This English was drafted by keikaku, a translation engine running on Meta's models. Before a line was drafted, it wrote an analysis of the book, its people and its tone, and that analysis steered every stage: the draft, the two readings against the Japanese, and the editing. It is published here in full, with the voice the draft was written in.
If you'd read this story differently, start your own edition and steer it. Or go back to the translation.
keep Nekohachi's patter as work, not local colour
His banter on the tram in paragraphs 2 to 10 is not decoration before the serious part begins; it is the act itself, carried on in public because passengers have become an audience and a comeback is professionally compulsory. Again at the meeting he tests jokes, misapplies the borrowed word "situation" (paragraphs 67 to 69), apologises, recovers, and feels the flatness when は、は、は does not come (paragraph 63). If English tidies this into witty repartee it ennobles him; if it renders it as broad dialect comedy it does to him exactly what his audiences do.
In the English: he must never become quaint Cockney or stage-Japanese. Use dropped, run-on, self-interrupting colloquial syntax, repetitions and verbal tics in place of the sentence-ending な and the self-deprecating でげす forms, and let the dignity show through competence and generosity, not through making his grammar more respectable.
keep the ramble, because the ramble is the consciousness
The narration stays glued to Nekohachi's mind, and that mind does not proceed: on the tram it slides from a heckle to why a comedian must not laugh, to protecting a voice he does not drink for, to caterpillars in a ditch and cutworms that, like thieves and like himself, work only at night (paragraphs 10 to 14). The garden returns at every pressure point (paragraph 20, paragraphs 31 to 33, paragraph 100, paragraph 158, paragraphs 172 to 173) and is still what he offers the departing gentlemen at his own gate (paragraph 182). A fluent version that breaks this into themed paragraphs, or clarifies the transitions, has rationalised away the man.
In the English: do not iron out the long, associative sentences in which cabbages, a bath, a fee and a son succeed one another, and do not cut the lists. Keep the repetitions - animals, vegetables, children, money - as repetitions: they are Berman's networks, the web the story is made of, not redundancy to be varied away.
let 'The Tiger' stay a clumsy paraphrase, not a set piece
Half the story is a second-hand retelling of Kume's tale of a comic actor cast as a tiger whose child finds him weeping in the wings (paragraphs 48 to 90). It would be easy to polish this into a moving story-within-the-story. In the text it arrives as reported talk, interrupted, jargon-dusted (シチュエイション, バック), and judged thin by everyone present. Its power for Nekohachi is precisely that this mediocre fiction has got his life: four sons, a gifted twelve-year-old he has moved to the suburbs to keep away from the yose (paragraph 50, paragraphs 93 to 95). Prettify the paraphrase and his response looks disproportionate; sentimentalise his response and the literati's cool verdict loses its sting.
In the English: keep the embedded summary flat and a little long-winded, keep its pathos unlyrical, and keep Nekohachi's interventions in his own terms (a father should not let the child see it) rather than translating them into the group's critical vocabulary. Let the reader feel the identification before Nekohachi names 悲哀 for himself.
A second reader, who read the Japanese without seeing the reading above, put the heart of the story differently. keikaku drafted with both in mind.
The collision of languages is the action: close third-person narration saturated with Nekohachi's Edokko yose patter (でげす, な, self-deprecating jokes, internal 洒落 he performs even to himself) set against the literati's imported jargon (シチュエイション, バック, 現実主義/具体) that he literally cannot parse. He is never off stage—he swallows '小奈良の小大仏' (paragraph 8), turns a tram ride into a 高座 (paragraphs 5 to 9), negotiates every humiliation as a gag—while they study that very compulsion as '悲哀' in Kume's '虎'.
Strip the register gap and the plot (a mimic taken to a research society) has no tension left: his mishearings of 'situation' as a predicament he is trapped in (paragraph 53), his gratitude at being quoted back as criticism (paragraphs 79 to 82), and his final triumph in performance (paragraphs 124 to 136) all only register because we hear him thinking and speaking in a different tongue from theirs.
In the English: Keep two audible Englishes unblended: Nekohachi in a working, comic, self-interrupting stage patter full of swallowed retorts and asides, the writers in flat, borrowed critical abstraction; never polish either into the same literary fluency, and let the reader feel when neither fully understands the other.
The mirrored tiger must stay unresolved: Nekohachi condemns Fukai for letting his child see the debasing role (paragraphs 91 to 95) and has moved to the suburbs to hide his own, yet eagerly performs, fishes for praise and a fee (paragraphs 171 to 177), and misreads Kume's anonymous self-denunciation as proof Kume is a wit after his own heart (paragraphs 103 to 110). The text itself flags that even his grief-stricken face is partly exaggeration he half-knows about (paragraph 91), and ends not in renunciation—he plans to retell the novel to his wife (paragraph 188)—but in a 'rare' humble, human feeling (paragraph 185) alongside gas-lamp advertising and the night's two coins.
If the translation settles him as either dignified artist-victim (the literati's '悲哀' made true) or comic butt the reader pities from above, it picks the side the story refuses: his sorrow is real and performed at once, his pride in hiding the act from his sons coexists with delight that '例の猫八' is known (paragraphs 37 to 39), and that undecidability is what the whole mirrored structure was built to produce.
In the English: Hold the double exposure in the English: render his self-recognitions and the closing humility straight, without irony markers, ennoblement, or a softened/resolved ending, so the reader—not the prose—decides how much is insight and how much is act.
The crux of 『猫八』 is a man hearing his own life told back to him as somebody else's mediocre fiction, and being unable to say so in any language the room will accept. Nekohachi is a yose mimic, half-crippled by rheumatism for over a decade, who earns his living imitating cats fighting, birds, insects and latterly aeroplanes, and who has moved his family to an inconvenient suburb precisely so that his gifted twelve-year-old son will not watch him do it and will not become a second Nekohachi (paragraph 50, paragraph 95). Taken by the patron Takami to a writers' study group, he listens to a flat paraphrase of Kume's 「虎」, about a comic actor cast as a tiger, proud of the applause, and found after the curtain by his small son, crying in the costume: "the tiger and the human child wept together for a while in the shadow of the dark scenery" (paragraph 87). Everyone present agrees the piece is shallow, deft, thin in background. Nekohachi sits with one hand on the tatami and thinks it is about him. A translation stands or falls on whether that recognition lands without ever being upgraded into insight: he does not achieve self-knowledge in the story, he achieves a feeling - 悲哀, a word he has literally just learned from the man across the room (paragraphs 56 to 57) - and he carries it home past the sleeping tenement like something he has been paid in.
Everything follows from keeping the two registers unmerged. Nekohachi's spoken voice is Edo working patter: ingratiating, self-deprecating, built on な and でげす, forever turning a slight into a routine - the heckler on the tram must be answered because the other passengers have become an audience (paragraphs 5 to 10), the fat acquaintance must be greeted with 大山大将 and a lie about another engagement to save face (paragraphs 23 to 26), a lord's carriage must be met by borrowing a kimono from the blacksmith's wife and pretending to come back from the bath (paragraph 159). This is not colour; it is labour, and it is also evasion. Against it stands the literati's talk, abstract, loanworded and cool: シチュエイション, バック, 現実主義, 具体的, personality as the backing of a work (paragraphs 103 to 117). Nekohachi understands none of the terms and most of the substance. He thinks "situation" may mean a tight spot, which for him it does: he is はめられて, fitted into the patrons' favour until he can no longer move (paragraph 53). The translation must let the reader hear that he is misusing their words and meaning something truer with them, without a narrator stepping in to award him the point. Equally, the gentlemen must not be flattened into villains. They are mildly kind, mildly bored, they feed him餅菓子 instead of the drink he refuses, the host's wife talks gardens and children with him (paragraphs 119 to 120), Takami quietly presses two yen on him outside (paragraph 176) - and three of them walk out in the middle of the most honest story he ever tells (paragraph 161). Condescension here is structural, not snarling, and English that gives them sneers, or gives him a rebuttal, destroys it.
The narration is the third voice and the treacherous one, because it keeps slipping into Nekohachi's own idiom and self-justifications: the long tram reverie that moves from why a comedian must not laugh, to the voice he protects by not drinking, to green caterpillars shaken into a ditch and stamped on (paragraphs 10 to 13); the sudden boilerplate of Edo pride, no money kept overnight, born in Asakusa to a geisha mother (paragraph 158), set down right beside the admission that he beats his wife for trying to save (paragraph 175). The narrator neither endorses nor corrects any of this. That evenness is what a fluent draft will most want to fix, by making the interior passages lyrical where the story turns sad and brisk where it is comic. Resist it. The prose should stay dogged, repetitive and faintly garrulous even at paragraph 175, when he wants, in hiding, to embrace the tiger and weep for a while: the bathos is the emotion, and ennobling it into a climax would be the exact falsification the story is about.
Against the stage the text sets the allotment, and it must be translated as seriously as the tiger. Digging a ditch along the rows so the caterpillars roll in (paragraph 12), watching for cutworms that work nights as he does (paragraph 13), worrying on the tram home that two or three seedlings' roots will be cut before he gets back (paragraph 20), the surplus cucumbers and aubergines he gives away (paragraph 11, paragraph 182): this is the one place he is competent without being laughed at, and the one generosity nobody applauds. Note that he ends the evening not with a resolution to quit - he does wish, at paragraph 177, that he could stop tomorrow - but by advertising his vegetables to the departing writers at his own dark gate, and planning to make his wife taste what he has felt (paragraphs 182 to 188). The shape is a long evening that changes nothing except the temperature of a man's self-pity, and translations that sharpen it into an arc of awakening will have imported the 落ち he himself kept asking for and was laughed at for expecting (paragraphs 82 to 85).
Repetitions are load-bearing throughout: the animal catalogue that runs from tiger, monkey and pig (paragraph 179) through his frog-origin story (paragraphs 141 to 145) to the firefly and the colic-worm he cannot imitate and blusters about (paragraphs 147 to 153); the children and the dreaded second Nekohachi; the fee that must never be named and is always on his mind (paragraph 171, paragraphs 175 to 177); the 気違いか猫八のような化け物 of the opening joke (paragraph 6), madmen and monsters as the only residents of Sugamo, which the whole story quietly tests. Keep them unvaried. Keep his set-pieces - the caged nightingale, the valley-crossing, the mating cranes, the earthworm research that got him taken for a burglar (paragraph 62, paragraphs 124 to 130) - as performance, with the room's inadequate laughter left inadequate. And keep the unglamorous furniture: Kōdan Club magazine, the gas lamp he has petitioned to advertise himself with (paragraph 186), the leftover cakes in his pocket with the borrowed magazines. This is a Taishō naturalist story whose pity works by inventory, not by statement.
Called: 猫八 / ねこはち (narrator, Takami, study group, stout woman as 猫八さん); 大将 (Takami to Nekohachi (paragraph 2); Nekohachi to stout woman (paragraph 24)); 例の猫八 (Takami introducing him (paragraph 37)); 猫八君 (knowledge-face man, near-sighted man (paragraph 79, paragraph 97)); 江戸屋猫八 (narrator for him (paragraph 185)).
How they speak: Edo working yose patter in speech and in much of his thought: な, でげす, self-interruption, swallowed retorts, ingratiating jokes; never literary
Called: 高見 / 高見さん (narrator and Nekohachi); 先生 (Nekohachi to Takami (paragraph 3 ff.)); 小大仏の先生 / 小奈良の小大仏 (Nekohachi in thought (paragraph 8, paragraph 14)).
How they speak: easy casual standard; mildly kind patron speech, no jargon
Called: 乗客ども / 乗客 (narrator); 筋向うに座を占めてこちらを見詰めていた男 (narrator (paragraph 9)).
How they speak: laughter only: は、は、はア
Called: かかア (Nekohachi (paragraph 8)); 女房 (narrator and Nekohachi); かの女 (じょ) (n/a).
How they speak: no direct speech; reported as Edokko wife who wants to save
Called: 家族 / 子供 (narrator and Nekohachi); 総領 (14) / 次男 (12) / 男の子が四人 (narrator/Nekohachi (paragraph 50, paragraphs 92 to 95)).
How they speak: child speech reported only; second son mimics father
Called: 隣り近所 / 長屋のものら (narrator/Nekohachi); 鍛冶屋と山の神 / 女髪結い / 電車の車掌 / 目ッかちで跛足の蜆屋 (Nekohachi in thought (paragraph 158)).
How they speak: no direct speech; seen in Nekohachi's boastful inventory
Called: でぶでぶ女 / 太った図体 (narrator); 大山大将 (Nekohachi (paragraph 24)); 猫八さん (stout woman (paragraph 23)).
How they speak: cheerful passing greeting; gentle voice contrasted with bulk
Called: 亭主 (Nekohachi joking (paragraph 28)).
How they speak: no speech
Called: 六七名の一座 / 皆 / 先生方 (narrator and Nekohachi).
How they speak: flat literary-critical standard with loanwords; cool, mildly kind, easily bored
Called: 当家の主人 / 主人 / 御主人 (narrator and others).
How they speak: explanatory literary standard; reads and glosses the Tiger at length
Called: 久米氏 / 久米 (host and group).
How they speak: quoted fiction is deft but thin; anonymous review is harsh self-denunciation
Called: 三枚目俳優 / 主人公 / 深井 / 深井君 (host/narrator paraphrase and group).
How they speak: paraphrased earnest-troupe speech, not distinguished from host's summary
Called: 八歳になる子 / 自分の子供 / 人間の子 (host paraphrase); お父さん (child to Fukai (paragraph 87)).
How they speak: no direct speech beyond お父さん
Called: 天神さまみたような顔つきの人 / 天神さま / 天神様 (narrator/Nekohachi).
How they speak: earnest critical standard with 悲哀, 皮肉; explains Nekohachi back to himself
Called: 座長 (host paraphrase).
How they speak: hearty troupe encouragement in paraphrase
Called: 五分刈り...坊さんらしいの / 善智識顔 / 知識がお / 智識がお (narrator); 君 (this man to Nekohachi (paragraph 149)).
How they speak: cutting critical standard: 浅薄, 通俗化, 堕落; sneers through nose (paragraph 59)
Called: 劇評家 (host paraphrase).
How they speak: smart teasing reported speech
Called: ひどい近眼らしい人 / 近眼 (narrator).
How they speak: blunt critical standard; asks Nekohachi if he despises his own art; first to leave
Called: 碧瑠璃園 / へきるりえん (Tenjin-like man (paragraph 61)).
How they speak: no speech; name as insult
Called: 徳富蘆花 / とくとみろか (Tenjin-like man (paragraph 61)).
How they speak: no speech
Called: 刑事 (Nekohachi anecdote (paragraph 62)).
How they speak: no quoted speech; official challenge
Called: 由井の役 (troupe talk in paraphrase (paragraph 66)).
How they speak: no speech
Called: 劇の女主人公 (host paraphrase (paragraph 72)).
How they speak: no speech; screams/leapt-upon function
Called: ずッと若い人 (narrator (paragraph 73)).
How they speak: blunt youthful standard
Called: Ｔ君 (host (paragraph 47, paragraph 80)).
How they speak: postcard request only
Called: 陶淵明 / とうえんめい (Nekohachi in thought (paragraph 100)).
How they speak: classical Chinese in Japanese reading
Called: 昔の三馬 (Nekohachi (paragraph 104)).
How they speak: no speech
Called: 書生らしい人 / 神経質 (narrator).
How they speak: nervous idealist standard: 人物が裏づけ, 理想主義者的に; asks about backing by character
Called: 主人の細君 / 奥さん / かの女 (じょ) (narrator/Nekohachi (paragraphs 119 to 120, paragraph 172)).
How they speak: warm domestic standard
Called: 八公 (Nekohachi performing (paragraph 155)).
How they speak: beranmei downtown patter in performance
Called: 宮様がた / ○○○様 / ○○家 / ○○子爵 (Nekohachi anecdotes (paragraph 155, paragraph 159, paragraph 168)).
How they speak: reported stiff house speech: すぐ来るように, いくらで来てくれるか
In the English: Keep one plain English set for the plot-work and do not vary: ditch, ridge, caterpillar/worm, seedling/root, cucumber, eggplant/aubergine. The garden is his competence and his alibi at every pressure point.
In the English: Keep the catalogue unvaried and unlyrical: tiger, cat, frog, monkey, pig, boar?/crane/nightingale/cricket/mole-cricket/earthworm, aeroplane/motorcar, firefly/colic-worm. Let tiger stay tiger, frog stay frog.
In the English: Keep child/children/sons and the fixed phrase second Nekohachi identical each time; keep the ages flatly stated.
In the English: Keep money words blunt and repeated: fee, wooden gate charge, contribution, two yen coins, overnight money. Do not euphemise the fretting.
In the English: Keep hiai as sorrow/grief unvaried once adopted; keep situation/background/compromise/personality/concrete as English-derived abstractions set against his patter, with his misuses left visible.
In the English: Keep madman/monster/beast-fool wording stable; keep teasing/heckling/fooling and compromise/flattery wording stable.