Recently I’ve been playing Japanese visual novels.
installation
From my hentai watching memory, “Sora no iro, Mizu no iro” is a good one. So I downloaded the visual novel.
The install is a bit complex; I don’t know why, it requires that disk must be dvd, so normal click on the downloaded iso files are not good.
I don’t want to use DTLite, as it was a “potentially unwanted software” as labeled by Microsoft Defender.
But there is another software called WinCDEmu. It was open source; although old, it works. (the developers also maintains visualgdb, which I kind of head of.)
After installation the game start still requires DVD. But it also it have a patch, copy it to installation dir and run, then you’ll be fine.
play
Well my japanese was still on entry level; I only learned basics from NHK channel.
So I use Google translate on phone to take picture of the game playing screen, and it will translated it to English.
Sadly, the character name “Asa”, which also means “morning”, is interfered with the translation…
well then I have used Gemini, it can also translate from picture, and I can give guidance to it!
More playing and start
After made some progress the main character is learning ancient Japanese with his teacher.
The teacher had them read the paragraphs, and explain it. I’m kind of curious, so I looked them up, then there it is: 徒然草.
Some paragraphs talks about beauty and necessities interests me. So I started reading related Wikipedia pages. And generally I discovered more and more.
The bigger picture
On reading Japanese culture history, from old, middle, to recent, many familar authors came to me: MISHIMA Yukio, etc.
By the way I also discovered some related Chinese culture: the story of Li Si 李斯. Also, while not very related, there is also the story of Yue Yi乐毅.
The way forward
Well I plan to read some of the famous novels: Snow County 雪国 and Thousand Cranes 千羽鶴.
I don’t know why, but the Chinese characters seems much more beautiful than English letters.
That makes me want to read the Japanese version, but I still don’t know much Japanese…
Well I also created a separate website for my Japanese journey.