Kara no Kyoukai

if you are a typemoon fan, chances are... or rather, most definitely you would have known about this story. nasu kinoko, the man behind the famous fate/stay night and tsukihime, wrote this book. kara no kyoukai is very similar to tsukihime in quite a number of ways, however it is different enough for one to enjoy reading it without feeling repetitive. this is because knk is so called the story concept from which tsukihime used, or you can say it is a parallel world to the tsukihime world.

as usual of his writing style, knk is a story with a dark theme. for those who like this kind of stories, it will be a good read. of course, it contains sadness and tragedy, unreachable hope and despair as a major element.

for those who know how to read japanese, i guess you would have read it a long time ago. for those who know how to read chinese, this 2 volume novel had been translated to traditional chinese. i read that, the translated version. it's great to know chinese, particularly if the manga and novels i want kept getting translated to that language.

as for those who only know how to read english, i guess you have to wait a bit more. the translation is kind of slow. i seriously don't know what the official translating company is doing, letting money just flow away for every single day they dragged the production. fan translation had been dropped because it had been licensed. but you don't have to wait for long, it appears. this year, 2009, del ray will begin printing the translated version of this story. let me add a word of my own opinion: i wouldn't expect much from their translation from the way they do their sypnosis. i didn't read the sypnosis from their own source, but from a third party source which got it from them.

one thing about translation, is that during the process of translation meanings get lost sometimes, and it spoils the story, or even change the whole meaning of the story. for example, if in japanese a person says, 'i want to sleep,' the translation may turn out, 'i want to rest.' essentially, there might be no change in how the story goes. but you see, the actual meaning is changed. i have had too many experiences dealing with crappy translations to trust official english translations. no offence to those translating it but this is my personal experiences. fans translations often do a better job.

regarding translations, if i had to choose between chinese and english, both of which i am confident to say i am proficient, i would rather choose the chinese version, as opposed to others who would choose the latter. for those who know the same 2 language as me, allow me to give you my advice.

the japanese writing system borrowed heavily on the chinese system. hence there are many words, idioms, ideas which can be easily translated across. as all who learnt 2 languages or more know, there are words which cannot be translated into another language, simply because, there are no words in that language. not convinced? let me give you an example.

in english, we can have these 2 words: happy, glad. in chinese we can have these words to describe the same thing: 高興,開心,快樂,愉快。if you cannot see the 4 set of words in the previous sentence, you would need to enable your computer to see east asian language words.

as you can see, there are words which cannot be translated as easily into english. you can say they mean essentially the same thing. but if they all mean exactly the same thing, there won't be any need to use 4 sets of words when they can be replaced by 1. so my advice is, if you know both chinese and english, read it in chinese. the japanese kanji is practically, chinese.

knk is an old story, but its story is relatively new to many. because of typemoon's recent popularity, nasu's works had been published and adapted into anime. this had brought out a good story which was otherwise hidden only to the circle of i would say, light novels and typemoon fans. as we all know, many people rather watch the anime than read that thick book. but the book has a better story. oh well...

in any case, i finished reading the story a couple of weeks back. i had stopped reading haruhi (i had just finished reading the 3rd volume then) to go into knk, and is now back to haruhi (5th volume now) again. you can't read the same kind of story for too long, if not you will start to get sick and lose interests of a very well-written story. haruhi and knk are both good, it is just that they cater to different audiences and their story settings are too different. i would dare say all of you would agree with me on that.

anyway, so i am posting the pictures of the cover of knk 2 volume books. there are a few covers around, it seemed. but i am posting the cover of the books i have at home. they are in black and white though, because the picture i found on the net seemed to be off-color. so to make it more presentable i have set it to black and white.

and as for the picture below, i really like this picture. shiki looks real cool. not that the 2 pictures above is not cool, just that this is cooler. i would rather have this picture as my book cover. but of course, this is not a book cover. this is the cover for the anime disc. totally cool. (obviously the bottom left of this pic is blurred, but don't mind it, ok?)