Zombie!

I believed zombies were definitely imaginary monsters. But I found an unbelievable article.

In Miami, a naked man was eating most of a homeless man’s face on May 26th. He didn’t stop chewing, so was shot by a policeman. But he didn’t stop eating! The policeman had no choice but shot him about six times and the man was died. The homeless man managed to be saved, but lost more than 70% of his face.

The media reported the news with headlines “Miami zombie” or “Zombie apocalypse”. Actually, the man’s crazy action seems to have been caused by a drug “Bathsalt”, which is now regarded as problematic because it is considered to be legitimate and can be bought at a low price.

Reading this news, I wondered if the origin of zombies was somehow connected with science like Frankenstein. I mean, zombies may have been created to give a lesson to human, though they are just a word which represents crazy men. There is no zombie in Japan and most of Japanese monsters have been an object of awe rather than that of threat or fear. That is one of interesting differences between Japanese monsters and European monsters, I think.

Humor

I read the beginning of The River of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Actually, I didn’t know about the author at all. But as soon as I found information that he had worked on Doctor Who, I came to feel close to him because I learned and watched the TV series last year and was fascinated by it.

The River of London also fascinated me with sentences studded with humor. The author didn’t use some difficult literary technique but composed sentences with a lot of humor caused by the choice of words, which makes the readers read the book more even if they can’t understand the settings in first few pages and feel bad about it.

On the other hand, Neal Stephenson used a lot of similes and metaphors. That technique attracts the readers’ attention. In Anathem, there is no explanation to us of what is happening (told) at the beginning. However, humor caused by the literary technique makes the readers keep on reading.

Both of the works are very interesting even for Japanese, but it seems to be difficult for me to translate them into Japanese if I am a translator. Humor is closely connected to the culture and it is not easy to express humor to people who don’t know the culture at all. So I really want to know how the sentences are translated, but to my disappointment, they haven’t been translated yet.