Finally on to Part III.
I wanted to put a little parallelism in the Shinkasen scene. The opening chapter of the book, directly following the prologue, she is on a JAL flight and confused by the announcement; "Shiito beruto wo shikkari o-shime kudasai…"
Which is also a setup; her friend in Boston explains the first words are "seat belt," as translated through kana into Japanese. In the next scene, she's confronted by several serious men saying, “Kochira Ashina Fokusu-san desu ne?” in her direction. (The name of her alter-ego, rendered into katakana, would beアシーナー フォックス according to an online converter. I've omitted the lengthened vowels and otherwise simplified slightly to make it even slightly plausible that she eventually figures it out.)
And, yes, this is Scene Building II. I've answered so many Scene Building I questions over at Quora. People keep asking, "How do I write a scene where..." and the answer almost always includes, "find a way to dramatize it." Find the conflict, find the stakes, find what gets the reader involved in reading to the end to figure out what is going to happen.
But, you see, in the length of a novel, not all scenes are like this. Not all scenes are directly load-bearing. There's a pattern of stress/relax, sometimes built into try/fail cycles; it can also be considered as action/reaction cycles. A big action sequence when things are happening quickly and big developments in the plot are flying by is followed by a recovery scene where the characters take a breather, take stock, discuss what the heck just happened. Oh, and maybe move the B plot (particularly the romance plot) ahead a little.
So not all scenes have a primary purpose of being dramatic and moving the plot forward. As much as I'm not in the mood for writing a slow scene, I need a slow scene for the opening of Part III for several reasons. I'm coming off the last exercise scene, her big "Drago!" moment.
I'm also changing venue. Changing style; the Kyoto scenes are traditional Japan, slow walks, lots of food, and of course working out...during revisions I found a place to do a total Karate Kid shot. Tokyo -- this is where we ramp up to full spy stuff, fancy parties and fancier dining, fast cars, fast-talking, and so forth.
You can transition from one place to another in the white space; "The next day we were in Tokyo." You can transition over a paragraph. But it isn't always the right choice. Sometimes you have to feel the journey. "Five weeks later Frodo and Sam arrived at the Black Gate." Yeah, doesn't work.
But back to Japanese. I'd looked around, and I'd found a recording on YouTube of the actual announcements in 2019 on the Nozomi from Kyoto to Tokyo. It was even subtitled. In kanji of course.
If there had been no other way I could have got out my Kodansha's and tried to work it out character by character. There was audio, but this was an actual recording inside a train and it wasn't exactly clear. Ah, but I also found a discussion on a language forum with some examples of other train announcements.
So that began a cycle of making my best guess based on what I understood of Japanese pronunciation and grammar, putting that reversed into GoogleTranslate so if I came close enough it would show me choices in kanji, then comparing the kanji. Fortunately, a chunk of the announcement particles and verb ending stuff and I did once memorize my hiragana. Like, I can definitely see "-imasu" at the end of the phrase. And, doesn't
just leap right out?
It takes longer to say than it did to do. At the end of it, all that is going in the book is, “Kyō mo, shinkansen o go riyō kudasaimashite…”
(The full phrase is Kyō mo, shinkansen o go riyō kudasaimashite, arigatōgozaimasu. Which idiomatically is "Thank you for riding the shinkansen today" but in Japanese is a bit more like, "From today, shinkansen using-please thank you for what you are doing.")
And as it turns out, the english announcements were recorded by a certain Donna Burke, an Australian singer and seiyu who was, in fact, the voice of the iDroid from Metal Gear Solid.
Which is very close to the James Bond beat I'm trying to work in here. (Since no scene ever does just one thing, this is also a short reflection showing how Penny is starting to adjust to becoming Athena Fox, continuing set-up on a "robots and neon" running gag, and a brief but extremely necessary discussion of the Atsuta Shrine, specifically, how Kusanagi no Tsurugi is claimed to be kept there but nobody but high-ranking Shinto priests have ever seen it personally.
And, yes, I wanted to have her anime friend in Boston jump in with a "Major Kusanagi? I know her!" But I can't afford to get that far into anime/manga so there's no way of properly exploiting that. And although it is a fun character beat, it wouldn't mean anything to half the audience without further explanation.
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