Rakugo nagaya ha hana zakari [落語長屋は花ざかり]: Original Script

That's right. I said "original script".

I translated the whole thing. If you'd like, you can also look at it for yourself; I've put it on archive.org here. Sorry for the bad photos, but putting this in a scanner would have destroyed it. I'm going to go ahead and create a specific tag for this film as well since I'll be writing about it so much.

So.

While I was doing research for my post about this movie, I found a kosho.org listing simply titled "Rakugo nagaya ha hana zakari script". The description said "stains, tears, scratches". There were no photos. No further details. No page count or dimensions were given. The price it was listed for was suspiciously cheap.

"Count me in," I said.

After reading the script, I think I can infer a few things about it. The first is that this is an early draft. That's fairly obvious just from looking at the pages where the cast is listed - there are actors written there who weren't in the final film, roles that didn't make it, and blank spaces where there should be names. There's also a blank page where the rest of the crew's names should be. I haven't (and probably won't) see the finished film, so I can't say this with full confidence, but I'm inclined to think that this may even be the first draft. We can be certain, though, that whoever owned this definitely knew Akihiko Hirata was going to be in the film at the point when they were writing stuff in it, since his name is written with the rest of the cast.

There is absolutely no way to tell who this belonged to. I'm almost certain it was someone on the production crew rather than the cast, since the notes made in the script seem to pertain to cutting/editing scenes. However, I don't know how many people in the crew would or could have the authority to do things like cross out entire scenes and change the layout of the set. That blank page where there should have been more crew listed is interesting in this regard. It could mean absolutely nothing, but it could also mean that the rest of the crew hadn't been assembled yet, so the script would have been owned by one of the few crew members whose names were written in the script: Ichiro Sato, Yoshie Kishii, Tsuruo Ando, Toshiro Ide, or Nobuo Aoyagi. You can find a fuller list of the credited production crew here, although as always be aware of mistranslated names if you're using an auto-translator.

Utter guesswork there, though. Anybody could have had it. It could have been someone in the cast as well, but I’m trying not to think too hard about that.

Just... honestly, my god. Holding this in my hands. This was bouncing around Toho even if it wasn't on set during filming. I just want to emphasize that the experience of reading this script and "watching" a film that doesn't seem to exist anymore in its full extent was, honestly, very affecting. You want to see something incredible?

Like, incredible incredible?

To talk about the actual process of translating it: I put several weeks of my life into this project and I don't think I fully knew what I was getting into. As you can see in the photo above, the handwriting was extremely difficult for me to decipher as someone who doesn't natively write kanji. Further complications arose the further I went into it: it became evident that the entire film assumes familiarity on the viewer's part with a plethora of specific aspects of Japanese culture and history from the Edo period, including plays, people, places, customs, and language. The script is also so old that it frequently uses obsolete kanji.

That all being said, on the whole I am fairly confident about this translation, because the bulk of it was done literally word-by-word, copy-pasting kanji into online dictionaries and using websites like HiNative and Kotobank to gain context for phrases and idioms I was uncertain of. I did lean on machine translation, but I don't want to say that that's all this is, because the percentage of it that I figured out through looking up individual words in a dictionary (or being able to read it myself, although that accounts for very little) far outweighs what I got from DeepL and the like. I've tried to be honest in places where I just can't figure something out, and I've added a frankly somewhat frightening amount of footnotes to make it easier to understand, so hopefully reading it is not as hard on you as translating it was on me.

If you read this far, thanks! I included a chart mapping out all of the relationships between the characters in the PDF of my translation, but I'll post it here too just for funsies. Note that this only applies to the script - many of these characters aren't present in the final film.

Here are my links once more for good measure: translation here, full script here.