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Words of Truth And Wisdom: The Regal Ayame Sohma
Written by Alethea and Athena Nibley

We've been wanting to talk about Ayame Sohma for a long time now, because looooong long ago when we translated volume 19 of Fruits Basket, we came across the chat column where Natsuki Takaya wonders what it's like to translate Ayame's lines. So I want to talk about that, but first I want to talk about Fruits Basket fortune-telling.

Those who have seen (or were kind enough to buy) the Fruits Basket fan book (in stores now!) know that one of the fun things they have to do in it is find out what your Chinese zodiac sign would be if the cat was included. Of course we had to try it ourselves, and our sign is the Rat. We were a little disappointed at first, because Yuki is such a common character. We wanted the Bird or something, you know? But it actually didn't take very long to figure out that, of all the cursed Fruits Basket characters, both of us are most like Yuki. And! according to the description, Ayame-types are perfect our perfect matches. This turned out to be surprisingly accurate when we started working on I Hate You More Than Anyone and both instantly fell in love with the main guy, Maki Sugimoto, who is also an Ayame type.

Of course, being the same type doesn't make them the same character, and one important difference between Sugimoto and Ayame is the way they talk. Sugimoto talks like a girl, and Ayame talks... like a king (you can't see it, but we have to make a little flourish with our hands before the “like a king” part). And actually, as far as conveying unusual speech patterns, Ayame is the easier one to translate.

We didn't always enjoy translating Ayame. He first shows up in volume four, and the page where he tells the story of how he convinced the teachers to let him have long hair took us twenty whole minutes! Twenty! We were so appalled, we were complaining to everybody. (One page usually takes us about three to five minutes to translate.) On the bright side, Ayame used some old-fashioned Japanese that we wouldn't have been able to figure out if we hadn't happened to be taking a class on Classical Japanese (it's like another language entirely) at the time, so when the Classical Japanese professors expressed their concern that most of their students thought the class was useless, we were able to testify to the contrary. (Elemental Gelade is another excellent example of a translating situation where that class comes in handy.)

But once we got used to him, Ayame became really fun to translate, and here's why: we come from a family of drama queens. Not only that, but they're intellectual drama queens, so they like to use fancy words, so we channel that energy when translating Ayame. I personally think that that trait isn't as strong in the two of us, because we weren't as big readers as our older sister and our dad, so our vocabulary isn't that great. And thus, we can't take all the credit for the quality of Ayame's dialogue, because there have been some great adaptation writers who are probably a big help in polishing it up. (I say probably because we... actually... haven't really read the final English verion. But people have said good things about Ayame, so he must have turned out well!) But we do enjoy writing in flowery language. Of course I can't do it now, because I'm under pressure. Like when somebody says, “You know Japanese? Say something!” And we're like, “Duhhhhh...”

Incidentally, we do have English copies of Fruits Basket 1 through 14, because we needed them for reference when we did the fan book (we lost our scripts in a tragic reformatting incident), so we're looking up all of Ayame's scenes for this, and we can't tell what we came up with and what must have been the adapter. But whoever came up with it, it's brilliant.

Anyway, in some ways, Ayame can be easier to translate than even characters who talk “normally.” I guess it's because of culture differences, but in Japanese, there are some words that are used by everybody, but their most accurate English equivalent isn't so common. “Iya” is a pretty good example of this. It literally means “disagreeable” or “unpleasant,” and is often found in the sentence “iya da!” or “iya desu!” meaning “(it/this/that/he/she/etc.) is disagreeable.” So, if we translated it literally, we'd have people like Kyo saying, “That is disagreeable!” all the time. That just doesn't sound right coming from Kyo, so we have to work around it. Usually it gets translated to “I hate it!” or a simple “no!” depending on the context. I wish “ew!” worked more often, because that's just fun. Ayame, on the other hand, can say, “That is disagreeable!” and no one would think twice, except perhaps to wonder why he didn't say “most disagreeable.” But then again, Ayame is more likely to choose “fuyukai” over the simple “iya” anyway.

Of course, Ayame, like all manga characters, does have his moments of choosing words that just baffle us. It's fun to look back on those times, sometimes. I remember when we were translating the scene where Ayame and Mine forced Tohru to wear “that one.” Once Tohru's changed, Ayame tells her to come out “zu-zui to.” To us, it sounds like he's saying, “come out with a zu-zui sound.” Well that's what dictionaries are for, after all, and fortunately we found it in a Japanese language dictionary. (Sometimes it's better not to find something in a J->E dictionary, because that allows for (or rather, forces) more originality in translating.) And so we learned that “zui to” means “without hesitation.” (The extra “zu” was Ayame being Ayame.) From there it seems like coming up with “forthwith” would have been super easy, but for some reason, at the time we translated it, we had no clue. So when we went to the thesaurus (thesauruses are our friends!) and found the word “forthwith,” we were like, “That's it! It's brilliant!” And we had a little party. Yay! (It's important to enjoy your work.)

Are there too many parentheticals in this column? Athena suggested naming it “The Regal Ayame Sohma (or Attack of the Parentheses),” but I thought that might be too long.

Where was I? Right. French. Those of you who have read the TOKYOPOP version of Fruits Basket know that, in it, Ayame spices up his dialogue with some occasional French. Ayame doesn't use French in the Japanese version--he uses English. Well you don't exactly sound very fancy if you're interjecting English phrases into your everyday English, do you? So we thought it would be a good idea to go with French, a la Miss Piggy of the Muppets. Anyone who grew up with the Muppets as we did knows that if you want to use a fancy language, you use French. And fortunately, all the editors and people along the way agreed, because when I think fancy king, I think Louis XIV of France.

It was pretty funny the first time he used English, though, because the word he used was “excellent.” So I turn to Athena (she's the one who took French in high school while I took Spanish) and say, “What's French for excellent?” “Ek-se-LAHN.” “How do you spell that?” “Excellent.” “Dang it!” So we changed it to “magnifique.” Don't know how it ended up in the final version, though, because we don't remember exactly where it was so we can't find it.

In conclusion, Ayame's lines aren't any harder to translate than anybody else's, but they are a lot more fun. Our only regret, as was pointed out to us by the King of the Cosmos in Katamari Damacy, is that we didn't have him use the royal “we.”


PS: Let me explain the picture we're using for this column. Our little sister spent some time teaching English in China a few years ago, and since she knew we were translating Fruits Basket (and was actually familiar with the series), when she saw a wall hanging of the Chinese Zodiac in a Chinese shop, she just had to get it for us. Since this column is about Ayame, we thought a picture of the Snake from that hanging would be perfect (and not in violation of copyright laws). It may be hard to make out because of the way the snake is coiled up, but that's what it is. If you look carefully, you can make out part of the Dragon and the Horse on either side of it.


And while I'm at it, I might as well explain the origin of the picture we normally use for this column. A few years ago, we were struggling to make ends meet, as people tend to do when starting out in many professions, so a very good friend of ours suggested we make fliers to post at the local college, offering to tutor people in Japanese. So Athena drew the picture of the girl in the kimono to use for it. The plan was to have a speech bubble saying “Benkyou shimashou! (Let's study!)” (only in Japanese characters). But the fliers never got made, and the picture went unused--until now! Only this time we copied her so there'd be two, to represent us, the Twins. We wanted to flip one, so that her braid would be on the other side, but then we would have had to change the kimono, because if the right side of her kimono was on top, that would mean she was dead, and we didn't want that. Maybe someday we'll color the picture, but we're usually too distracted with work and video games to take time to play with photo editing software. But maybe someday.