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New My Beautiful Man book!

It's been a while, but I finally started to translate the latest book in the My Beautiful Man series - the one that came out at the end of last year and that continues the story past My Troublesome Man (aka Nayamashii Kare). I haven't seen any info on when Tokyopop plans to release the official English version of it if that's even in the plans at all, so impatient fans can at least have something for now.

The book is called Mamanaranai Kare, which can be translated as My Impossible Man, and the translation is in Russian, but I'll be posting a link to a corrected English machine-translation at the beginning of each chapter. Or you can translate it with browser tools, but Hira's reasoning (and some of my colloquialisms) are also somewhat impossible for Google translate :)

Anyways, here's the link.

Also, Wattpad recently deleted my original account (sob!) so I had to scramble and reupload everything to a new one which, hopefully, will last longer. If you were my follower there before, please follow the new account too (I've updated all the links in my Tumblr masterpost as well).

While you wait for new chapters, you can also read Hira and Kiyoi bonus stories from the Interlude which haven't been translated to English as of now (link) or - for hardcore fans - check my versions of books 2 and 3 of the series since official English releases, unfortunately, have lots of mistranslations, including some really major ones. Here's a big reddit thread about the ones in My Hateful Man.

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I thought the first book could've been translated much better, to be honest. That's rich coming from me, of course, considering that the official translator knows Japanese much better than me. But I know what it's like to translate commercially while on a tight deadline, and I've also been analyzing these characters A LOT for the past two years. So I do have some confidence regarding the way their speech and thoughts should be translated.

Like, Hira always treats Kiyoi with reverence and he's never vulgar, so he would never, for instance, say "What's up" to Kiyoi, especially not when he is startled. You also have to be careful when picking words that describe his actions: it's not good to write "he told Kiyoi to wait", for example, because that comes across almost like an order. You should use "he asked Kiyoi to wait" instead. Because of things like that Hira in the official translation sometimes changes into an ordinary guy, even around Kiyoi, and that's jarring. And it also makes his polite-cultured-creepy-obsessive self less believable.

Also, the text there just needs more polishing, frankly. You don't need to know Japanese to recognize stilted English.

I've been anticipating/dreading the official English release of book 2 of Utsukushii Kare (or My Hateful Man, as per its official title) for months, waiting to see how much I messed up in my translation because of my insufficient Japanese.

...and then in the first 20% of the official English version finally available (Google play books has the longest free excerpt!) I've spotted: a major mistranslation that was seriously out of character and probably did no favors to readers' opinions of Kiyoi; an obvious continuity error born of inattentiveness; a number of tone-deaf phrases that, again, were not in-character for either Hira or Kiyoi. And one mistranslation on my part, also due to inattentiveness, but at least that sentence was something Hira could (and did at some other point) think and it wasn't anything important. To be fair, I felt that the overall quality of English text got better. I loved how some things were phrased. The number of repetitions also decreased and, thankfully, Kiyoi is now referred to as "the other man" instead of "the other boy", which at least doesn't sound so creepy or jarring. I also felt the translator's struggles when I reached the place I've probably had the most trouble with in this book. I get you, lady, these few sentences just refused to fall into place.

For those who want to know about the mistranslations:

Firstly, regarding the one I did: I mistook kanji for "by nature" for "future" (again *sigh*), misremembered the meaning of the next one and ended up with "the king who looks only towards the future" instead of "the king he could only look at from below". It was so in tune with something Hira could say I completely forgot to check.

Now, as for the one in the English version, when Kiyoi and Hira go for the apartment viewing, at one point Hira says that, even though he doesn't want to break up, if their relationship ends one day and he has to live after that, he wants to at least have a lot of pictures of his life with Kiyoi to remind himself that it wasn't a dream. To which Kiyoi says "I kinda understand that… but I don't want to understand", and Hira hurriedly jumps on it, saying that it's like what he himself meant with his whole "I don't want to understand you, Kiyoi" speech earlier before viewing (the same speech as in the episode 3 of the second season of the drama). But Kiyoi shuts him up, saying that this is completely different from Hira's sick notions. But because the translator misread "wakaritakunai" (don't want to understand) for "wakaretakunai" (don't want to break up), what we get in the official translation is Kiyoi saying "I kinda understand that… but I don't want to break up". To which Hira worriedly replies that it's just what he said before about not wanting to break up, but Kiyoi shuts him up, saying that his not wanting to break up is different from Hira's and that Hira is an annoying creep.

You see why it's so upsetting? The translation doesn't just miss the point, it reads so completely out of character it should've given the translator a pause. Kiyoi simply can't be that frank at this point, and it's really not clear why Hira would feel worried by his words instead of being reassured by them or why Kiyoi would try to shut him up in the first place. Most importantly, it paints Kiyoi as some kind of unreasonable drama queen, when he's getting a lot of flak from western readers as is.

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I've been anticipating/dreading the official English release of book 2 of Utsukushii Kare (or My Hateful Man, as per its official title) for months, waiting to see how much I messed up in my translation because of my insufficient Japanese.

...and then in the first 20% of the official English version finally available (Google play books has the longest free excerpt!) I've spotted: a major mistranslation that was seriously out of character and probably did no favors to readers' opinions of Kiyoi; an obvious continuity error born of inattentiveness; a number of tone-deaf phrases that, again, were not in-character for either Hira or Kiyoi. And one mistranslation on my part, also due to inattentiveness, but at least that sentence was something Hira could (and did at some other point) think and it wasn't anything important. To be fair, I felt that the overall quality of English text got better. I loved how some things were phrased. The number of repetitions also decreased and, thankfully, Kiyoi is now referred to as "the other man" instead of "the other boy", which at least doesn't sound so creepy or jarring. I also felt the translator's struggles when I reached the place I've probably had the most trouble with in this book. I get you, lady, these few sentences just refused to fall into place.

For those who want to know about the mistranslations:

Firstly, regarding the one I did: I mistook kanji for "by nature" for "future" (again *sigh*), misremembered the meaning of the next one and ended up with "the king who looks only towards the future" instead of "the king he could only look at from below". It was so in tune with something Hira could say I completely forgot to check.

Now, as for the one in the English version, when Kiyoi and Hira go for the apartment viewing, at one point Hira says that, even though he doesn't want to break up, if their relationship ends one day and he has to live after that, he wants to at least have a lot of pictures of his life with Kiyoi to remind himself that it wasn't a dream. To which Kiyoi says "I kinda understand that… but I don't want to understand", and Hira hurriedly jumps on it, saying that it's like what he himself meant with his whole "I don't want to understand you, Kiyoi" speech earlier before viewing (the same speech as in the episode 3 of the second season of the drama). But Kiyoi shuts him up, saying that this is completely different from Hira's sick notions. But because the translator misread "wakaritakunai" (don't want to understand) for "wakaretakunai" (don't want to break up), what we get in the official translation is Kiyoi saying "I kinda understand that… but I don't want to break up". To which Hira worriedly replies that it's just what he said before about not wanting to break up, but Kiyoi shuts him up, saying that his not wanting to break up is different from Hira's and that Hira is an annoying creep.

You see why it's so upsetting? The translation doesn't just miss the point, it reads so completely out of character it should've given the translator a pause. Kiyoi simply can't be that frank at this point, and it's really not clear why Hira would feel worried by his words instead of being reassured by them or why Kiyoi would try to shut him up in the first place. Most importantly, it paints Kiyoi as some kind of unreasonable drama queen, when he's getting a lot of flak from western readers as is.

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Спросить вроде не о чем, просто хочу сказать огромное спасибо за ваш перевод!

И вам спасибо! Нас, читателей этой серии, мало, поэтому я радуюсь любому отклику. Но не теряю надежды, что однажды снимут продолжение, и больше людей захочет почитать первоисточник.

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Introduction and UtsuKare Translations Master Post

Some of you might recognize me as that Russian translator of Utsukushii Kare books from Wattpad. I decided to revive my tumblr to compile all the links and explanations here for those of you, My Beautiful Man fans, who can't wait for official English releases of the books.

I could never keep a blog, so for now here I'll just tell how it all came about, and you can find links to all my MBM translations at the end (feel free to just skip the wall of text).

So a couple of years ago I finally bowed down and decided to read Utsukushii Kare series in Japanese for language practice, even though I found the summary unappealing and I'm generally suspicious of overhyped media (as far as BL novels go, these books seemed to be The most hyped-up series in Japan). Much to my surprise, I loved it so much it was hard to move on. And while I waited for a chance to buy book 3 and Interlude, I gobbled up everything else related to the series that I could. The manga was only just starting, I didn't like dramaCDs (but I'm in the minority), and the drama somehow revived my love for watching Jdramas, even though I thought that this part of my fandom life has been over for years. When the second season started airing, I made a new friend in the Russian-speaking parts of the Internet who was even more obsessed with MBM than I am, and we fangirled to our hearts' content. At some point I promised her to translate the big sex scene from the end of book 3 as a gift for all the talks. I did, and since back then there was nothing for book 3 in any European language, as far as I know, I decided to post it online and give a link to English-speaking UtsuKare fans too. And since Wattpad doesn't allow copying text, and the browser translator feature from Google Translate was really inadequate, I also put up a link to the translation made with Deepl. As far as machine translators go, it is noticeably more comprehensible, and I didn't have the time (or skills to do the book justice, really) to translate it to English myself. Anyway, after this excerpt I thought I could manage one more important scene from book 3, then one more, and then I finally gave up and started translating it properly from the beginning. I also started correcting mistranslations in Deepl-versions that I kept doing for English readers, so some parts of the book are now much more readable than others. Now the third and the second book are done and I started to work on book 4, Mamanaranai Kare that was published in Japan at the end of October 2024. I also translated several stories from Interlude and plan to do at least one more, and maybe some others for some holidays.

So here are the links to everything I've translated from My Beautiful Man book series:

Book 3 "Nayamashii Kare" which continues the story past the movie (completed). The text is in Russian, but there are links to decent machine translations to English at the beginning of each part (I've also run through most of them and corrected the mistranslations). Or you can use the in-browser translation feature, but the results would be less readable.

Book 2 "Nikurashii Kare" which was technically turned into season 2 of the drama and the movie, but the script has deviated so much from the book, at times it's like a completely different story (completed). I don't make Deepl translations for this since the official English release finally came out in December.

Stories from the Interlude. A number of stand-alone stories from the collection of them called "Interlude". The book has a total of 15 stories, and I probably won't translate it in its entirety, but I've dones the ones that I personally liked. One of them had also been translated to English by Mauli before, but I didn't use her version when working on mine. The rest of the stories have never been translated by anyone else, as far as I know. These, too, have links to Deepl-versions at the beginning.

Book 4 "Mamanaranai Kare" continues where book 3 left off. Ongoing. Usually I can manage at least one update per month, sometimes more, and I plan to divide the whole book into 12 parts. Each part will have a link to an English version which is machine-translated but with all mistranslations corrected by me.

Disclaimer: my Japanese is not yet really on a level good enough to translate fiction, and there are bound to be mistranslations even if you read the original Russian versions. But I'm cross-checking myself on everything to try and keep those mistakes to minor things. I also know how to translate so I made sure that the text flows well, doesn't feel choppy and retains the same vibe that I get from reading the original.