Then a girl appeared in front of them, carrying a bouquet of roses. After whacking Mitsuo on the head a couple times with it, she gives it to him and congratulates him on being accepted into the university. This perfect girl is actually his childhood friend Kouko who he had promised to marry when they were small. He tried to run away from her, but she followed him all the way here, even enrolling in the same university.

The prologue, BTW, introduces Banri, and describes a mysterious incident a year or two earlier, in high school.

[rpapo]

Time for a minor poll. It is not at all clear from the prologue text whether the main character, 万里 (Banri), is male or female. My Japanese friend says the name is normally female. Four characters are obviously female, and one is obviously male. Banri is not obvious. What do you all think?



While we're at it, here are both of the color illustrations from the start of the book, at 100dpi.

http://home.comcast.net/~rpapo/GoldenTime1_1.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~rpapo/GoldenTime1_2.jpg

Here's an idea:

Spoiler! :

Banri winds up doing an ugly-duckling to swan transformation, and we see the result in picture #1. The eye and hair colors match, and isn't that how manga artists usually distinguish their characters?

Any other ideas?

[Isapfe]

There is an article on Golden Time (in Japanesse).
And from that article Banri is most likely a guy. He is also dressed like a guy. So, unless he's into crossdressing... As described in the article,

The main character, Banri Tada (brown-haired guy fourth from the left in the picture) having passed entrance exams in private university in Tokyo meets Mitsuo Yanagisawa (tall black-haired guy) after they both got lost on the university campus. Feeling mutual resemblance, they become acquainted, and while trying to find their way they meet a beautiful girl with the rose bouquet. She slaps Mitsio on the face with the bouquet, hands it over to him, congtratulates him on entering the university, and runs away. She turns out to be Kouko Kaga (leftmost in the picture), Mitsuo's childhood friend, who he'd promissed to marry back in their childhood, but forgot about his promise. So she chased after him, entered the same university, and...

Read the book if you want to find out what happened after that. Heh, although Banri is declared as a protagonist, why is it Mitsuo who gets all the action right from the start?
No info about other characters so far.

Spoiler! :

Maybe Kouko will get attracted to Banri and dump Mitsuo?
There is also something about some sort of an accident with Banri, him falling from the bridge (, hitting his head) and losing memory after the graduation ceremony in his high school, his ghost dwelling in other person's body, but I didn't get that.
So, maybe the guy on the picture is not really Banri.

[Vaelis]

HQ :

[rpapo]

Well, until I got some feedback from a Japanese lady friend, I was assuming that Banri was male also. Then she pointed out a whole mess of inconsistencies in my translation of the prologue (notice I deleted it from the forum?). Those inconsistencies become much less when you consider Banri to be female. To quote her e-mails to me:

Mari in this episode, is, I believe, a girl. Boys in a school sport team never have pony tale, for one reason. For joking and looking at each other's face during the practice is also girls' behavior in Japan. The boys, on the other hand, are very, very serious when they practice. And the captain is usually very strict. They would never joke. In addition, boys and girls never be in the same team, sport club activities there is always gender-segregated. I think that is the way it is here too right? So, it is a one-gender club. From these perspective, I understood they are all girls.

I took a look at the pictures. Banri is a girl! She looks a little shy and short as a male college student. And she has breasts!! I guess the author decided to read typical girl's name in a different way.

My friend is referencing things she saw in my translation of the prologue, such as it is right now.

BTW, the end of the prologue implies that some as yet unidentified guy might have fallen in the river. That he would be unidentified would be strange, though, if Banri already knew Mitsuo from their mutual home town.

After I do some more research into the identity of Banri, I will rework my translation of the prologue and get it posted.

PS: You must buy everything you can get your hands on, seeing as you're in France and you've also got the book already.

[Isapfe]

Waiting for your translation then
If Banri is a girl dressing like a boy, there's bound to be complicated relationships.

[rpapo]

Right this moment, I am attempting to translate the Japanese wiki page about the book and create an English page for it. The page gives a short synopsis of the story, and a short description of each character. The most interesting development so far is with regards to Banri. She/he is turning out to be rather complicated, and a bit spooky.

Once I've done that, I will be better prepared to finalize the translation of the prologue. I will post a link to the wiki (Vaelis posted the Japanese link earlier) once I'm done with the Wiki, which will hopefully be today or tomorrow. Then perhaps we will have the prologue itself by the end of the weekend.

This is a case where the fact that Japanese does not do any male/female conjugations or word modifications helps the author to be very vague. As my friend noted, it is the cultural points that give it away. You don't even really see the usual male/female speech patterns showing up in the prologue. In that regard, the main story I am working on right now, the second story of Spinoff 2, the male/female speech patterns are very distinct: Haruta speaks in a very distinctly male fashion, and Sena uses an obvious female pattern.

[Darklor]

Is that even possible to transfer those different speach pattern into english or any other european language?

[rpapo]

Not really, and most people don't try. But those reading Japanese can use those speech patterns in general to identify speakers. Japanese stories generally don't identify who is talking (you simply see quoted text after quoted text), but if there are two speakers, and one is male and the other female, you can generally tell who's speaking by their style.

And then there's people like Ami Kawashima in Toradora. She uses a very distinct style all her own, almost as if she considered herself royalty. For that matter, Minori had her own way of speaking too, which could be translated more or less, making her look rather strange, almost what we would call a "space cadet" here.

Takemiya gives each of her characters a distinct way of speaking, apart from the basic male/female differences found in Japanese speech.

[rpapo]

OK. After cheating, and reading the last page of the book, I can say with reasonable certainty that Banri is a guy. Why he looks like a boyish girl is also reasonably accounted for. Not having read the intervening pages, though, I will reserve judgement on the story as a whole.

Anyway, here is a translation of the prologue. It's not the best, but then again I am still learning the Japanese language.

“Kuwaa~n… aanaan iya aaaaan… ufuu~n…”, the strangely erotic sound of the bell could be heard in the distance again today. Banri went to the head of the group, already more than half-way across the bridge.

“Sorry, did we go too fast today?”

He turned to look back at the club captain, who had been running just behind him.

“Yeah, let’s go a little slower.”

While he pulled out his pony-tail, which had fallen into the collar of his jersey, the captain turned around too, and watched as the last two guys in the group were just then getting on the bridge.

If they went at their normal pace, the bell could be heard when they were one quarter over the long bridge. Kanada-san, the club secretary, came up from the end of the line on his bicycle, from where he had been in order to work with the first-years who weren’t all that strong yet, from a whole forty minutes of road work, the sound of the bell letting them know where they should be.

“That bee---llll---,”

“Haaasss beeenn ruuunnng,”

"Kana~~~da~~~~!" ...Holding imaginary microphones in their left hands and waving them to an R&B rhythm, Banri and the captain sang out in chorus. “Senpai’s an idiot!”, the second-year students running up after them cast a cool eye on the two. Another of the second-years said, “Don’t they do that every day?” No matter how uncool it was, or how tired you got of it, there was no way they would cut it out. They couldn’t stop what they wanted to do so badly. Looking at the secretary he said, “Nothing wrong, is there?” “Just keep up with Banri’s pitch.”, he replied.

Banri and the other track club members ran this bridge every day, what was said to be Japan’s longest wooden bridge. He agreed with the locals: it was certainly long. A big river separated this side (the mountains) from that side (the sea), which could be sensed in the hazy distance. Especially now, the dusty spring wind blurring the view of the bridge winding off into the distance. Because the bridge was so long, ten years ago a travel program had featured it on their show.

Next thing you know, there was a bridge boom! City Hall climbed on board this latest fad, saying “Let’s make sure we please the tourists that will surely descend upon us!” They had interminable meetings upon worse meetings and in the end, on the mountain slope the statues of the “Seven Lucky Gods” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Lucky_Gods) were arranged. About the size of children, placed here and there along the trail, they were set up like an impromptu banquet, just before the trees stopped at the bridge. At the end of the trail, above Fukurokuju (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukurokuju) a huge bell was hanging, the sound of the bell bringing good fortune to the opposite bank. “Please sound the bell”, it said on a mallet alongside. The fact that the bell’s sound reverberated in a strangely sexy way they decided to leave it be, “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

But the infrequent tourists visiting from the city were only concerned with getting the best shots with their cameras. Consequently, the only visitors to the statues were either the neighborhood dogs, or the after-school track teams practicing. The dogs, of course, couldn’t ring the bell. The only person who would make the obscene noise by ringing the bell was Kanada.

“Huh? What happened to that guy?”

Banri spotted him, after he eased off on his pace and turned around. Surprised, the captain asked, “Eh? What?”

“Excuse me, you there… perhaps you are ill? Are you alright?”

On the bridge itself, a little further along than Banri’s group, a man wearing a khaki jacket was crouched down. He was clinging to the knee-height guardrail, as if he could hardly hold himself up. Banri glanced sidelong at the guy, but hesitated to call out to him, and instead quietly said to himself,

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”

That very moment, he passed by.

Their eyes met sidelong, quietly.

The man was crouched down, unable to stand as if he were really drunk, or maybe crying, or perhaps suddenly ill. Both hands covering his face, he saw Banri through a gap in his fingers. Something shone on the back of his hand. There was a mysterious character there, perhaps “wa” or “re”. He caught it gleaming faintly yellow. He didn’t understand it’s meaning. The man’s eyes were opened wide in surprise.

There was something quite strange where his half-hidden nasal bone could be seen---

“Uo, o!”

Because his was looking way over to the side for too long, he lost his balance and stumbled a few steps. The underclassmen hardly saw anything of what happened.

“Banri!”

Surprised, the club captain called his name too. As if it were to blame, the elbow of his windbreaker was nudged.

“That’s dangerous! What’re you doing?”

“But, but something about that guy… what!? No way!?”

Stubbornly, Banri was already running back, searching for the person he must have just passed, as if drawn by the look he had received.

He may have been seeing things, or it may have been a waking dream.

However many times he looked back, the unfortunate phantom was now nowhere to be found. He suddenly wasn’t there. He had simply disappeared.

Was it entirely his imagination? Was it a hallucination? No, or maybe, no way… did he fall off the bridge?

But he didn’t think he could hear anything apart from the sound of the water.

Based on what I've read in the Japanese wiki page, this appears to be an incident during Banri's third year in high school, before the accident that caused him to lose his earlier memories, and which caused a distinct personality shift. Just why his personality shifts is part of what apparently will make this story different from your standard love triangle story.

[Darklor]

This is the feed back thread for Golden Time at http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index ... olden_Time

Please tell us what you think of it.

[Darklor]

Created teaser project: http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index ... olden_Time

[ShadowZeroHeart]

Sorry... No offense, but where did this pop out from...?

Guess I ain't too updated these days...

And what is this story about? Reading the synopsis gave me more questions marks than anything else... Romance story? Something like Tora Dora? Hmmm?