Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 11 - Chapter SS1

Bonus Translation Notes: On Blu-ray Bonuses

No need to bury the lede on this one: in the last volume’s TL notes I promised a description of the bonus merch included with the Blu-ray release of the Supernatural Battles anime, and this volume, that’s exactly what you’re going to get! Let’s dive right into it!

...Okay, so maybe a little lede-burying first, because some context is probably merited for any readers who may not be super familiar with how the whole physical anime industry works in Japan. To make a long story short, seasonal anime is typically released on Blu-ray on multiple discs that are sold separately, each of which includes a very small number of episodes. Supernatural Battles, for instance, was released on six separately sold discs, each of which contained two episodes and retailed for 7,700 yen ($49.55 in the current economy, and roughly $70 in saner times).

If this is news to you, then your first thought was probably something along the lines of, “Wait, what? You’re telling me that two episodes of a show on Blu-ray in Japan costs more than the entire show costs on Blu-ray if you get the English release?” The answer to that question is yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. That’s why Blu-ray regions are a thing—justifying that price is presumably why Japanese releases of anime tend to also include bonus stuff in some form or another.

So, what sort of bonuses are we talking? In this instance, each disc came with three major pieces of bonus material (not counting the cases, which are quite nice themselves): a bonus disc containing a song and an audio drama, a booklet containing art and behind-the-scenes info, and another booklet containing a short story written by Kota Nozomi himself. Note that the short story booklets didn’t actually come with the version of the set that I was able to obtain, but that’s not a problem for reasons that I’ll address right at the end of this section!

Let’s go ahead and start with the bonus discs, specifically with the songs! All six songs are technically the same song, titled “Nobody Knows, Oh Yeah!” The gimmick is that the song’s a duet, and each version is sung by Andou and one of his potential love interests, with Tomoyo, Chifuyu, Sayumi, Hatoko, Kudou, and Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First taking the spotlight in that order. Andou’s lyrics remain mostly consistent from song to song (he more or less recites a ridiculous chuuni cliché every line), but the other half varies wildly from version to version, and the instrumentals are all completely different, so I’ll go ahead and go through them in broad strokes!

To start, volume one: Tomoyo! Unsurprisingly, Tomoyo’s lines are mostly dedicated to calling out Andou’s nonsense and/or roasting him for it. The exception is the chorus, which she seems to get kind of into, even working Andou-style chuuni English into some of her portions. As for the instrumentals, the only way that I can describe it is that it sounds like an anime OP. Like, serious Fripside energy.

Next, volume two: Chifuyu! Her lyrics also fall broadly into the roasting Andou category, though in her case they’re less targeted at specifics of what he says and more broadly noting that he’s not making sense/telling him to stop shouting. Her instrumentals are completely different as well, and have a certain nursery rhyme, little kids’ edutainment song vibe to them.

Volume three: Sayumi! As you might imagine, we’re right back into roasting Andou territory with her lyrics, though in a more eloquent sort of way that plays off his word choice. I’m no expert, but to my untrained ear, the instrumentals and general style of the song are just straight up enka, which certainly suits Sayumi in a number of ways.

Volume four: Hatoko! We’re finally out of roasting Andou territory with her lyrics, which instead mostly center around the fact that she has no clue what Andou’s talking about. Her song is very poppy and bubbly, with a few little semi-meaningless, scat-singing-style verbal additions that distinguish it from the others.

Volume five: Kudou! This one’s very different, abandoning the back-and-forth chuuni antics of prior versions in favor of lyrics centered around the experience of awakening to an ability that’s totally worthless in all practical senses, contrasting Kudou’s and Andou’s reactions to being put in that scenario. This version of the song is fairly poppy as well, though in a slightly less upbeat and energetic way than Hatoko’s was.

And finally, the one that made me write this section: Kiryuu! Literally no one will be surprised to hear that Kiryuu’s song goes super hard—I’m talking metal guitar, ultradramatic vocals, and just a generally over-the-top vibe all around. As for the lyrics? Pure, undiluted chuuni excess from start to finish. It’s glorious.

That brings us to the other half of the CDs: the audio dramas! Compared to the previous two dramas, each of which were somewhere in the vicinity of an hour long and covered a whole volume in abridged form, these are much shorter—roughly ten minutes each—but also feature entirely original (albeit largely inconsequential to the greater plot) short stories.

The first of those stories centers around Andou and Kudou! It’s set during the brief period when Kudou thinks that she and Andou are dating, and features her cooking a deliberately bizarre meal for him in order to test whether he’d still like her if she was an awful cook (much to the horror of Tomoyo, who’s there too). Andou spends the whole time being extremely uncomfortable and failing to clear up the misunderstanding with Kudou, which is theoretically his whole goal throughout the incident.

Story number two features Andou rushing home to watch a TV show, only to get sidetracked by Chifuyu, who enlists him to help her pick out a birthday present for Kuki. It doesn’t go very well, on account of the fact that Chifuyu has no clue what Kuki would want, or even what she likes on a basic level. Chifuyu has a mini crisis over the fact that she doesn’t understand her best friend at all, but then Kuki happens to cross paths with them and ends up reassuring Chifuyu that the fact she tried to make the gift a surprise means that she knew what Kuki would want most after all...and also notes that her birthday is, in fact, next month. Oh, and Andou totally misses his show.

Story number three moves along to Sayumi—or, rather, to her family. Maiya shows up at Andou’s house out of the blue, explaining that she ran away from home and asking him to let her crash at his place. Andou eventually gets Maiya to reveal that she ran away after a fight with Sayumi, and over the course of telling the story, Maiya goes from complaining about how comically perfect Sayumi is to praising her for it, finally bemoaning the fact that they fought at all. That’s when Sayumi emerges from a nearby bush—she’d been listening in from the start—and the two sisters make up...but then start fighting again after Andou asks what had set the argument off in the first place (it was a debate over the proper method of squeezing a toothpaste tube).

Story number four stars Hatoko and Machi! Machi calls Hatoko over to her place to help her with busywork for a college course, and Hatoko waxes nostalgic about being in Andou’s house. Andou himself comes home soon afterward, unaware that Hatoko’s over. Andou starts monologuing to himself, Machi pounds on the wall, and Hatoko is amazed to discover that the siblings can have whole conversations through wall-pounding. When Machi convinces Hatoko to try it herself, she very lightly knocks on the wall, and Andou instantly realizes who she is, much to her delight.

Story number five: the Hitomi story! The story opens with Hitomi and Leatia chatting, but Leatia quickly snaps and calls Hitomi out for bringing Hajime up way too much. Hitomi explains that she had a fight with Hajime (over a pudding cup, which Leatia calls out as being a cliché) and told him to leave, only for him to actually do just that. Leatia tries to help—at one point by doing a disturbingly good impression of Hajime—and ultimately, Hitomi goes out to look for him...and finds him right outside her door. The two of them have a touching moment of reconciliation that’s only slightly ruined by Hajime being a shameless freeloader.

And finally, story number six: the Sagami story. Andou walks in on Sagami getting asked out on their school’s rooftop. Through a series of classic Sagami-style conversational left turns, Sagami explains that he somehow ended up picking up a girl’s gym uniform, then calls Hatoko in to help him get it back to its actual owner. Sagami takes the opportunity to trick Hatoko into saying a bunch of horrible sexual innuendos out loud, Andou tells him to knock it off, and Hatoko reflects on how nice it is that the two of them get along so well despite the fact that they don’t even like each other.

That just about does it for the bonus CDs! As you can probably see, none of their contents are what I’d describe as essential, particularly for the sake of enjoying the main series. Rather, they’re fun little bits of bonus material that, among other things, give just a little extra speaking time to a bunch of characters that didn’t get all that much of it in the anime itself.

Next up: the bonus booklets! All six of these follow the same general pattern: two pages dedicated to the episodes that were included in that volume, a few pages of character profiles, an interview with one of the series’s main voice actors (as in, the actors for the literary club members and Kudou), the lyrics to that volume’s version of “Nobody Knows, Oh Yeah!” and a credits page for that volume’s audio drama.

As far as interesting things from the booklets go, the two big points that caught my attention were the interviews and the sidebars in which the director (Takahashi Masanori) and actors picked out favorite scenes and aspects of the series. There are a lot of tidbits throughout the interviews, but we have limited space to write about them here, so I’m just gonna pick a smattering of my favorite parts and list them in no particular order!

Surprising absolutely no one, multiple members of the cast picked Hatoko’s “I don’t understand” rant as one of their favorite scenes. Notably, the segment that the director wrote about it confirms the longstanding rumor that Hayami Saori nailed the whole speech on the very first take! Apparently, Takahashi went into the recording session prepared for it to drag on longer than usual, but in the end, it was actually shorter than a typical recording would be.

One of the interview questions was “If you could have a supernatural power for one day, what would you pick?” Only Tomoyo’s and Kudou’s voice actresses actually picked powers from Supernatural Battles, and both of them went with World Create. Yamashita Nanami (Chifuyu’s voice actress) said she wanted “the power to enter the 2D world.”

Several members of the cast were asked to come up with questions for the next cast member who’d be interviewed. Yamazaki Haruka (Tomoyo’s voice actress) asked Yamashita Nanami “How are you that good at winking, anyway?” to which Yamashita replied “I can only actually do it with my left eye.”

Multiple cast members—including Okamoto Nobuhiko, Andou’s voice actor—picked the bit where Andou sings to himself while stripping since he thinks he’s home alone as one of their favorite scenes.

One of the interview questions asked the cast members to talk about a chuuni moment that they’d caught themselves experiencing recently. Fukuhara Kaori (Kudou’s voice actress) talked about waking up at 4:44 in the morning and thinking more seriously than she should have about the possibility that she could get dragged into a horror scenario (the number four, for reference, is somewhat like the number 13 in American culture, as it can be read like the word for “death”). Taneda Risa (Sayumi’s voice actress) talked about smirking to herself while listening to music, inadvertently failing to realize that other members of the cast were trying to talk to her while she did so, and Yamazaki Haruka talked about catching herself making the sort of exaggerated gasps and exertion noises that voice actors have to record for anime in real life.

Instead of the above question, Hayami Saori was asked “Is there anything that you haven’t understood lately?” She replied “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand!” Also, she listed Squirrely as her favorite character and put “that scene” as one of her favorite Hatoko-centric sequences.

The final episode’s credits include stills of the various characters from the series, one of which features Machi sampling a pot of stew in her kitchen. On her character profile page, the director notes that said stew was, in fact, canonically made by Hatoko, not her.

And, finally, the elephant in the room: the bonus short stories. You’d think I would be livid at the prospect of there being huge chunks of written content from this series that I’ll never get to translate...and you’d be right, if it weren’t for the fact that I will be able to translate them, because volume 12 of Supernatural Battles is literally just the six bonus Blu-ray short stories compiled into a single volume, with a final, exclusive short story tacked on at the end. This means two things: first, you won’t have to worry about missing any major content from this series after all, and second, for all intents and purposes, volume 11 really was the penultimate story! We’re firmly in the endgame now, and I hope you’ll enjoy seeing how this series concludes when volume 13 comes along.

But first, references!

Prologue

? (for the sake of argument, let’s just call Big Windup! an outlier).

Big Windup! is a baseball manga by Higuchi Asa that, as Sagami’s train of thought implies, is known for really digging into the particulars of each and every game that its characters play in, depicting them in remarkably granular detail.

Chapter 1

? Sagamicizm of the One-Ten-Three

The title of this chapter—and, for that matter, the titles of most of the chapters in this volume—is a play on the kanji used to write a character’s name in Japanese! Each chapter’s title uses the name of the character Sagami meets in it (in other words, the character depicted in the chapter’s illustration) as the basis for its title.

? As Kaneko Misuzu put it, “Everyone’s different, and that’s just fine.”

Kaneko Misuzu was a Japanese poet who was born in the early 20th century, died young, and then achieved widespread renown some decades later when her poetry was rediscovered and popularized. The line that Sagami is quoting here is from a poem called “Watashi to Kotori to Suzu to” (roughly, “Me, the Bird, and the Bell”), which celebrates the idea of individuality and is one of her most famous works.

? ...where I found myself sitting directly across from a crusty, Kitaro-haired hag...

“Kitaro” in this instance is the titular protagonist of Mizuki Shigeru’s GeGeGe no Kitaro! We briefly covered the series back in volume 5, when Kiryuu theorized that Hitomi was styling her hair after Kitaro’s on purpose, but to recap: Kitaro is a youkai who resembles a human child, but he keeps his bangs long to cover his missing left eye in much the same manner Hitomi hides her right eye.

? ...apparently he’d rolled the idea that the fallen angel Lucifer had twelve wings into his personal mythological headcanon somewhere along the way...

There is, apparently, some theological basis for the Lucifer-having-twelve-wings theory! I am by no means a scholar of religion, and the sources that I’m finding for the idea are all varying shades of dubious, but at the very least, it’s not something that Kiryuu (or Kota Nozomi) pulled out of thin air.

? ...or for the panties off a hot babe...

This, of course, is a shout out to the very first wish that was ever made using the Dragon Balls in, well, Dragon Ball! The wish gets made by a character named Oolong, who preempts the story arc’s villain (who is about to wish for world domination) by wishing instead for the first thing that pops into his head...underwear. Which, by the way, he then proceeds to wear on his head for the rest of the arc. Let it never be forgotten that early-era Dragon Ball was very, very silly.

? Off the top of my head, I assumed that making like Hiei in the Dark Tournament arc and wishing for the bloody deaths of everyone who had played a part in organizing the war would be rejected outright.

We’re back in YuYu Hakusho territory! We’ve discussed Hiei himself before—that’s the wielder of the Dragon of the Darkness Flame, and thus the inspiration for a lot of Andou’s chuuni aesthetic, for reference. The Dark Tournament arc, meanwhile, revolves around a tournament that, like the Spirit War, rewards everyone on its winning team with a wish.

? Maybe from his perspective, this Fifth Spirit War is just The Spirit War: Part 2.

The sole purpose of this note is to specify that, yes, the phrasing of this line does use the same terminology that’s used to distinguish JoJo’s parts.

? (For the sake of argument, let’s just say Tsugumi Seishiro and her masculine name are an outlier.)

Tsugumi Seishiro is a character from Nisekoi, a Jump manga by Komi Naoshi, and is, in fact, a cross-dressing girl despite her not quite adhering perfectly to Sagami’s theory!

? If it seems like someone’s power reflects their personality, that’s just the Barnum effect at work.

The Barnum effect, named after the famed circus showman and legendary grifter P.T. Barnum, is a psychological term that describes people’s tendency to perceive vague, sweeping statements that apply to a massive number of people as having been specifically targeted at them. To somewhat oversimplify the phenomenon, the idea is that if someone gets you in the mindset that they know things about you on a deep, often mystical level, then makes a statement that does in fact apply to you, you’re more likely to be amazed at how they were right than you are to realize that said fact also applies to basically everyone else.

This effect—or rather, the psychological tendency it describes—is the foundation that allows cold reading, a technique used by con artists of all shapes and sizes, to work as effectively as it often does. On the less malicious side of the spectrum, it’s also the basis for astrology, most of those personality quizzes that you find all over the place online these days, and—as Akutagawa notes—the Japanese superstition that one’s blood type has an influence over their personality and compatibility with others.

Chapter 2

? The oldest story in history was, umm...The Tale of Genji, dating back to the Heian Era, I think?

Sayumi is right about The Tale of Genji being the world’s first novel—or at least, many people have made that claim with confidence in the past, though it’s unsurprisingly a matter of considerable dispute (some people, for instance, claim that Don Quixote was the first novel in the modern sense of the term, a fact that I mostly bring up as an excuse to talk about Don Quixote again). It was written in serialized form by one “Murasaki Shikibu” (real name lost to history) somewhere right around the year 1000, which does indeed put it squarely in the middle of the Heian era of Japanese history. The work’s story, to be incredibly reductive, revolves around an unimaginably hot courtier sleeping his way through the imperial court and generally failing upward.

? The Late Queen Problem.

The odds are pretty good that you haven’t heard of the Late Queen Problem before, on account of the fact that despite it being named after an American author (technically speaking, a pseudonym written under by multiple American authors), the theory itself was come up by and popularized among Japanese literary theorists! To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t really get discussed much this side of the pond aside from in the context of discussing Japanese mystery fiction that engages with it.

? Proving that something doesn’t exist... This is starting to veer toward probatio diabolica territory.

Probatio diabolica, the devil’s proof, is more or less just a term used to describe a circumstance in which one is required legally to prove something that is, in fact, impossible to prove.

Chapter 3

? I was convinced that a veritable field of lilies was blooming within that school, if you catch my drift.

The Japanese word for lily is “yuri,” and if you’ve read this far into this series, odds are pretty good that tells you everything you need to know about what Sagami is insinuating in this line! On the off chance I’m wrong about that, “yuri” in the context of Japanese media refers to works portraying homosexual relationships between female characters. It is, of course, much more complicated than that—because when isn’t it?—and in many use cases it carries connotations of purity. Many works that get classified as yuri take a nonsexual, or even nonromantic, approach to the relationships they portray...though of course, many other works are expressly romantic and/or sexual, making it very hard to make broad statements about the genre, on the whole. In any case, I think we all know perfectly well what side of that spectrum Sagami’s likely falling on here!

? When I tried to think of characters with powers that had actually addressed that contradiction in-universe, Genthru was the only one I could come up with offhand.

Iiiit’s Hunter x Hunter reference time! We’re long past the need to introduce that series at this point, so let’s get right into it: Genthru is an antagonist whose Nen power allows him to, among other things, create explosions in the palms of his hands. As Sagami alludes to, he does not have a convenient immunity to his own explosions, and has to dedicate more energy to protecting himself from them than he devotes to creating the blasts in the first place.

? She was contacting someone through LINE, best as I could tell.

LINE is a messaging app that’s used by virtually everyone with a smartphone in modern Japan! Its sheer ubiquity really can’t be overstated, and it’s largely usurped texting and phone email as the primary means of communication for most modern teens.

Speaking of phone email, the shift from Kudou’s phone email address playing a key role in the events of volume 2 to LINE being casually referenced in volume 11 is a kinda cool sign of how pop culture changed in the real world in the time between the publication of those two volumes. V2 came out in 2012, V11 in 2016, and LINE was launched in mid-2011, for reference. It really did sweep in and change how a vast swath of the country casually communicated online (on LINE?) in less than half a decade.

Chapter 6

? She looks so peaceful, doesn’t she? It’s almost hard to believe, right? She really is alive, though. She is.

As Sagami himself points out, this is a reference to Touch, a baseball manga by Adachi Mitsuru! It’s only a partial quote, though, on account of the fact that in Touch, the word “alive” is swapped out with “dead.” Speaking of the line’s original context, the character in question dies after getting hit by a truck, which somehow makes Sagami’s joke even more tasteless than it already was.

? I’m pretty into nakige, after all.

“Nakige” is a subgenre in the visual novel medium, referring to games that are, in short, designed to make their players cry! A popular representative example of the subgenre would be Clannad, and, for that matter, the vast majority of games created by Key, the developer that made it.

? Having a main character fight to save their mother hasn’t really been a thing since the days of JoJo’s Part 3 and Flame of Recca—

The plot of JoJo’s Part 3 is driven by its protagonist’s quest to save his mother from a mysterious illness that, due to convoluted JoJo’s reasons, can only be cured by killing DIO. Flame of Recca, meanwhile, stars a protagonist who tries to save his mother in an altogether different sort of manner by curing her of her curse of immortality.

Chapter 8

? I can’t think of any characters whose powers address the your-own-skill-can’t-harm-you inconsistency other than Genthru and Feitan...

We’ve already been over Genthru, but since Andou clearly knows Hunter x Hunter better than Sagami, we’re right back to it! Feitan’s Nen ability creates an incredibly potent flame that burns everything around him, but it also requires him to use another ability first in order to make a suit of armor that protects him from the former ability’s effects.

And, that’s all for this time! See you again in volume 12, which I assure you is somehow even more unhinged than the past several volumes have been. Look forward to it!

-Tristan Hill