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Unofficial vs. official translation of the line about the girl Father saw Izanami as in the Underworld

Two translations with two wildly different meanings with way different connotations 🤔🤔🤔🤔

Just some clarification since the post is back on my dash:

I always took the first panel with the line “I wonder if he saw the person he was thinking about...” to be Izanami asking herself if he saw her as the “person he was thinking about” - as in, if that was how she appeared to him - not as her literally wondering if he ever saw the Pockmarked Girl again.

That’s why the official translation threw me off when I first read it, and raised a lot of questions that were totally different from the ones I had when I read the unofficial. I wonder if any of ya’ll also took the unofficial line like that too or if it’s just me. 🤔

Unofficial vs. official translation of the line about the girl Father saw Izanami as in the Underworld

Two translations with two wildly different meanings with way different connotations 🤔🤔🤔🤔

The Loophole(TM)

Aka me avoiding working on Part 2 of my Father Meta bc idk how to approach it.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been thinking about this ever since Chapter 80 dropped. And if you’ve been thinking about it, there’s one thing we’re all undoubtedly scratching our heads over:

what’s the loophole?

Well, here’s a singular theory. Elaboration under the cut.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Yomi isn't really like the Christian or Buddhist concepts of hell, where you go to suffer for your sins/karma - it's just a place you go after you die, neither a punishment nor a reward.

Yomi is a land of the dead where, after you die, you have no return from because you're dead (unless you're Izanami and your husband doesn't see you but he did so not even when you're a god)... but what about going into Yomi while you're still alive? You're neither dead because you haven't died (yet) but you aren't "alive” in the metaphorical sense of being physically in the Land of the Dead, so this tricky position can be likened to being in a state of existential limbo. Noragami (and Shinto overall, I'd say) is all about ties, about bonds to things both physical (such as people) and concepts (such as Yato being “tied” to the concept of being a Magatsukami).

The reason a human probably shouldn't go into Yomi is because they'd get eaten by ayakashi in like, 5 seconds (as Kofuku herself stated)...

...if they don't know what the fuck they're doing. But the thing is, Japanese mythology is full of people knowing what the fuck they're doing because they're either descended from a supernatural entity or because they've attained that knowledge somehow, doing things humans shouldn’t technically be doing. One such figure is Abe no Seimei, who had a powerful fox spirit as a mother and was an accredited specialist of onmyōdō in the Heian period. Abe no Seimei famously resurrected his father using a ritual called Taizan Fukun no Sai (泰山府君祭), for which the Abe clan is also famous for.

Anyway, back to the concept of ties and bonds. Theoretically, if a (living) human that knows what the fuck they're doing were to go into Yomi, they're still technically alive because they haven't experienced a physical death, and therefore still have a connection/tie/bond to the Near Shore. The person just needs someone that they already have a bond with on the Near Shore to call them back to the Near Shore - as the manga says, "Call his name. That will take him from the Far Shore and bind him to the Near Shore. [...] Only a resident of the Near Shore who has ties to him can do it."

(Interesting thing to note: The first page comes right after that mini flashback of Father running from Izanami and Nora saying he heard a voice calling for his name.)

The reason that the gods probably wouldn't have thought of this as even a viable situation is because 1) the Underworld is usually sealed off or guarded from what I remember, 2) Any humans who would theoretically dare do that would probably die in there as it's a den of ayakashi and humans cannot keep shinki to slay ayakashi with, and 3) Death is considered impure in Shinto (you could also argue the natural human fear of death, etc etc), so why would anyone want to go into Yomi? In conclusion, I don't think gods would genuinely think that humans would be parading into Yomi. Like, didn’t spare even a passing thought to that because it is so unlikely that anyone would come out of such an ordeal.

Back to soul summoning once again...

Here's what the Volume 10 translation notes have to say about it:: "Kofuku is referring to an old tradition called tamayobi or tamayobai (literally "soul summoning"). Death was seen as something that could be reversed, and so the bereaved would attempt to call the deceased soul's back to the world of the living. The attempt was made by either climbing to the roof or looking down a well, then shouting the departed's name.

Incidentally, the modern Japanese word for 'revive' or 'come back to life' is yomigaeru - literally, 'to return from Yomi.'"

In a way, the dead can come back to life in the Noraverse - becoming a shinki and being granted a "new" life. The reason that tamayobi wouldn't work for a person already deceased is because all of their ties to the Near Shore are cut and as we saw numerous times, death for humans is irreversible (and this fact is a big source of strife for shinki, and the whole reason for GGS being so Huge™), even for Father who has to body hop all the time.

Let’s take a look at Hiyori during the Hospital arc. The reason that Hiyori could revert her partial transformation into an ayakashi was because she still had ties to the Near Shore, despite getting farther and farther from them. This is even represented in the manga by her “tail” connecting her to the Near Shore.

Yato "called her back" in the way that he reminded her of those ties and everything she has to live for.

So, summing up: The Loophole™ is that living humans can get called back from Yomi, the Land of the Dead, as they still have ties to the Near Shore because they’re alive and have not experienced physical death. This tie to the Near Shore allows them to be "bound" to the world of the living once again by someone who is a) human and still alive and b) has ties to the person of some sorts. Gods likely wouldn't have thought of still living humans going into Yomi because it's very unlikely that they would get in (or want to) in the first place, much less gain the knowledge required to survive and actually survive.

thanks for coming my TED talk

every month i am in awe of just how masterfully adachitoka has written father. the complexity. the depth. who let their brains be this huge