Okay, this has little to do with translation, but I just heard some great news. Misaki Itoh is going to play Kyoko Otonashi in next Spring's Maison Ikkoku dorama!

If you're not familiar with how Japanese TV dramas (doramas) work, they run 9-12 episode complete stories during four seasons worth of a broadcast year. There have been occasional "double season" doramas, but those are the exception. If a dorama is extremely popular, they will have a sequel series about a year or so after the original dorama aires. (NHK doesn't follow this general pattern, but most of the commercial networks have at least a few doramas every season.) Some recent top-rated dorama include the Socrates in Love dorama and the Summer of 2005's Trainman dorama.

Misaki Itoh is a 29-year-old actress who, years ago, was one of the two stars of the You're Under Arrest dorama adaption, and she played the supporting role of the "pretty teacher" in the first adaptation of the manga-based Gokusen. But her breakout role was the lovely Hermes in Trainman last year. Since then she's had two or three more doramas that are basically vehicles for her. Although she's 29, she's a good choice for the character of Kyoko since she has some comedy chops. Her timing isn't as spot-on as, say, Izumi Inamori or Yuko Takeuchi, but she can hold her own. This means that the dorama will be anchored much better than the 1980s Maison Ikkoku movie was since it was used as a vehicle for a couple of relatively talentless idols at the time. (Although Yotsuya was brilliantly portrayed in that movie.)

I'm a little worried about the compression that will take place to stuff the 15-volume series into about 11 episodes. I'm sure Nikaido, who was even dumped from the 2-year-long anime, will never see the light of day, but I'm a little worried that a great character like Yagami will be dropped for space. Also, most dorama mirror the season they're broadcast in, so they usually take place over the course of 12 weeks within the dorama as well as in real life. But with MI, Godai takes something over five years (seven or so?) to gradually change from a hopeless teenager into a man who is worthy to marry Kyoko. It'd be hard for him to change realistically over the course of three months.

Maison Ikkoku means a lot to me. Not only because I worked on the subtitles for about the first half of the television series working freelance for Viz in the mid 1990s (until I actually got hired by Viz, then I didn't have time to continue it anymore), but Maison Ikkoku tought me more Japanese than any of my human Japanese teachers. After the first year, and especially when I was in Japan on the exchange program, I would pull out MI every couple of months and give reading it another go. It had no furigana (pronunciation guides written next to kanji), so I had to look up each kanji in my Nelson's dictionary, and some of the conversation (especially Akemi and Ichinose) were pretty slangy. But Kyoko, Godai, and Yotsuya always spoke very polite Japanese so it was very nice to see polite (masu- and desu-style) in action. And the subject matter was always very domestic, so most of the vocabulary I learned on it was useful in my everyday life in Japan.

I'm a dorama fan, so I'll be watching it on a weekly basis this coming Spring. I hope they do a good job with it.