Thoughts from Episode 1: Introduction to the story, and court ranks
Here’s the first blog post proper! I’ll be going through my thoughts from translating Saito Chiho’s Torikae baya, starting at the beginning. If you happen to have access to the manga in Japanese, you can even follow along!
First, I’ll quickly introduce the story. The manga is based on Torikaebaya monogatari, a tale written by an unknown author or authors (there was originally more than one version) in probably the late Heian period – at the very least, it’s set in the Heian period. In both the original story and the manga, a court official has two wives, each of whom gives birth on the same day to almost identical babies, one a girl and one a boy. This is all very auspicious for the father, who would hope that they can grow up to fill important roles, but there’s a catch: his new “daughter” behaves like a boy and his new “son” behaves like a girl.
とりかへばや！ the man says to himself – approximately “I wish I could switch them.” They’d be perfect if they were the other way around, but they just won’t change. Time goes by, and people start to assume that the “daughter” is really the man’s son. Rumour spreads about this charming, talented boy, and the father is asked to have him come of age and take up a job at the court. He can’t convince his children to change, and he can’t refuse the request, so it is decided that the child will live as a young man. Soon, the other child has the coming-of-age ceremony for a young woman, and becomes a naishi no kami, an important attendant to the new crown princess.
The two siblings earn constant praise, but it isn’t long before romantic issues start to derail their success. The young man is caught up in a love triangle with his new wife and an amorous colleague who is simultaneously obsessed with him, his wife AND his rumoured identical sister. Meanwhile, the naishi no kami falls in love with the crown princess. After all sorts of drama, the siblings leave the capital, believing there is no way they can return – until they decide to trade places.
Now taking on each other’s former roles, they return and sort out all their romantic entanglements, with most people none the wiser. In the original story, they mostly just resolve their earlier problems at this point, before living happily ever after in influential positions with desirable spouses. The Torikae baya manga takes a longer route to the ending, featuring high-stakes political intrigue after the siblings’ return to the capital, but the story is the same by and large.
Unlike the original tale, Torikae baya is split up into chapters (named “episodes”) which were published monthly in Gekkan Flowers. Making each chapter compelling seems to me to have been a key motivation for making changes to the story. Episode 1: Sara and Suiren covers a lot of ground, starting with the siblings’ birth and ending just before they come of age – and finding time for a major incident in between that doesn’t happen in the older tale.
What I want to talk about today is names and titles. Titles for ranks and job positions are of huge importance in Torikaebaya monogatari, because in the original tale, that is how characters are always referred to. Rather than personal names, they get called things like “Gondainagon” and “Saisho no chujo”, and these change as they receive promotions during the story. This feature is not necessarily preserved in modern Japanese translations and adaptations, including Torikae baya. Saito names the court official with the two wives Fujiwara no Marumitsu, while his boyish daughter is Sarasoju (most often abbreviated to “Sara”) and his girlish son is Suiren. As the manga continues, more named characters also appear.
Still, this isn’t to say that titles are totally done away with. Some characters are still always referred to by their official position. Meanwhile, other people tend to refer to Marumitsu, Sarasoju, Suiren and others with titles. And that means I need to translate them!
Just a few pages into Episode 1, we get a salvo of official titles to let readers know what big shots Marumitsu and his family are:
男の名は藤原丸光
父親は元・関白
兄は右大臣
本人は権大納言にして近衛大将という超上流貴族
(Torikae baya, volume 1, page 7)
There are a few options for how to tackle these:
Transliterate. This little bit of narration feels like it’s supposed to be at least a little bit bewildering, even for Japanese readers. It reminds us that we’re dealing with a society most readers aren’t all that familiar with, so maybe in English, they should stay as they are.
Use an existing translation. Other classical Japanese works have been translated into English, including Torikaebaya monogatari. In Rosette F Willig’s translation from the late 1970s (it’s a bit complicated in the version later published as The Changelings in 1983), these job titles are all translated, and keeping the same translations could clarify the connections between the two texts.
Come up with my own. Relying on Willig’s terms and her source for these terms is all well and good, but what if I disagree on some of them? What if I encounter one that doesn’t appear in the original tale?
Ultimately, I still don’t know what I’ll settle on. Transliterating is the easiest way, and in some cases it might be no harder to understand than an English term, but on the other hand, they do have practical functions which could be lost that way.
For now, I’ve been making my own, mapping them onto similar positions in other government systems or militaries. Helpfully, in one “Atogaki baya” section (brief afterwords in manga form that appear at the end of each collected volume), Saito has a little chart of relative positions, so I can hopefully avoid translating a term one way only to realise later that it suits another position better. I’ll work on devising a system I’m happy with. These might even work out to be much the same as Willig’s translations!
And so, to finish off, here’s what my translation of the quoted section above looks like right now:
His name was Fujiwara no Marumitsu, and he belonged to the upper echelons of society.
His father was the former Chief Advisor to the Emperor.
His older brother was the Vice Chancellor.
And Marumitsu himself was a Provisional Upper Councillor of State and General of the Imperial Guards.
Thanks for reading!
