Repository path: workshop/translations/kiseru/R04-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-kiseru-R04-v2 — 芥川龍之介「煙管」 sections 三–八, and the work completed

Source: workshop/canon/kiseru/source-3-8.txt — Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 「煙管」 (1916), sections 三–八 entire, 4,617 non-space characters, 69 paragraphs, Aozora card 80 / file 80_15183.html, cp932. Provenance: workshop/canon/kiseru/manifest.md.

Regime: R04 v1.0 — lead, source only, in session. Single pass with in-line revision, not the draft-then-revise of R04-v1: this is the completion of a work whose first two sections were translated on 2026-07-30 (T-kiseru-R04-v1), and the standing register was already set there. That departure from R04 §2a is declared rather than absorbed.

Pair: JA→EN. With T-kiseru-R04-v1 this completes 「煙管」 — 1,734 + 4,617 = 6,351 non-space source characters, the project's second Akutagawa and its ninth whole work.

Contamination

Suspected, and the basis is named. The lead has translated this story's first two sections before, on 2026-07-30, and has that English in context. It also carries, from the arm this translation serves, the hypothesis under test. Neither is a reason to conceal the hand; both are reasons it is excluded from every registered number of E-20260813e (F4), and they are why the 2026-07-30 hand — written thirteen days before the hypothesis existed — is the lead hand that enters the primaries instead.

Glenn W. Shaw's "The Pipe" (Hokuseido 1930, Gutenberg #78105) was not opened. Before a word of this was written, a script compared every .md file in the repository against Shaw's whole text for shared seven-token runs and reported where in Shaw each match falls: every one of them sits in Shaw's sections I–II, which is where the lead's own 2026-07-30 English is. Nothing in the repository quotes Shaw's sections III–VIII, which is what this translation covers. That check was run because note (bnd) exists — last session's blind leaked out of the project's own result pages — and it is recorded here whether or not it had fired.

Overlap against Shaw is measured after the freeze and reported on the result page (F6).

三

It was not long afterwards.

Narinaga was smoking as usual in one of the rooms within the palace when the gold sliding-door painted with the Queen Mother of the West opened quietly, and a shaven-head in a black-striped yellow Hachijō silk with a black crested haori over it crawled forward deferentially into his presence. He kept his face down, so it was not yet possible to tell who he was. Narinaga, supposing that some business had arisen, tapped out his pipe and spoke to him in an easy, open way.

"What is your business?"

"Ay — Sōshun has a request to make."

Kōchiyama said this and broke off a moment. Then, in the course of saying what came next, he raised his head by degrees, until at the end he was gazing steadily into Narinaga's face. He gazed with the eyes of a snake taking aim at something, and all the while wore that particular kind of agreeableness which only men of his sort have.

"It is nothing out of the way, my lord. That pipe there at your hand — I should like to receive it of you."

Narinaga looked, before he could help it, at the pipe he had in his hand. His eyes falling to the pipe, and Kōchiyama's going straight on as though in pursuit of them, were very nearly at the same instant.

"How would it be? Might it please my lord to have it granted me?"

What was in Sōshun's words was not the feeling of entreaty only; there was in them as well the threat that the class of the shaven-heads holds over every lord in the land. Within the palace, where the tangle of precedent was held in reverence, the princes of the realm had to follow the shaven-heads' guidance. That was the weakness on the one side. On the other there was the feeling that for his own credit he did not wish to earn the name of a niggard. And besides, a pipe of solid gold was no article that he could not easily come by. — When these two motives came together into one, his hand of itself held the pipe out towards Kōchiyama.

"Ho. You shall have it. Take it and go."

"I am deeply obliged."

Sōshun received the pipe of solid gold, raised it reverently to his forehead, and withdrew, quickly enough, back beyond the door of the Queen Mother of the West. And as he withdrew, someone plucked at his sleeve from behind. Turning, he found Ryōtetsu there, grinning all over a thin unpleasant face and pointing covetously at the pipe of solid gold lying on his palm.

"Here — look at this."

Kōchiyama said it in an undertone and carried the bowl end of the pipe up to the tip of Ryōtetsu's nose.

"So you got it out of him in the end."

"Which is exactly what I told you. It is no use envying me now: the festival is over."

"Next time I shall go and ask to be given one myself."

"Hah. Do as your honour pleases."

Kōchiyama tried the weight of the pipe a moment in his hand, then, with a glance at Narinaga through the door, gave another shake of his shoulders and sneered.

四

Now, if it is asked whether Narinaga, having had his pipe carried off him, felt any displeasure — he did not, necessarily. That much can be gathered from the fact that when he left the castle he wore a look of better humour than usual, so that the samurai of his train thought it strange.

He felt, rather, a kind of satisfaction at having given the pipe to Sōshun. It may even be that the degree of that satisfaction was greater than when he had the pipe. But this is a perfectly natural thing. For, as has been said before, what made him take pride in the pipe was not any fondness for the pipe itself. What he was really vain of was the million koku, in the shape of a pipe. And so is it not the case that this vanity of his, which was satisfied by the daily use of a pipe of solid gold, would be satisfied better still by giving that pipe away to another man without a sign of regret? Even if, when he happened to give it to Kōchiyama, there was something in it of being forced by circumstances outside himself, his satisfaction was not impaired in the smallest degree on that account.

And so, when he had got back to the mansion at Hongō, Narinaga turned to the gentlemen-in-waiting and said, with every appearance of enjoyment:

"I have let the shaven-head Sōshun have the pipe."

五

The men of the household who heard this were astonished at Narinaga's magnanimity. But three officials — Yamazaki Kanzaemon of the Office of Affairs, Iwata Kuranosuke, Keeper of the Wardrobe, and Ueki Kurōemon, Comptroller of the Household — these three alone knit their brows before they could stop themselves.

To the finances of the whole domain of Kaga the cost of a single pipe of solid gold was of course nothing at all. But if at every attendance at the castle — the festivals, the first and the fifteenth of the month, and the twenty-eighth — one of them was certain to be taken by the shaven-heads, that was no light outlay. It was not beyond possibility that the imposts might be raised to make good what the pipes were costing. And if it came to that, it would be a serious matter. — The three loyal samurai, as though they had agreed on it beforehand, all dreaded it before it happened.

They therefore opened a council at once, to determine on a remedy. A remedy, though — there was of course only one. It was to change the metal of the pipe altogether, to something the shaven-heads would not want. But when it came to the question of what the metal should be, Iwata and Ueki were of two minds.

Iwata said that for the lord's own dignity it was unbecoming to use a baser metal than silver. Ueki said, on the contrary, that if the object was already to head off the shaven-heads' greed, there was nothing better than brass; that to have regard to dignity at this time of day was a makeshift view. — The two of them held each to his own opinion, and tried to refute the other with all their might.

Then the seasoned Yamazaki brought forward a compromise: that there was excellent reason in both opinions; but that they should first try silver for the time being, and if the shaven-heads still wanted them, it would not be too late to use brass afterwards. To this, of course, neither of them could have any objection. And so the council came at last to a decision — to order Sumiyoshiya Shichibei, once again, to make a pipe of silver.

六

From then on Narinaga carried a silver pipe every time he went up to the castle. It was again a pipe of the utmost delicacy, with the sword-and-plum-blossom crest scattered over it.

It goes without saying that he did not take the same pride in the new pipe as before. To begin with, he hardly ever took it up even when he was talking to someone; and when he did take it up, he put it away again directly. The reason was that the same Nagasaki leaf did not taste as good as when he smoked it in a pipe of solid gold. But the change in the metal of the pipe did not have its effect on Narinaga alone. As the three loyal retainers had foreseen, it had its effect on the shaven-heads too. Only, this effect ended by betraying their forecast altogether. For when the shaven-heads saw that gold had turned to silver, even those who had until then held back precisely because it was solid gold came pressing forward, each before the other, to ask for the pipe. And a Narinaga who had felt no attachment even to a pipe of solid gold could have no reluctance whatever about parting with a silver one. He tossed the pipes away, ungrudgingly, to whoever asked. In the end he could no longer distinguish, himself, whether he gave the pipe away when he went up to the castle or went up to the castle in order to give the pipe away — or came near enough to it, at any rate.

Yamazaki, Iwata and Ueki, hearing of this, put their anxious heads together in council again. Matters being as they were, there was nothing for it but to have brass pipes made, exactly as Ueki had proposed. And so the order was about to go down to Sumiyoshiya Shichibei as usual — and just at that moment, a gentleman-in-waiting came to them to convey Narinaga's wishes.

"His lordship says that when he carries a silver pipe the shaven-heads' importuning is a nuisance. From this time forward it is to be a gold pipe, as before — such is his lordship's command."

The three were dumbfounded, and did not know what to do.

七

Kōchiyama Sōshun looked on, wincing for them, while the other shaven-heads pressed forward each before the other to get Narinaga's silver pipes. On the occasion when Ryōtetsu got one — at the attendance on the first day of the eighth month, or some such day — and was delighted with it, he went so far as to fling "Fool!" at his head from the start, in that shrill voice of his. It was by no means that he did not want a silver pipe. But for him to run with the rest of the shaven-heads, trailing after the same pipe, he had rather too much gilt on him. Tormented by the grinding of his pride against his greed, he kept his eye vigilantly on Narinaga's pipe with an air of taking no interest, thinking: wait a little, and I will take the shine out of them.

Then one day he noticed that Narinaga was smoking at his leisure with a solid gold pipe as before. But among the shaven-heads there seemed to be nobody going to ask for it. So he called Ryōtetsu, who happened to be passing, and whispered, indicating Narinaga with a quiet movement of his chin.

"It is solid gold again, is it not?"

Ryōtetsu, hearing this, looked at Sōshun with an air of amazement.

"You had better be greedy in moderation. When they beg the silver pipes off him the way they do, what on earth would make him bring a solid gold one?"

"Then what is that?"

"Brass, I should think."

Sōshun shook his shoulders. He gave no laugh aloud, out of regard for the people about them.

"Very well; if it is brass, let it be brass. I shall go and be given it myself."

"What makes you say it is gold again?" Ryōtetsu's confidence seemed to be getting shaky.

"What you fellows would think is known to the other side. He has brought a solid gold pipe and made it look like brass. In the first place, a lord of a million koku is not going to carry a brass pipe and say nothing about it."

Sōshun said this rapidly and went off alone towards Narinaga, leaving Ryōtetsu dumbfounded in front of the gold door of the Queen Mother of the West.

It was about an hour afterwards. Ryōtetsu came upon Kōchiyama again in the matted corridor.

"Well, Sōshun, how did the affair go?"

"What affair is that?"

Ryōtetsu thrust out his lower lip and looked hard into Sōshun's face.

"Don't play the innocent. The pipe, of course."

"Ah, the pipe. If it is the pipe, you may have it and welcome."

Kōchiyama drew a yellow gleaming pipe out of his breast and, almost in the same movement, flung it at Ryōtetsu's face and went off with a quick step.

Ryōtetsu, rubbing the place where it had struck him, and grumbling as he went, picked up the pipe where it had fallen. He looked at it: the sword-and-plum-blossom crest scattered over it, a pipe of the most studied refinement — and of brass. He threw it down on the matting again in vexation, lifted a foot in its white tabi, and went through an exaggerated show of trampling on it. …

八

From that time the shaven-heads' begging of Narinaga's pipe stopped dead. The reason was that Narinaga's pipe had been proved to the whole company, by Sōshun and Ryōtetsu, to be brass.

And so the three loyal retainers, who had for a time deceived Narinaga by passing a brass pipe off as gold, ordered Sumiyoshiya Shichibei at the end of a council to prepare a pipe of solid gold once more. It was a pipe with the sword-and-plum-blossom crest scattered over it, not differing by a hair's breadth from the one Kōchiyama had taken. — Narinaga carried this pipe up to the castle in high feather, privately expecting to be begged for it by the shaven-heads.

And not one man came forward to ask to be given it. Even Kōchiyama, who had begged two solid gold pipes off him before, only gave him a hard sidelong look, bent slightly from the waist, and went away. The lords seated beside him, needless to say, said nothing about wishing to look at it or anything else, and held their peace. To Narinaga this was strange.

No — it was not merely strange. In the end it made him somehow uneasy. So when he saw Kōchiyama coming his way again, he spoke first this time.

"Sōshun. Shall I let you have a pipe?"

"No, I thank your lordship; I have already received one before this."

Sōshun must have supposed that Narinaga was making game of him. He said it with a sharp edge to his breath inside the courteous words.

Narinaga, hearing this, clouded over with a look of displeasure. Even the taste of the Nagasaki leaf was not to his liking now. For he suddenly felt that the power of the million koku, which he had felt until then, was vanishing away as idly as the smoke that came from the end of this pipe of solid gold. …

According to what the old people hand down, in the House of Maeda after Narinaga both Nariyasu and Yoshiyasu used brass pipes, every one of them. It may be that this was the result of some admonition left to his descendants by a Narinaga who had had his lesson from a pipe of solid gold.

(October, Taishō 5)

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before the coding of any hand was designed or dispatched (R04 §3, charter rule 8). Decisions and alternatives; no quality claims. Where a sentence is evaluative it carries internal-judgment-only inline. Numbering continues from T-kiseru-R04-v1, which ended at D31.

The thing this half of the story is made of

Sections 一–二 were about objects and offices — the realia of a graded society. Sections 三–八 are about the grading itself: almost every speech is between men of different rank, and the Japanese says so in the grammar rather than in the words. Three quarters of what follows is one problem in different clothes.

• D32 — 「何用じゃ。」 What is your business? The じゃ is a lordly copula: the sentence is two words and the whole of the rank is in the ending. English has nothing at the verb. What carries it here is brevity and the absence of any softener — a lord who does not say may I ask. Rejected: What is it you want? (petulant), What would you have? (costume drama).
• D33 — 「宗俊御願がございまする」, the self-naming. Sōshun refers to himself by name rather than with a pronoun, which is itself a deference device. English has this, exactly — Sōshun has a request to make — and it cost nothing. Worth recording because it is the one Japanese footing device in this passage that transfers without being re-spent as anything else.
• D34 — ございまする / まする / ましょう, twelve times. The archaic-deferential predicate ending. English has no inflection for it. At three of the four places I reached for my lord / your lordship at the end or the front of the clause — a word the Japanese does not have, put in to carry a syllable the Japanese does have. At 「有難うございまする」 I did not, and wrote I am deeply obliged, where the deference is carried by lexis instead. I could not find a third method.
• D35 — 「別儀でもございませんが、その御手許にございまする御煙管を、手前、拝領致しとうございまする。」 The hardest sentence in the story: four deference marks stacked on one request — the honorific prefix twice (御手許, 御煙管), the humble first person (手前), the humble verb (拝領致し), the deferential ending. English took one of the four (I should like to receive it of you, where receive … of you is the humble verb) and re-spent one more as my lord. The prefixes and the pronoun went. There is no version of this sentence in English that is as deferential as the Japanese without becoming a joke, and every alternative I tried — that most honourable pipe, this unworthy person — became one. internal-judgment-only.
• D36 — 御 and お, seven times. 御手許, 御煙管, 御願, 御勝手, 御承知, お煙管 ×2. Every one is lost. The prefix has no propositional content — 御煙管 is the pipe, not the honourable pipe — and English's pre-nominal slot, though free, has no device that lives in it: your gracious pipe reads as burlesque and the honourable pipe as chinoiserie. The one place I got any of it back is D37.
• D37 — 「へん、御勝手になせえましだ。」 Hah. Do as your honour pleases. Sōshun says this to an equal in mock-honorifics — an honorific prefix and a fake-polite imperative with a flat plain copula stuck on the end. Here the English does have a device, because your honour used to an equal is already ironic in English; it is the single site in the story where a prefix survives, and it survives because the source's use of it is a joke and English's device for that joke exists.
• D38 — 貴公 / 手前 / 己 / わし / 私 / こちとら, thirteen places. Continued from D21, and the finding is the same and total: all thirteen become you and I. The one that hurts is 手前, which Sōshun uses to Ryōtetsu as a contemptuous you (手前が貰わざ, 手前たちの思惑, 手前にくれてやらあ) and to Narinaga as a self-abasing I (手前、拝領致しとうございまする, 手前はもう). One Japanese word doing opposite social work in one story, and English has a single word for each end of it and no way to show they are the same word. I put contempt into the surrounding syntax where I could — What you fellows would think, you may have it and welcome — which is a different device at a different place, not a rendering of 手前.
• D39 — 「おお、とらす。持ってまいれ。」 Ho. You shall have it. Take it and go. とらす is the lord's own bestowing verb; 持ってまいれ puts a humble verb into an imperative aimed downward. English has you shall have it, which does carry the grant, and nothing at all for the second. The three-beat shape is kept because the abruptness is the rank.
• D40 — 「煙管は宗俊の坊主にとらせたぞよ。」 I have let the shaven-head Sōshun have the pipe. ぞよ is a lordly-archaic final particle; 「宗俊の坊主」 puts the man's name in apposition to his class, which is condescension by naming. English keeps the second (the shaven-head Sōshun) and loses the first. Rejected: have the pipe, so I have (dialect), an exclamation mark (punctuation standing in for morphology, which RS-20260812-unlicensed-typography is about).
• D41 — 「御前は…仰せられまする。」 The gentleman-in-waiting quoting his master. Two honorifics for the lord (御前 as a title, 仰せられ as deign to say) and a deferential ending, all pointed at an absent third person. English took His lordship says and such is his lordship's command — the same word twice, because English has one word here and Japanese has three graded ones. The repetition is deliberate and is a loss, not a decision.
• D42 — 拝領, seven more times (D30's class). 一–二 already handled this word three different ways and the log recorded that as a violation of C15's one-handling-per-class constraint. Knowing the whole work did not fix it: ask to be given (三 and 八), receive it of you (三), be given it myself (七), ask for the pipe (六). The reason is now clear and is worth stating: 拝領 names a single act that English splits by who is doing it — the soliciting, the granting, the receiving — and no English word covers all three. This is a case where the class cannot be handled uniformly, as against the cases where the translator merely fails to. This is the same shape as the finding in ARM-dakghar about unifying a recurrent word across a long work, and it comes out the other way: there, unification was possible and cost a later line; here it is not possible at all.
• D43 — 後の祭. the festival is over. The idiom is after the festival = too late. English has a day after the fair, which is the same idea in the same register and was the first choice; rejected because the story is set among men whose working life is festivals and attendances at court, and fair imports an English village. The literal is doing the idiom's work here only because the source's own furniture supports it.
• D44 — 「金箔」がつきすぎている. he had rather too much gilt on him. 金箔がつく is to have gold leaf on one, i.e. to have acquired a reputation. The pun with the gold pipe is in the source and survives in English, which is luck rather than skill.
• D45 — 鼻を明かしてやる. take the shine out of them. Literally to make his nose flare = to outwit and humiliate. English idiom chosen for register; the nose is lost, and in a story with a pipe held to a man's nose two pages earlier, that is a real echo gone.
• D46 — the three officials' titles. 御用部屋 / 御納戸掛 / 御勝手方 → Office of Affairs / Keeper of the Wardrobe / Comptroller of the Household. All three have the honorific 御 fossilised into the office name, where it marks nothing about the speaker; they are excluded from the census by rule, and I mention them because the same character is doing two different jobs in one text.
• D47 — 「いえ、難有うございますが、手前はもう、以前に頂いて居りまする。」 The last speech, and the story turns on its manner: perfectly correct deference with a blade in it. No, I thank your lordship; I have already received one before this. The Japanese carries the edge in the excess of the politeness — four deference marks for a refusal. English cannot be excessive here without becoming servile, so the edge is left to the narrator's next sentence, which states it. The source shows and the translation tells; the loss is the whole point of the ending, and I could not repair it.
• D48 — 斉泰, 慶寧. Read Nariyasu and Yoshiyasu. Left unglossed; the sentence is a pretended piece of local history and works on a reader who does not know who they are.

Sizes

4,617 source characters → 2,442 English words, counted from the body of each section with the section numbers and the dateline excluded: 三 543 · 四 242 · 五 376 · 六 372 · 七 538 · 八 371. Factor 0.529 words per source character, against R04-v1's 1,015 words from 1,734 characters (0.585) — the second half is dialogue-heavy, and dialogue is denser in Japanese than narration is.

With R04-v1 the completed work is 3,457 English words from 6,351 Japanese characters.