Twelve Kingdoms: Interview with the Translator, The Animated Series, Part II

Kate: In one post, you comment that hopefully Taiki can eventually be reunited with his shirei in the future. My initial reaction was, “Really?! They may be protective but yikes! Sociopaths!” However, after watching the series, I felt the same!

On the other hand, having now seen the entire series (hooray, interlibrary loan!), I’m glad I read the majority of the books first. I think I would have been quite confused otherwise. In the series, one (unnecessary) character (Asano) entirely disappears, only to re-merge later in a very odd fashion. Taiki’s story begins, gets rolling…then abruptly cuts off. Youko’s meeting with Suza and Shoukei is far too long, which is regrettable since it is a powerful story and delivers a fantastic climax. The most power-action stories—Shouyuu and Enki’s—are delivered rather late in the series.

Were you influenced by the series at all during your translation process?

Eugene: Although watching the NHK series got me interested in the books, my opinion of the series declined sharply after I started reading them and it became more of a distraction than a help. To be generous, you could argue that NHK stole a march on the whole isekai boom to come, but it had the effect of diminishing the centrality of Youko's character.

Kate: I recently was able to interlibrary loan Star Blazers, an animated series from my childhood that I remembered despite growing up in a house without a TV. As Wikipedia remarks,

Many fans regard Star Blazers as more ‘adult’ than other cartoons shown in the United States at the time, as personal tragedy, funeral scenes for fallen comrades, and the extinction faced by humanity were left intact. The very Japanese theme of ‘the honorable enemy’ was also a tremendously important aspect of character development

—all this despite the show being somewhat “bowdlerized” by American producers.

The thankful lack of afterschool messaging is what I remembered. Anime and manga appear to have the elements mentioned above plus a lack of messaging! Twelve Kingdoms is remarkably dark in places. How do other anime compare?

Eugene: Rewatching Demon Slayer: Mugen Train got me thinking that the dream sequences would provide plenty of fodder for Freudian analysis (or maybe it's more Jungian), though they didn't have nearly as much fun with it as they could have.

When it comes to psychoanalysis, practically every character in Fruits Basket needs serious therapy, but of course, that subject never comes up. Aside from the cinematic forensic psychologist, clinical psychiatry gets little respect in Japan, in both fiction and reality.

I don't think there's a single shrink in A Silent Voice. A Hollywood version would have one in every other scene (and audiences would wonder if there weren't any).