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

祝盃 — The Toast · Kikuchi Kan, 1920 · T-shukuhai-R06-v1

Source. Kikuchi Kan 菊池寛 (1888–1948), 「祝盃」, first printed in 『電氣と文藝』, September 1920. Copy-text workshop/translations/shukuhai/source-aozora-60665.txt — Aozora Bunko work id 60665, set from 『菊池寛文學全集』第三巻 (文藝春秋新社, 1960), decoded from Shift_JIS. Units [1]–[45], 2,816 Japanese characters. Public domain in Japan: Kikuchi died 1948-03-06, term expired 1999, and the 2018 extension did not revive expired terms.

Regime. R06, lead single pass, source only, no revision pass. The whole story, straight through. 2,816 Japanese characters → 1,513 English words.

Cost. $0. Lead translation is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: none, and the basis is that nothing was reachable to be contaminated by. No English rendering of this story was read, sought, or stored before translating, and no search of any kind was run on the title before the draft was written — the source text was reached from the Aozora author index by length and dialogue count, not by reputation. Whether any English rendering exists at all is measured after this file is committed, and the measurement (or the finding that no comparator is reachable) is recorded on the study limb's result page.

Copy-text. One witness. The Aozora file is set from a 1960 collected edition, not from the 1920 magazine printing, and no second freely reachable text of this story was found; the 初出 in 『電氣と文藝』 is not online. This translation therefore stands on an unchecked copy-text, which is a weaker position than the project's Turkish, Bengali and Finnish spans, all of which were collated. Nothing in the study limb turns on a disputed reading, because there is no second reading to dispute; that is a limitation, not a reassurance.

CORRECTION, 2026-08-12, added after the freeze. The paragraph above is wrong on its central fact: a second witness exists and is freely reachable. 『道理 : 小説集』(春陽堂, 1921), the story's first appearance in book form, is on NDL Digital Collections under a Public Domain Mark at pid/3462043, pp. 191–200, as page images. It was located while measuring contamination — that is, after this file and the whole of E-20260812d had been frozen and run. The collation has since been done and is at workshop/translations/shukuhai/collation.md: five divergences from the 1960 text, none of them on a site the experiment measured, and one of them — [11] 興味 against 意味 — falls on the very sentence log entry D12 below spends its length adjudicating, and settles it a third way that D12 did not consider. The translation and the log are not amended; they are the frozen record of what was done under a stated copy-text, and correcting them retrospectively would destroy that record. Method note (bmn).

The translation

The Toast

[1] The three of them, coming away from Kuno's house, walked slowly from Sanchōme toward the cutting. Five or six years before, when they had been at the First Higher School, there was no counting the times they had gone along this same street at a brisker pace.

[2] In those days Keikichi and Kuno — and Aoki too, who had now turned up in Tokyo out of nowhere after so long — had each in his own way been full of fight. Of the three it was Aoki who had been surest of himself. There was a touch of genius in the way he carried himself and in the things he did, and everyone had thought his future the most brilliant of them all.

[3] Keikichi and Kuno had come, without noticing when, to allow Aoki a point or two above themselves. But fate did not come round the way they had all expected. Aoki, of whom the most had been hoped, had in the very year he entered the university made it impossible for himself to stay at the school by his own misconduct, had behaved very shabbily toward Keikichi and Kuno into the bargain, and had buried himself away in a corner of the San'in country where the sun seemed never to reach. Some rumour that he was keeping a little private English school down there had come to Keikichi from no one in particular. And now that same Aoki had come up to Tokyo without a word of warning and called on him.

[4] Just as Aoki had disappointed everyone and gone under, so Keikichi and Kuno had come out into the literary world further than they had ever expected to.

[5] "Since I have set my heart on literature, I should like at the least to do some translating and make a name that way."

[6] Keikichi, who had once thought thoughts as modest as that, now held, without ever having looked for it, a considerable place among the new writers. As for Kuno, he had got out into the literary world a full year earlier than Keikichi had.

[7] Kuno and Keikichi walked on without speaking. Between the three of them, who five or six years ago had differed in nothing, there was now, socially, a line clearly drawn.

[8] Say Kuno Toshio, and any young man with a taste for literature will at least know the name. Say Aoki Yoshio, and who is there who would know it? Five or six years ago that name had been spoken among their schoolfellows with respect, and with a faint something like wonder besides; now it had become the name of an ordinary man whom nobody knew.

[9] "I say. It's been settled that I'm to go out to Taiwan. There's a research section at the Government-General, you see. That's where I'm going."

[10] Aoki said it as though to break the silence of the three of them, in the beautiful, low voice he had always had.

[11] "Is that so. Well, that's splendid," Kuno and Keikichi said in the same breath. But neither of them meant anything by it. That Aoki, who had looked as if he had the makings of a real thinker in him, should be taking up odd-job work in a research section or whatever it was, darkened both their hearts.

[12] The three walked on again in silence. Anything said in memory of their First Higher School days would, with the three of them standing as they now stood, have come out as irony every time, and so neither Keikichi nor Kuno began on it.

[13] What Keikichi wanted far more to talk about, in any case, was his own first collection of stories, which it had just been settled would come out from B——. Since the thing had been agreed the day before, it was too much of a joy to keep shut up in his own breast. Though the joy of a first collection going out into the world is not a thing anyone can be made to understand who has never had it.

[14] "My book, you know. It's settled at last. I've gone and let B—— have it."

[15] Keikichi said it at last, in a low voice, to Kuno. Kuno, who by the look of him had been stuck for a subject for some time, took it up like a man let off.

[16] "Mm! From B——, is it, that's good. How many are they printing?"

[17] "Twenty-five hundred."

[18] "I thought as much. Mine was the same. Is it Migita Shigeru doing the binding, as usual? Plain work, and none the worse."

[19] "Does one have to see to the proofs oneself?"

[20] "With B——, so long as you look at the first proofs, they'll read the second for you at their end."

[21] Kuno, who had already brought out two or three books with B——, said it with the air of a senior.

[22] Keikichi knew perfectly well what talk of this kind must be doing to Aoki's mind, and still he could not leave off. There was no measuring how much more this talk commanded the interest of the two of them than Aoki's going to Taiwan did.

[23] Keeping up the same constrained silence, the three came out at Ikenohata and turned in at a café there. Sitting in a café, at any rate, made the time easier to get through.

[24] For a while the talk went back to their higher-school days again. How greedy each of them had been; what shifts they had gone to for the money for a single plate of cutlets; how they had sold off even their textbooks and eaten and drunk it away — subjects of that kind were the ones the three could give themselves to, as things stood, with the easiest minds. But Kuno and Keikichi, in the long city years since, had had their tastes refined by degrees, and without noticing it had stopped being satisfied by café cooking of this sort.

[25] That Aoki should be drinking his coffee and eating his food with the same eager manner as in their higher-school days darkened Keikichi's heart.

[26] Out of the café, the three trailed on and on as far as Hongō. It was still only about ten. But Keikichi and Kuno had had enough of the odd strain of being three.

[27] Yet at Sanchōme, when a tram came, Aoki still showed no sign of getting on. The three of them stood there ten minutes or so, vacantly. Aoki, up in Tokyo after however many years, may well have had all sorts of feelings rising in his breast. But Keikichi felt, and felt it quite strongly, that he wanted to see Aoki off and then talk about him with Kuno, the two of them together. And Aoki looked as if he had no intention of going home by himself.

[28] "If you take this tram, you won't have to change, will you."

[29] Keikichi thought it unkind of him, but it had slipped out before he could stop it. Aoki, as though he had at last made up his mind to go,

[30] "That's right! Well then, I'll say good night," he said, and having said it, with a sobriety that was only to be expected of him,

[31] "We may not meet again. I'm to leave sometime tomorrow," he said.

[32] Watching him from behind as he squared that small body of his and got on the tram, Keikichi felt a pure feeling for his old friend rise in him too.

[33] Once Aoki had been seen off, Kuno and Keikichi both felt easier, as if let out. Kuno spoke in a light tone, like a different man from the one he had been all evening.

[34] "Here! Let's have a soda water or something."

[35] "Mm. Let's."

[36] Keikichi understood how Kuno was feeling. Both of them wanted to talk out what they felt about Aoki.

[37] At a table in a café close by, Kuno sipped at the soda water the waitress brought as though it were a duty, and said:

[38] "That fellow Aoki hasn't changed in the least, has he."

[39] "That is what astonished me too. Not the least bit different from the old days," said Keikichi, who was entirely of the same mind.

[40] "Still, there's no telling, is there. That it should be Aoki of all people who fell out of the ranks."

[41] Saying that, Kuno drank his soda water off at a gulp.

[42] It was true. From their last year at the higher school and on into the time they moved up to the university, Kuno and Keikichi had both kept up a life every bit as wild and as slapdash as Aoki's. And yet, for all the dangerous bridges they had crossed, it could fairly be said that the two of them had got on in the world better than the schoolfellows who had studied seriously.

[43] "When you come to think of it, we've had the luck of it."

[44] Saying that, Keikichi drank his soda water off at a gulp too.

[45] It was soda water. But the two of them, unaware of it though they were, were raising a toast — to each other's good fortune.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written, frozen with it, before any evaluation of this translation is designed (charter §3, A4). Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

• D1 — the title. 「祝盃」 is the cup raised in celebration; 祝盃を挙げる is the fixed phrase the last sentence turns on. English "toast" carries both the act and the drink, and the story's point is that the drink was soda water — so The Toast keeps the turn. Rejected: The Congratulatory Cup (accurate, dead), Drinking to It (loses the noun the last line needs).
• D2 — [1] 切通し. Read as the Yushima cutting, a landmark on the walk down from Hongō to Ikenohata. Rendered "the cutting", a common noun, while 三丁目 / 池の端 / 本郷 stay as Sanchōme / Ikenohata / Hongō. The mixture is deliberate: 切通し is transparent in Japanese and "the cutting" is transparent in English, whereas the other three are opaque either way. Cost: an English reader cannot tell that the four are the same kind of thing.
• D3 — [1], [12] 一高. "The First Higher School." Kept, untranslated in sense: the institution's whole meaning here is that these three were the elect, and no English school supplies that without a false transposition ("our public-school days" was live and rejected — it moves the story to England).
• D4 — [2] 意気軒昂. "full of fight." Alternatives live: in high spirits (too mild), full of themselves (imports contempt the narrator has not yet earned).
• D5 — [3] 一目も二目も置いていた. A go metaphor: to concede an opponent a handicap stone. Rendered "to allow Aoki a point or two above themselves" — the doubling (一目も二目も) kept as "a point or two", the board lost. "conceded him a stone or two" was written and struck: the go sense is not available to an English reader without a note, and this regime writes no notes.
• D6 — [3] 日の目を見ないような山陰の田舎. A pun that does not survive. 山陰 is the province name and is literally mountain-shade; 日の目を見ない is never to see the light of day. Japanese gets the figure and the place name in one stroke. I wrote "buried himself away in a corner of the San'in country where the sun seemed never to reach" — the figure is kept and the name is kept, but an English reader cannot see that they are the same word. Nothing was invented to compensate.
• D7 — [3] 不義理な事をして. In this period the word usually means unpaid debts. I wrote "had behaved very shabbily toward", which keeps the moral charge and drops the money. "had left them badly out of pocket" was the specific alternative and was rejected as narrower than the Japanese.
• D8 — [5], [13], [24] the trailing が. Kikuchi ends [13] on a concessive particle with nothing after it. Kept as a sentence beginning "Though …" and running out — the English is as unfinished as the Japanese.
• D9 — [9], [14], [34] 僕ね / 僕の本ね / おい. These openings are almost pure phatic address. Rendered "I say", "My book, you know", "Here!" — each a different English device, because English has no single particle that does this work. Log for the study limb: I could not carry ね, よ, な, さ or か as such anywhere in this story. Every one of them became either nothing or a tag ("has he", "is it", "will you").
• D10 — the politeness level is flat and I did nothing about it. All three men speak plain form to one another throughout; there is no です/ます in any speech in the story. English cannot register that this is a choice rather than a default, so nothing marks it.
• D11 — [9] 総督府に調査部. "a research section at the Government-General." The colonial apparatus is named plainly; 調査部 is deliberately grey and I kept it grey.
• D12 — [11] 何の意味もなかった. "neither of them meant anything by it" — the Japanese is literally "there was no meaning in it for either of them", i.e. the words were empty, not that they intended nothing. Both readings are live; I took the second because the paragraph goes on to give the feeling the words did not carry.
• D13 — [15] 話題に困っていたらしい久野. らしい — inference from evidence. Rendered "who by the look of him had been stuck for a subject". The evidential is carried by a free English phrase in a slot English keeps open. Same device again at [27] for かも知れなかった ("may well have had") and at [33] for ように ("as if let out").
• D14 — [15] 解放されたように. Literally "as if released". "like a man let off" — colloquial, and it prepares [33]'s "as if let out", where I used the plainer word because the release there is real and not a figure of speech.
• D15 — [16]–[20] the publishing shop-talk. 初校 / 再校 are first and second proofs; 装幀 is the whole physical design of the book, for which "binding" is narrow and "design" is anachronistic. I took "binding" and accepted the narrowing.
• D16 — [21] 先輩ぶって. "with the air of a senior." 先輩 is the ranked relation the whole story is about, and English has only the word "senior", which is a comparison rather than a station. This is the sentence where the loss is largest.
• D17 — [26] ずるずるべったり. An adverb for something that drags on without a break being made. "trailed on and on" — the sound is gone; the shapelessness is kept.
• D18 — [38] 青木の奴. 奴 is familiar and slighting at once, and among old friends the slight is affection. "That fellow Aoki" — English can be familiar or slighting but has trouble being both in one word.
• D19 — [40] 落伍する. A military word: to fall out of the line of march. I kept the metaphor — "fell out of the ranks" — rather than "dropped out", because the story is about three men who set out together.
• D20 — [43] 俺達. The rough first person, and the first time in the story either man uses it. English has one "we". The roughness went into "we've had the luck of it" rather than into the pronoun, which is a displacement, not a carriage: nothing in the English marks that Kuno's companion has changed how he refers to the pair of them.
• D21 — [45] the last sentence. 訳だったのだ is a construction that says this, when you work it out, is what was going on. English has no particle for it; I put the whole weight on the dash and on withholding "to each other's good fortune" to the end.
• D22 — length. 2,816 Japanese characters → 1,513 English words. The story is almost all narration in long subordinated sentences plus very short speech; I did not break the long sentences, and where Kikuchi begins three sentences in a row with が I began three with "But"/"Yet"/"And".