Repository path: workshop/translations/botchan/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-botchan-R06-v1 — five spans of Botchan chapter 1, single pass

Source. 夏目漱石「坊っちゃん」(1906), 一, five whole paragraphs — 1,507 non-space Japanese characters, read in Japanese. Copy-text Aozora Bunko 000148/752_14964 (底本『ちくま日本文学全集 夏目漱石』筑摩書房), fetched 2026-08-07. Working span workshop/experiments/E-20260807b-botchan-register/materials/src-spans.txt.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — one pass from the source, no revision. Cost $0 (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: suspected, declared before measurement and measured afterwards. Botchan is one of the most translated works of modern Japanese fiction (six complete English renderings, S-botchan), so a lead prior is likely on principle. Two specific exposures are declared rather than left implicit: (i) the lead read Yasotarō Morri's 1918 translator's preface before translating, and no line of his chapter 1, which is why this artifact says suspected and not none; (ii) the title of Morri's rendering, Master Darling, was known. The measurement came back clean (4 shared 7-grams, 0 twelve-grams, longest run 9 tokens) and is in ../R04-v1/translation.md §Contamination and in the experiment's materials/contamination.json; it was made after this text was frozen and committed.

The paragraph tags [P01] … [P22] are the source paragraph numbers in chapter 1 and are not part of the text.

(text as frozen: workshop/experiments/E-20260807b-botchan-register/materials/r06-spans.txt)

[P01] Reckless from birth — I got it from my parents — I have been losing by it ever since I was a child. In grade school I jumped out of the second storey and could not stand up for about a week. Somebody may ask what I did anything so pointless for. There was no deep reason. I had my head out of an upstairs window in the new building when one of my class, for a joke, sang out that for all my swagger I would never get down from there. Yah, coward! So I jumped. When the janitor carried me home on his back, my old man opened his eyes wide and said, what kind of fellow throws himself off a second storey and knocks his legs out from under him — and I answered, next time I shall jump and not knock them out.

[P07] After my mother died the three of us lived on together, my old man, my brother and I. My old man was a man who did nothing at all, and he had only to look at your face to say, you're no good, you're no good, the way another man says good morning. What it was that was no good about me I do not know to this day. A strange sort of old man to have had. My brother said he was going to be a businessman and was forever at his English. He had a womanish streak in him to begin with, and he was sly, so we did not get on. We had a fight about once in ten days. Once we were at chess and he laid a cowardly waiting-piece, and when I was stuck he sat there enjoying it and needling me. I lost my temper and threw the rook I had in my hand at the middle of his forehead. It split the skin and a little blood came out. My brother told my old man. My old man began to talk of disowning me.

[P12] After that Kiyo took it into her head that when I had a house of my own and was independent she would live in it with me. Please do keep me, she asked, over and over again. I felt somehow as though I might come to have a house, and I answered, all right, I'll keep you — the answer and nothing more. But this was a woman with a powerful imagination, and she would lay out her own plans all by herself: which part would you like, sir, Kōjimachi or Azabu; you must have a swing put up in the garden for yourself; one Western room will be quite enough. At that time I did not want a house in the least. A Western house and a Japanese house were both entirely useless to me, so I always answered Kiyo that I wanted nothing of the kind. Whereupon she would praise me again, and say that I had few wants and a clean heart. Whatever I said, Kiyo praised me.

[P21] When it was all settled at last, I called on Kiyo three days before I was to go, and found her lying ill with a cold in a three-mat room that faced north. She sat up the moment she saw me come in and asked, young master, when will you be having a house of your own? She was under the impression that money wells up in a man's pocket of itself the moment he graduates. And to be calling a person that grand young master still was more foolish than ever. I said shortly that I would not have a house for the present, I was going to the country; and she looked bitterly disappointed and kept stroking the loose hair at her salt-and-pepper temples. I was sorry for her, so I comforted her: "I am going, but I shall be back soon. I shall certainly be back in next year's summer holidays." She still had an odd look on her face, so I asked, "what shall I buy you for a present, what would you like?" and she said, "I should like to eat some of the bamboo-leaf candy of Echigo." Bamboo-leaf candy of Echigo — I had never heard of it. And in the first place it was in the wrong direction. When I told her so — "there does not seem to be any bamboo-leaf candy in the country I am going to" — she asked back, "then which way would it be?" I said, "westward," and she asked, "beyond Hakone, or this side of it?" She was a great deal to put up with.

[P22] On the day I left she came in the morning and fussed over everything. She had bought toothpowder and a toothbrush and a towel at a notions shop on the way, and she put them into my canvas bag. I told her I did not need such things, but she would not hear of it. We took rickshaws side by side to the station, and when I had got up on the platform and into the carriage she looked hard at my face and said, in a small voice, "This may be the last we see of each other. I wish you very well indeed." Her eyes were brimming with tears. I did not cry. But I came very near to crying. When the train was well under way I thought it would be safe, and put my head out of the window and looked back, and she was still standing there. She looked very small.