Notobe Takenao.
Not too sure of the family name, I read it out loud in Japanese name order.
But no sooner had the words left my mouth than someone broke up laughing.
I looked and found T with her hand over her mouth, face buried in her shoulder, shaking with laughter. I thought she’d been focusing on Asahina’s Japanese lesson, but apparently, she’d been keeping one ear on us as well. And I guess she did come from an English-speaking country.
So how was this a hilarious gag? If you had to be good at listening comprehension to get it, I didn’t think I’d get much use out of it myself.
“So we said the doctor’s dying message was ‘Don’t swallow,’ but that was translated into Japanese, right?” I said, pressing further. “But in English, what he actually said was…‘Notobe Takenao’? How do you get ‘Don’t swallow’ from that? Is this a game of telephone?”
The room had divided into two camps. The only people not smirking were me, Asahina (blinking furiously), and Nagato (reading). Okay, that was half of us. Guess I didn’t need to count.
“I’ll explain later, but the culprit’s card joke required an additional phrase. And we have to remember that the victim was a doctor looking directly at a first aid kit.”
Koizumi swung the marker like a conductor’s baton.
“In light of that, what was the exact wording of the doctor’s dying message before Tsuruya’s translation? If we know that, then it all becomes clear.”
Koizumi began writing something horizontally.
“I believe what he said was…”
He turned around, popping the cap back on, and took a step sideways, revealing the English phrase beyond.
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Not to be taken
“Depending on the situation, this phrase could mean many things, but assuming the medicine in the first aid kit was produced for an English-speaking market, something like a bottle of ammonia would have a warning label that might well read, Not to be taken orally.”
He popped the cap back off (that didn’t last long) and scribbled a few kanji below.
“If we translate that back into Japanese…”
Some very angular kanji there, but legible enough.
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Fukuyou Kinshi
Okay, so orally meant “swallowing.” And since you shouldn’t do that…Tsuruya had gone with nomu na or “don’t swallow.” The thought process behind the translation was clear enough.
“Perhaps she thought those kanji would be too much of a hint. If you search for them, the first hit you get will give you the phrase not to be taken. You’ll soon see why.”
Right. Sure.
And we go from Not to Be Taken…to Notobe Takenao.
All this buildup for a pun? And a bad one. Notobe, fine. But getting Taken from Takenao would take some willful sabotage even in the wildest game of telephone.
“Thus, the extra step,” Koizumi said, flashing his pearly whites. “Remember the joke he used when handing out his business card. That card, naturally, had his name on it. And he was handing these cards out at a party in a country we’re assuming was America. He would, logically, be meeting very few Japanese speakers, so would the cards be in Japanese? Hardly seems likely. Japanese businessmen working abroad either have a separate set of cards in Romaji or two-sided cards with both languages on them. So his card…”
He proceeded to write the man’s name out again. Instead of kanji, he used the English alphabet. I expected the order to change, but Koizumi kept it as Notobe Takenao.
“I believe he kept the name in the Japanese order. It’s common to reverse the names on English-language business cards, but there’s a growing movement to dispense with that practice. Mr. Takenao is either part of that movement or simply realized he could use his name to get a laugh out of new acquaintances if he kept it in this order. His motives matter little.”
Associate Professor Koizumi’s lecture did not end there.
“When he exchanged cards, I believe he covered the last two letters—ao—with his finger, talked around the missing t, and told everyone his name formed an English sentence with an actual meaning to it. Not a claim many can make, and a joke about how he was ‘not to be taken,’—lightly or orally—would be an effective way of getting his name remembered after a single encounter. Especially if he was speaking to doctors.”
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Not-to-be Taken-ao.