T-maru's photo blog 書籍レビュー(特に白井喬二、小林信彦)、囲碁、音楽、昔のSF系TVドラマ、野鳥の写真などの話題をお届けしています。 This site offers review of books (especially of Kyoji Shirai and Nobuhiko Kobayashi), of music, old Sci-Fi TV dramas, topics related to Go (board game), and photos of birds.
久野暲・高見健一著の「謎解きの英文法 単数か複数か」を読了。最近EigoxやAEONで英語をしゃべっていて、よく迷うのが動詞を単数で受けるか複数で受けるかということ。その辺りの知識を整理するために読みましたが、なかなかに有益でした。まずは学校文法で十把一絡げに「集合名詞」と呼ぶものの中に、team, familyのように数えられるものと、cattle, policeのように数えられないものが混在していることを明らかにしてくれます。しかもcattleの場合は、a cattleは駄目だけど、two cattle (two cattlesではない)はOKというなかなか混乱することが書いてあります。また、アメリカの野球チームのThe Boston Red Soxは複数形で受ける、何故ならSoxは元々Socksだから、なんてのは知らないとまず間違えます。(野球チームは原則複数で、日本のHiroshima Carpも見た目は単数形だけど、この場合Carpが単複同形で複数形と見なすべきだそうです。)また私は会社については複数の人が働いているという意識でつい複数で受けてしまいますが、それはイギリス英語で、アメリカ英語の場合なら、General Motorsのように名称自体が複数形になっていても単数で受けなければならないことを再度確認できました。また、none of usの後はisかareというのは、50年くらい前まではisが正しいとされていたのが、今は複数で受ける人の方がはるかに多い、などなかなか目から鱗でした。それがNeither of themの後だと、書き言葉で正しくは単数で受けるけど、話し言葉では単数を使うとものすごく文法の細かい所にこだわっている感じがして却って不自然と思われるなど、なかなか一筋縄ではいかないことが理解できました。また、Nobody can see himself directly. に付加疑問文をくっつけると、Nobody can see themself directly, can they? になるなんて言うのは細かすぎて初めて知りました。この場合のthemselfはthemselvesの間違いではなく、himself or herself という意味です。
そんな感じで、この本では英和辞典の記述も結構当てにならないことがいくつか例示されています。
Kyoji Shirai’s photo (from his autobiography) when he was living at Asahigaoka, Nakano in Tokyo (1926 – 1933). Kyoji loved slow but steady steps of a cow, and he practiced “Fabian tactics” in literature.
As I stated in the previous article, Kyoji Shirai was one of the most important novelists in an emerging stage of public romance. Let me now describe his life and some of his works in detail.
Kyoji Shirai was born in Yokohama in 1889, as the first son of Takamichi and Tami Inoue, who were both from Samurai (warrior) class of Tottori prefecture. When he was born, Takamichi was working as a policeman of Yokohama city. Kyoji inherited the sense of justice from his father. Because of the frequent changes of his father’s working place, Kyoji kept on the move from Ome, Kofu, Urawa, and to Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture. In 1902, he finally settled in his parents’ home town, Yonago in Tottori. While he was attending Yonago east high school, he wrote two novels and they were put in two local newspapers, showing his precocious talent as a writer.
He entered then Waseda university but he soon moved to Nihon university by his father’s request that he should become a lawyer. While he was studying at Nihon university, he translated many works of Saikaku Ihara (“井原西鶴”) and Monzaemon Chikamatsu (“近松門左衛門”) into the modern Japanese for Hakubunkan (“博文館”), which was one of the biggest publishers at that time in Japan. These works gave him deep knowledge of the Japanese literature in Edo period, and he utilized many episodes or anecdotes in this period later in his works.
After he graduated Nihon university, he started to work at a few publishers and got married with Tsuruko Nakajima, a daughter of a baron Masutane Nakajima, in 1916.
In 1919, he wrote “Kai-kenchiku juni-dan gaeshi” (“怪建築十二段返し”) as his first work under the name “Kyoji Shirai” and the manuscript was offered to Hakubunkan. The publisher put the work in the January issue of “Kodan zasshi” (“講談雑誌”) in 1920. This first work was welcomed and he received requests for other works one after another. Ryunosuke Akutagawa (“芥川龍之介”) praised Kyoji’s “Ninjutsu Koraiya” (“忍術己来也”) enthusiastically and “Shimpen Goetsu Zoshi” (“神変呉越草紙”) also got a favorable reception.
In 1924, he started to write two most famous works, namely “Shinsen-gumi” (“新撰組”) and “Fuji ni tatsu kage” (“富士に立つ影”), and established his fame by these two great novels. The former was put at the head of a weekly magazine “Sunday Maichini” (“サンデー毎日”), which was the first weekly magazine in Japan, and the magazine could get enough number of readers to survive as an independent magazine by his novel. The latter was serialized in the Hochi newspaper (“報知新聞”), which was one of the biggest newspapers at that time, and it continued for more than 1000 times. The hero in this novel, Kimitaro Kumaki (“熊木公太郎”), attracted the readers overwhelmingly by his honest and decent character. As I introduced before, Ryunosuke Tsukue (“机龍之助”) in Dai Bosatsu Touge (“大菩薩峠”) was the first typical character type in public romance with his nihilism and cruelty, but Kyoji created then a completely different type of bright character with this novel. (to be continued)