Chapter 2
? ...but if you wanna make like your buddies and dance the hard luck waltz, then be my guest.
Buckle up, because this one’s a deep cut! In this line, Kiryuu is paraphrasing a character from Kaze Densetsu Bukkomi no Taku, a manga that ran from 1991 to 1997 that was drawn by Juzo Tokoro and written by Hiroto Saki. The series has never been published in English, and in fact, the only series associated with either the artist or the author to be brought out over here was Juzo’s manga adaptation of the Spawn franchise back in 1998 (which isn’t even remotely relevant, but I just couldn’t resist mentioning it because it came from so very far out of left field for me).
Anyway, the story of Kaze Densetsu is centered around the very particular type of biker gang that Shuugo himself ran with in his backstory! Those gangs, known as “bousouzoku” in Japanese, were a presence all throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, but by the early ’10s, their popularity and presence were both far past their peaks, and these days, the concept exists more as a kind of anachronistic aesthetic than an actual social issue. What I’m getting at with all this is that in this line, Kiryuu’s quoting a classic manga about the exact sort of tough-guy bikers that Shuugo and his gang’s members are trying to act like.
Unfortunately, given the intense obscurity (by English-speaking standards) of the manga in question and the fact that the reference is so deeply tied to the very specific sort of biker gang Shuugo is part of, contextualizing the line or swapping in a functional equivalent were both not great options in this instance. Fortunately, the line itself comes across as such a generically tough guy thing to say in isolation that it still felt natural lacking full context when rendered as-is, which is the option we decided to go with in the end. Hopefully, the fact that Kiryuu’s talking like a tough guy to make fun of Shuugo comes through clearly regardless!
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