Mukoubuchi Chapter 5

Terribly sorry for the delay, Mukoubuchi chapter 5 is now up! We'll be doing Mukoubuchi once a week until we catch back up. In this chapter, we join a cabaret owner who is being forced to play mahjong with terrible odds against Yakuza! Can he come out ahead? And will the mysterious Kai play a role?

Thanks to Penchan for the cleans and to Tambur for the typesetting!

Chapter Link

"Terribly Sorry. You've busted out, haven't you?"

So this chapter was pretty good, it had a few mind games in it with Kai taking advantage of the rep players' assumption that he was breaking up a penchan if he played a 2 from the 2nd tile to the left. Our protagonist for this chapter, the cabaret owner, also did pretty okay, managing to quit while he was behind and not falling victim to Kai. It was cool seeing the Yakuza panic, as well.

I think now is the time to bring this up: Kai is a very interesting character in that, while he's definitely the main character, I wouldn't really call him the protagonist. Each arc has a different protagonist, and whether Kai is on their side or not is entirely circumstantial. For example, last chapter Kai was the antagonist opposing the protagonist, Kogure. And this chapter, the cabaret owner was the protagonist, the yakuza were the antagonists, and Kai was kind of neutral. Sometimes he's a protagonist, sometimes he's an antagonist, and sometimes he's neither. I think it's part of what makes him so fascinating to me as a character.

Something else I think it's time to bring up is Kai's catchphrase, "Terribly Sorry". I had a lot of hesitation in translating it this way, because the original, "Goburei" (御無礼) is so iconic in Japan. I think it would be really gross to just leave the original text in the bubble, so I tried to give Tambur a font that would really make it stand out in a similar way to how it does in the original, still be kind of "classy", and also be very ominous and menacing looking at the same time. A LOT of thought went into it as you can tell, lol.

So what does Goburei actually mean literally? It's essentially an outdated, very respectful way of saying Shitsurei, which literally means "rude", but in almost all contexts is used to mean "Excuse me" or "sorry". Back in feudal japan, you'd hear people saying "Goburei-shimashita" to their lords or those higher in rank when they messed up. I wanted to keep the kind of old and extremely polite feel of it while not making it too wordy, so after a lot of thinking I eventually came up with "terribly sorry", which is certainly used even today but you don't hear people saying it unless they're in a formal setting talking to a customer or their superiors. So I feel like it fits well enough. I also considered "a thousand pardons", which is definitely very old-sounding, but I just didn't think it sounded cool or concise enough. So terribly sorry it is.

Finally, we find out in this chapter that Kai keeps his loads and loads of money in coin-operated lockers at a tram station. Why such an insecure place and not a bank? Why is he just storing it there? Why does he need so much money? Who can say. For now, all we know is that he does. The mysteries only continue to grow.