みなさんこんにちは。Welcome to Sakura Neko’s Japanese Study Room, where you can learn Japanese from anime quotes! Today’s topic is Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃 / Kimetsu No Yaiba). We will look at a quote by the Flame Hashira (炎柱 / En Bashira), 煉獄杏寿郎 (Rengoku Kyoujurou). I am sure many of you watched the Mugen Train movie and now are considering to get a Blue-Ray and DVD.
Today’s quote is from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie Mugen Train. When 猗窩座 (Akaza) demands that 煉獄 (Rengoku) becomes a demon, he says this.
老いることも、死ぬことも、人間という儚い生き物の美しさだ。
oiru koto mo, shinu koto mo, ningen to iu hakanai ikimono no utsukushisa da.
Growing old and dying is what gives meaning and beauty to the fleeing span of a human life.
As is the case for many dubbed anime and manga, this English translation is not exactly the same as what Rengoku actually said in Japanese.
You may think this phrase is quite long, but the sentence pattern here is quite simple. You will gain a better understanding of the original phrase if you read further! You will just need to understand the 4 points below to understand this quote.
If you read this article, you will understand…
1️⃣Sentence pattern: Noun Aも Noun Bも
2️⃣Changing a verb into a noun
3️⃣XというY
4️⃣Changing an adjective to a noun.
Sentence pattern: Noun Aも Noun Bも
If you look at big picture of this quote by Rengoku, you can see it follows this sentence pattern: Noun A も Noun B も C, which means ‘Noun A as well as Noun B are C‘.
老いることも、死ぬことも、人間という儚い生き物の美しさだ。
oiru koto mo, shinu koto mo, ningen to iu hakanai ikimono no utsukushisa da.
Next, let’s look at the yellow and red parts of the sentence.
Changing a verb into a noun
If you apply the sentence pattern (Noun A as well as Noun B are C) to Rengoku’s quote, you have…
Noun A = 老いること
Noun B = 死ぬこと
This sentence pattern require nouns in the yellow and red places, so you will have to learn how to change verbs to nouns (nominalisation).
To nominalise a Dictionary form verbs into a noun, simply add こと or の. Therefore, 「老いること」and 「死ぬこと」are originally 「老いる (to age)」and 「死ぬ (to die)」respectively.
This concept is useful when you can’t use a verb because a sentence construction you want to use requires a noun. For example, the sentence pattern for「〜が好きです・好きじゃないです : I like … / I don’t like …」 require a noun for the「〜」part.
When you want to say ‘I like speaking Japanese’ it’s grammatically incorrect to say 「日本語を話すが好きです。」 because 「話す」is a verb (‘to speak’) and you will need to nominalise it to fit in this sentence pattern. Therefore, the correct version for‘I like speaking Japanese’ would be 「日本語を話すことが好きです。」.
XというY / Y which is called X
Next item we can learn from Rengoku san’s quote is this sentence pattern…
XというY
Y which is called X
Vocabulary we need here is…
人間 : human
儚い : Fleeting
生き物 : living thing
Therefore, you can translate「人間という儚い生き物」to ‘Fleeing living things that are called humans‘.
Changing an Adjective to a Noun
Rengoku san ends this quote with 「美しさだ」, which is a noun (‘beauty’) made from an adjective 「美しい」(‘beautiful’).
You can make an adjective by following the rules below.
For い adjectives
✅ Remove the last い and add さ
Ex
美しい (beautiful) → 美しさ (beauty)
やさしい (kind) → やさしさ (kindness)
むずかしい (difficult) → むずかしさ(difficulty)
For な adjectives
✅ Remove the last な and add さ
便利な (convenient) → 便利さ (convenience)
しずかな (quiet) → しずかさ (quietness)
にぎやかな (lively) → にぎやかさ (liveliness)
Summary – まとめ
Overall, applying things above, Rengoku’s quote:
「老いることも、死ぬことも、人間という儚い生き物の美しさだ。」
can be translated as
‘Both growing old and dying are the beauty of living things called humans. ‘
What do you think about this translation compared to the translation in the manga?
In this article, we discussed
1️⃣Sentence pattern: Noun Aも Noun Bも
2️⃣Changing a verb into a noun
3️⃣XというY
4️⃣Changing an adjective to a noun
I hope you found this helpful! If you liked this post, make sure you check out other articles as well! You can also find more phrases from my twitter account. じゃあ、みなさん、さようなら！
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