ei = shriek jare
= wriggle?
bata = flopping down muku
= sitting up
'Nothing worth reading' = Oh, how
can you say that, Sei-chan? When you're reading a story about
Hiei!
Yes, it's true--sort of. If you
look closely at the book Sei has dropped in the middle panel
that's Lively Little Hiei-chan on the right-hand page, titled
'Uwasa no Hiei' (The Famous Hiei). Here's
a blow up. The text, however, is a collection of extremely lame
jokes in romaji.
What are they? You must be kidding.
Who would be crazy enough to translate a bunch of tiny chicken
scratches that you can't even make out without high magnification
and were obviously never meant to be actually seen by the reader,
much less....
Okay, here they are.
Samui
gyagu 100 (100 lame jokes)
Translated and lovingly
explained by M.J."Patience" Johnson
"Tonari
no ie ni hei ga dekitatte ne." (Say,
they've built a wall (hei) next door.)
"He~i."
(the Japanese 'oh hey what
about that, really?' expression).
Yes. That's it. That's all of
it. That's the joke, see: hei and heiiii.
"Gingin
ni notteru kai?" (Is
everybody happy?)
"Ie~!" (Either 'no' or 'yay')
'Gingin ni notteru kai?' is some
old (meaning 70 or 80's maybe) comedian's way of getting a response
from his audience, the exact equivalent apparently of 'Is everybody
happy?' Evidently gingin alone has no meaning, or if it does
my informant doesn't know it. Together it just means to be in
bursting good spirits, and the 'kai' makes it a question. 'Is
everybody happy' gets the answer 'ie--' which can be a protracted
no but which can also be 'yay!!!'--the acclamation of the burstingly
good spirited audience.
Atarimae da no
kurakka (Well
naturally cracker)
Atarimae da no kurakka, from what I understand of my informant's explanation, was one of the
buzzwords of that 'long ago' period--again, 80's probably--and
consisted of throwing totally unrelated terms together. Here
it's 'cracker' added on to the phrase 'Well, naturally'. Evidently
people also said 'chonmage sumimasen' a lot too. Chonmage are
the scalplocks you see employed samurais
wearing in jidaigeki. Scalp shaved, and the long back hair is
tied back and oiled so it forms a thick sausage which is brought
forward so it lies on top of the scalp.
Panthea: "This is reminiscent
of word association football. (Monty Python fans will understand--all
others just ignore.)"
Superu ga
muchakucha da yo (My spelling's
a mess.)
Yurushite
kudaseii o-deikan-sama (Please
forgive me, o-daikan-sama.)
These are comments from Fuji
herself. The second is a phrase from the
jidaigekis (historical dramas) in proper rough male jidaigeki-speak.
Properly
'yurushite kudasai, o-daikan-sama.' A daikan was some official
in the Tokugawa bureaucracy, a country magistrate. (In the jidaigeki
they're always corrupt and venal and grinding the faces of the
peasants.) I assume there's some awful pun embedded here too,
but my informant had no idea what.
Wake wakame
do yo (Seaweed
makes no sense [we're just making this up by now])
Possibly a pun on wake wakanee--malespeak
for wake wakaranai--'makes no sense.' Here substituting wakame,
seaweed. This put my informant in mind of a popular song from
long ago, consisting of food names in slightly ridiculous forms,
which as it happens a couple of little Papuwa beasts sing as
well, which is so natsukashii no-one can stand it. The 'do yo'
is a puzzler. Emiko's suggestion is that Fuji got her letters
wrong and meant da yo. Or it could be a pun....
"Abayo"
(Sayonara)
"Kebai." ('Kay,
bye.)
Abayo is a rough male way of saying sayonara, also very jidaigeki.
To which someone else responds 'kebai' which looks like it should
be a Japanese word but isn't. It's "'kay, bye."
Umeboshi ga ume (Dried plums are delicious!)
Ume is colloquial for umai, delicious.
The pun, of course, is in the similarity of the words. Which
sheds sudden unwanted light on those flies in Papuwa who go around
saying 'Hai ga haii!' (The flies are high) not to mention the
horse that snorts 'uma ga umai' (the horse is clever- another
meaning of umai).
Runrun kibun
(High spirits)
Runrun kibun means 'high spirits',
but may be a pun on the English run. (Run from DOS? C:\DOS run.
Run DOS run.)
Then I believe it's 'Maybe I
should stop here. There may be people around, who knows?' It's
a little odd, so I'm not ruling out yet another pun. Ends with
gokurousama, 'thanks for all the hard work.'
The facing page has a parody of
a romantic song turned into something so strange and twisted
that we were all frightened away. Don't ask. |