Friday, October 13, 2006

Kwaidan : Stories and studies of strange things

Today has been absolutely grand.
The students were all on some sport trip, so I studied a few Japanese verbs and then proceeded to research Obakemono; ghosts and spirits of the Japanese past and present. Ghost stories are everywhere, and I have taken a fasciantion to both that and Japanese children's stories.

The secretary and the vice-principal were very excited about me getting into the mysterious underground of their nation's tales. She proceeded to tell me a local ghost story called Yuurei taki (Ghost waterfall) in extremely broken English. Her extended pauses just added to the suspense, as I had to wait for her translation to find out what happened next. After she painstakingly related the story, she re-typed it into Yahoo Instranslator, and this is what it mangled out:

There was young mother named "Yasumoto Masaru" in old days in Kurosaka-mura in a prefectural border of Tottori and Okayama.
The friends who worked overtime in the sewing factory which she commits at the night of a certain summer had a chat, but will say that I "contribute money together if I return to here with an offertory box of 瀧山神社 and will give a reward to the person at suggestion of a woman of そのなかの seniority.
When she who was a bride of a poor farming family wants to let my child eat a delicious thing, I come forward and will go to a test of a courage. I ran in a dark road at night hard and was going to return in delight when she who arrived at an offertory box "was successful".
When go by 瀧 on the way; from the back "leave" it!  I felt like having heard a mysterious terrible voice of ", but I covered my ears desperately and returned on the run to a factory.
When I finally opened a door of a factory, one of the women who waited screamed.
Her back was bloody. 
It was assumed by her, and the neck of the baby who should have slept peacefully disappeared as picked off by someone.

Disclaimer : 'tis a pity that you didn't get to hear the real story, cause it's actually very good. But bad computerised English always makes for easy humour.

2 comments:

partieweirdo said...

what a macarb story! Its very Edgar Allen Poe, isn't is?

partieweirdo said...

schweet.