I Enjoy The Simple Things In Life Like Sleeping, Daydreaming, Ignoring Reality, Listening To Music, Being

i enjoy the simple things in life like sleeping, daydreaming, ignoring reality, listening to music, being delusional, recklessly spending my cash, being a disappointment to my family and eating fruits

A Takemikazuchi & Kiun redraw for my friend @shinkimiope ♡ Happy Birth!!!

In quiet moments they get along

Geisha on the Streets of Gion.  Kyoto, Japan, April 4, 2010.  Photography by Edy Llanto on Flickr

On Father’s “I’d even sleep among monks” line

Quick TW: this post contains sensitive content so please proceed with caution.

So, while reading the raws for this chapter, I found this line of Father’s quite particular.

坊主と寝た事もあります。

What piqued my - and some others’ - attention was the と 寝た, which translates roughly with “sleeping with a monk”, rather than just sleeping among monks. There is a subtle suggestiveness surrounding this line - it’s very vague probably for this reason.

This verb, “to sleep”, of course means to literally sleep but it can also mean to sleep as in to have int/ercourse with someone. What makes this line even more suggestive is Izanami’s reaction - the あらあら, an expression of surprise similar to saying something like “oh my!” - and Father’s preceding and proceeding lines: “I even stole and killed”, then the line about sleeping with a monk(s), then “Whatever it took to survive.”

However, my Japanese ability is still pre-fluency (far from fluency, actually LOL) so while this line sounded odd, I wasn’t sure. However, a very kind Japanese-speaking user who wishes to remain anonymous reached out to me with some context:

I went to read the raws and I think unfortunately he does mean sleeping in the other way... the と in front of 寝た is used in instances for se/xual relations with other people. If he was sleeping amongst other monks would use 眠った (or 他の僧侶間で眠った). There were a lot of abuse going on around the era, and him being a young monk seemed dangerous. 

yeah, they used singular noun for monk, so it was more of a "There was a time where I even slept with a monk" 

and yeah, i don't want to say 100% that this is definitely true, but I do think the implication is there, and from experience from speaking with others it's more commonly used that way 

Oh and just to add on, if he were to use Neta (寝た) in a literal way, the end of the sentence would be "て寝た" too. So it really is the "と寝た" that's important

To repeat what I said on Twitter and elsewhere, this feels very significant, as in scraping the literal bottom of the barrel to survive.

Killing and stealing feels very much par on the course for what we know about Father but the implication of being so desperate as to sleep with a monk feels... the total opposite. Because that is a yawning power imbalance there. And Father has always been on the upper hand when it comes to power dynamics with pretty much any other personal relationship so this feels doubly staggering.

So yeah, some very important context, I feel like.