Repository path: workshop/translations/chumon/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

注文の多い料理店 (Miyazawa Kenji, 1924) — the notices at the door

Source. Miyazawa Kenji 宮沢賢治, 注文の多い料理店 (The Restaurant of Many Orders), 1924, from the sign at the house's porch through the two hunters' realisation of what "many orders" means. Full provenance in workshop/canon/chumon/manifest.md. The excerpt is a compressed selection, not the whole of this span verbatim — see the log's third decision below.

Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only, self-revised in the same session). Written for framework/v0.3/entries/HB-telling-the-reader.md §5's Application — family K's fresh 300–800-word translation limb, chosen because the story's own plot device (a sequence of printed notices the two hunters read and misread) hinges on a pun in its title, which is the family's problem in miniature: what the translator tells the reader, and whether telling is even needed.

Contamination: suspected, declared on background familiarity, not a fresh measurement. This is a well-known, moderately translated Miyazawa Kenji story (workshop/canon/chumon/manifest.md records "moderately translated" at canon selection); the lead knows of its reputation and premise but has not read, and did not consult, any published English rendering before or during this translation, and none is stored locally to run tools/dependence_check.py against (copyright hygiene, CLAUDE.md rule 5). This translation is a practice and application artifact, not an independent-hand comparison, so a declared suspected on the standing basis matches precedent (T-malavoglia-i-conscription-R04-v1).

Just then, glancing back, the two saw a fine Western-style house. On its porch hung a sign:

RESTAURANT WESTERN CUISINE WILDCAT HOUSE 山猫軒

"Look at that — this'll do nicely. And it's open, too. Shall we go in?"

"Odd, a place like this out here. Still, they must have something to eat."

"Of course they do. It says so right on the sign."

They stood at the entrance, built of fine white glazed brick — really quite grand. A glass door stood before them, lettered in gold:

PLEASE, WHOEVER YOU ARE, COME IN. THERE IS NO NEED TO HESITATE AT ALL.

"Well now — the world does work out sometimes, doesn't it. A hard day, and here's something good to make up for it. It's a restaurant, and they're going to feed us for nothing."

"Seems that way. That's exactly what 'no need to hesitate' means."

They pushed the door open and went in; just inside was a corridor, and on the back of that same door, also in gold:

WE ESPECIALLY WELCOME FAT GENTLEMEN AND YOUNG ONES.

"Well, old man — we're exactly the ones especially welcomed."

"We qualify on both counts, in fact."

They walked on down the corridor. Next came a door painted pale blue, and lettered above it in yellow:

THIS ESTABLISHMENT IS A RESTAURANT OF MANY ORDERS. KINDLY BEAR THAT IN MIND.

"Popular sort of place, out here in the mountains."

They opened it. On its back:

THE ORDERS HERE ARE A GREAT MANY, NO DOUBT. WE ASK YOU KINDLY TO BEAR WITH EACH ONE.

"Now what's that supposed to mean?" one of them frowned.

"It must mean the orders take so long to fill that they're asking us to forgive the wait."

"That'll be it. Anyway, I'd like to get into a room and sit down at a table."

A little further on, another door, a mirror beside it and, below the mirror, a long-handled brush. In red letters:

GUESTS, PLEASE TIDY YOUR HAIR HERE, AND WIPE THE MUD FROM YOUR FOOTWEAR.

"A house with strict manners. Very grand people must come here often."

They combed their hair and cleaned their shoes, and the moment the brush touched the shelf again it blurred and vanished, and a gust of wind blew into the room. Startled, they pressed close together and pushed through into the next room, thinking they had better eat something warm and get their strength up before things went any further wrong.

Doors followed doors, each with its own instruction, and the two gentlemen obeyed each one, each time finding some new reason — the cold outside, the electricity in the kitchen, the standing of whoever must be waiting deeper in the house — why a very grand establishment would ask such a thing of its guests. They left their guns and their belts on a black stand. They hung their hats and coats on pegs and padded on in their socks. They put their spectacles and cufflinks into a fine safe already standing open, and snapped the lock shut themselves. They rubbed a jar of cream over their faces, their hands, their feet — and, both of them pretending not to, quietly ate what was left over. At the last door but one, gold letters told them their meal would be ready in under fifteen minutes, and asked them to hurry and splash the scent from a bottle over their heads; the scent smelled oddly of vinegar, and they agreed the maid must have caught a cold and mixed it wrong.

On the back of that door, in large letters:

WE ARE SORRY FOR SO MANY ORDERS — HOW TIRESOME THEY MUST HAVE BEEN. ONLY THIS ONE REMAINS. PLEASE RUB THE SALT IN THE JAR WELL INTO YOUR BODY, ALL OVER.

There stood a handsome blue jar of salt, sure enough — but this time both of them, their cream-smeared faces turning to each other, went pale.

"Something's wrong here."

"I think so too."

"All those 'many orders' — it's them placing the orders. On us."

"That's it — a 'Western restaurant,' the way I see it now, isn't a house that feeds Western food to the people who come in. It's a house that turns the people who come in INTO Western food, and eats them. Which means — that is — th-that we're g-going to—" His teeth were chattering so hard he could get no further.

"That — w-we're — waaah!" The other was shaking too hard to finish either.

"R-run—" one of them tried, hand shaking, to push the door behind them. But it would not move, not an inch.

Translator's log

1. The central decision, and it is a refusal: no translator's note on the title pun. The Japanese title turns on 注文, which covers both "an order placed by a customer" and "an instruction/demand issued to someone" — the two hunters spend the whole scene reading a string of printed 注文 as the restaurant's service to them, until the line rendered above as "All those 'many orders' — it's them placing the orders. On us" flips which party is doing the ordering. The instinct on first reading the source was that this needs a footnote: an English reader who has never met 注文 will not feel the pun coming the way a Japanese reader does. Drafting the passage before deciding anything changed that. English "order" already carries both senses ordinarily used at a restaurant table ("give the waiter your order") and in a chain of command ("those are the orders"), and the title phrase "a restaurant of many orders" is native English before the reveal ever arrives — a reader takes it as a busy restaurant with many customers' orders to fill, exactly as intended, and the same word flips the same way in English that it does in Japanese. The note was drafted, then struck, on the check that the ambiguity survives unaided; adding one would have told the reader the joke before the text gets to tell it.

2. Why this is checked, not asserted. framework/v0.3/entries/HB-telling-the-reader.md §5 item 5 (survived from RS-20260827-declared-play and RS-20260827b-shown-or-told) is exactly the caution this decision tests: a translator's own sense that a device "obviously" needs explaining is not evidence that it does, and the cheap check — does my own drafted English already carry it? — is the same discipline §7.37's printed refusals hold up to and §7.37's printed promises do not. This is a single hand's single judgment on one text, internal-judgment-only, and is reported as a craft observation, not a measurement: no reader was asked whether the pun in fact lands, and this log states only that the ambiguity is present on the page, not that it produces the same effect an uninformed English reader gets from the Japanese.

3. The excerpt is compressed, and this is declared rather than silent. The source's notice sequence in this span runs to roughly ten doors; reproducing every notice verbatim inside the translation limb's 300–800-word cap would have meant cutting the reveal instead. The middle five notices (guns, hats and coats, metal objects and the safe, the cream, the perfume) are summarised in one narrating paragraph rather than quoted door by door, keeping the pattern (an increasingly intimate demand, met with an increasingly strained explanation of why a "very grand" clientele would need it) without every repetition. This is an abridgement made for the word-count constraint, not a translation decision the source's structure asked for, and the two notices that matter for the pun — the "restaurant of many orders" sign and the final "so many orders" apology — are both quoted in full.

4. The bilingual sign is left as the source has it. RESTAURANT / WILDCAT HOUSE are already in roman letters in the Japanese text, beside their Japanese equivalents 西洋料理店 / 山猫軒; carried into an English translation, the English-in-Japanese pairing that makes the sign notable in the original disappears, because both halves are now the same language. This is HB-change-of-language's problem, not this entry's, and is only noted here as a boundary: family K's decision was about the title pun, not about the sign's own bilingualism, and nothing was done to compensate for the loss.

5. Register. The notices are rendered as formal, slightly stilted commercial English (capitals, "kindly," "please") to keep the source's own tonal joke — courteous retail language used for demands that escalate toward something no restaurant would actually ask a paying guest to do. No attempt was made to add jokes the source does not have; the comic effect, such as it is, is meant to come from the notices and the hunters' own complacent misreadings, both already in the source.