Reading Miyazawa Kenji as a Japanese Learner: Start with The Restaurant of Many Orders

Miyazawa Kenji (宮沢賢治) was born in Hanamaki, Iwate, in 1896 and died in 1933. Aozora Bunko’s author page says he wrote poems and children’s stories while teaching at an agricultural school, and that Haru to Shura (Spring and Asura) was the only poetry collection published in his lifetime. His work has long been in the public domain in Japan, and you can read all of it in the original, free, on Aozora Bunko.

For a learner, Kenji sits in an odd place. Many of his works are children’s stories with fairly short sentences. At the same time, they are full of sound words, some use the dialect of Tōhoku, the northeast of Japan, and a few contain words Kenji invented himself. This post explains why it can make sense to start with Chūmon no ōi ryōriten (注文の多い料理店, “The Restaurant of Many Orders”), and what tends to trip learners up along the way.

Why start with The Restaurant of Many Orders

注文の多い料理店 is the title story of Kenji’s first collection of children’s stories, published in December 1924, according to its Aozora Bunko card. Two young gentlemen out hunting get lost in the mountains and find a Western-style restaurant called 山猫軒, “Wildcat House.” Inside there is door after door, and each door carries a notice with an instruction for the guests.

There are three reasons to read it first.

It repeats. Open a door, read the notice, the two men explain it to themselves in the most convenient way, do what it says. This happens again and again. From the second round on you can predict what comes next, which makes it hard to lose the story even when you don’t know every word.

It is short. The modern-spelling edition is about 5,400 characters. The counting method is in Which Japanese Classics Can You Read at Each JLPT Level?. That is one or two sittings.

The title is a language lesson. 注文 (chūmon) normally means an order a customer places with a shop. In this story, the shop keeps placing orders on the customers. Near the end one of the men finally realizes: 「沢山の注文というのは、向うがこっちへ注文してるんだよ。」 (“All these orders. They’re the ones ordering us.”) Once you understand that sentence, you understand the title.

Reading the notices: polite requests

The notices are written in polite shop language, addressed to the guests. The glass door at the entrance says 「どなたもどうかお入りください。決してご遠慮はありません」, roughly “Everyone, please come in. There is no need for reserve.”

お〜ください and ご〜ください are the polite request forms you learn in textbooks. Each time you read a notice, ask what is really being requested behind the polite form. Take off your hat and coat. Leave your metal things here. Rub this cream on. The requests get stranger, but the language stays perfectly polite. That gap is what makes the story funny, and a little frightening.

The gentlemen always read the notices in the way that suits them. As a learner, you end up reading each notice twice: once as they understand it, once as it is really meant. It is clear practice in reading one sentence two ways.

Old ways of writing

The story is about a hundred years old, so some words are written differently from today. In this story you will meet, for example:

• 云う, the older way of writing 言う (to say).
• 斯う, read こう (like this).
• 喰べる, the same verb as 食べる (to eat).
• 二疋 (two animals), where 疋 is used like today’s counter 匹.
• 硝子 read がらす (glass), 室 read へや (room), and 扉 read と (door).

The modern-spelling edition on Aozora Bunko gives furigana for many of these. Once you know the reading, the meaning is usually clear from context. If a word isn’t in the dictionary in that form, try looking it up in its modern spelling.

Sound words

One of the marks of Kenji’s style is onomatopoeia and mimetic words. In the mountain scene, this sentence appears:

「風がどうと吹いてきて、草はざわざわ、木の葉はかさかさ、木はごとんごとんと鳴りました。」

(“The wind came with a whoosh, the grass rustled, the leaves crackled, and the trees creaked and groaned.”) The same sentence appears again, word for word, near the end, after the restaurant has vanished. It frames the story like a door in and a door out. Elsewhere, the frightened men shake がたがた.

Dictionary entries for sound words are often short and don’t give you much feel for them. Reading them aloud can do more than looking them up in detail. Say ざわざわ and かさかさ out loud and you will hear the difference.

Dialect, and words Kenji made up

The dialogue in this story is close to standard Japanese, but other works use dialect. In 風の又三郎 (Kaze no Matasaburō), the children at a small mountain school speak in Tōhoku dialect. The wind song at the very start, 「どっどど どどうど どどうど どどう」, isn’t in any dictionary either.

Kenji also invented words. The best known is イーハトーヴ (Ihatov), his name for an ideal land based on Iwate. The first edition of this story collection carried the subtitle イーハトヴ童話. Words like these are naturally missing from dictionaries. If a word isn’t there, it may be one Kenji made, and you can keep reading.

What to read next

After The Restaurant of Many Orders, a natural next step is Yodaka no hoshi (よだかの星, “The Nighthawk Star”), which is about the same length, and then the somewhat longer Sero-hiki no Gōshu (セロ弾きのゴーシュ, “Gauche the Cellist”). Their lengths are in 30 Easy Japanese Classics on Aozora Bunko for Learners.

Ginga tetsudō no yoru (銀河鉄道の夜, “Night on the Galactic Railroad”) is about 38,000 characters, and Kenji kept revising it until he died. The scenes shift a great deal, and it can be hard to follow what is happening. One approach is to read several of the short works to the end before trying it. The same goes for Kaze no Matasaburō with its dialect.

Reading Kenji in Niho

I make Niho, a free reader for iPhone and iPad that holds the Aozora Bunko catalogue of more than 17,000 works.

On the Discover screen you can search for 宮沢賢治 or 注文の多い料理店 without a connection, in kanji, kana or romaji. A work’s detail screen shows its spelling (such as 新字新仮名, modern characters and modern kana) and its length in characters. There is also an edition in old kana spelling, so check the label before you choose. Niho tells you before you download an old-spelling edition.

Furigana is shown only where the source edition has it, and you can turn it off. Select a word and tap Look up to see its meaning and JLPT level. If a word isn’t in the dictionary, Look up on Jisho opens it on the web. Old spellings and invented words like the ones above are sometimes missing from the dictionary.

Niho shows text horizontally only, not vertically. Getting Started with Niho walks through your first book.