ばか！バカ！　馬鹿ー月！

Hello, I recently started work on the ShinSekai Yori project, and have come across a particular Kanji character that I cannot find anywhere. I can't even put it in the text here because the only place I've been able to find it is in the book I'm working on. The Kanji in question is the top character in the tiny image file I attached to this post.

I've looked in a number of Kanji Dictionaries, including one monster of a book with a huge list of archaic/alternate forms and commonly miss-written kanji. It does not appear in any of them. >_<

I am fairly certain that it is not a miss-print as it appears repeatedly and in multiple editions of the book printed in different years.

Can someone please help me figure out what this character is?

Closest would be '振子' (shinshi), a pendulum. It probably isn't a typo if it comes up again and again. It's likely that it's just some obscure kanji meant to be a play on 振子.

florza wrote:Closest would be '振子' (shinshi), a pendulum.

Thanks, but I don't think that's it. The word as a whole is the name of a role/duty a person can play/have in some kind of ceremony.

I tried words using many different Kanji with the 辰 root or the 'shin' reading, and none of them seem to make much sense, with the possible exception of 辰子 as 'Dragon Child.' That seems like it could be a role, but it still doesn't feel right.

I don't think I'll really understand it until I can figure out the actual character.

I don't know well this'd translate, but Baidu says the Chinese 侲子 refers to a person who carries out ritual sacrifice.

Yeah, a boy who purges spirits in the ritual. The Chinese seem to have a lot more information on it, the only time it's mentioned in JA wiki is in the below.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BF%BD%E5%84%BA

Hiyono wrote:I don't know well this'd translate, but Baidu says the Chinese 侲子 refers to a person who carries out ritual sacrifice.

I guess there's no way to be certain, but given the tone of this book and the ceremony in question, that makes more sense than anything else I've been able to find. If nothing obviously better turns up, I'll go with that.

That wiki article also looks very promising Florza. The ritual in the book either is or is based on the ceremony described. I should be able to get all the information I need from it.

Thank you, both of you.

weblio returns this:
【侲子】善い童子。

I get this.

It doesn't look like it translates very well.

Again this book decides to throw crazy non-standard Kanji at me >_<

Is there a good site where one can easily look up Kanji that are either Chinese-only or too archaic to show up in modern Japanese dictionaries?

Anyways, I've got two more that seem not to show up in any of my dictionaries, nor those I know of online. As far as the background of how they are used in the story, these are used alone(not part of larger words) as labels to indicate how 'dangerous' the information in a given book is, kind of like the USA's movie rating system.

The book itself includes a basic explanation of each, but I was hoping to find them somewhere as text so that I can include them in-line without having to screw around with in-ine image files.

Also, thanks again to everyone who helped out before.

烖
http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE7Zdic83Zdic96.htm

訞
http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE8ZdicA8Zdic9E.htm

Thanks zzhk, that was exactly what I needed.