Usually Lou Corlin was reasonably confident about his Japanese reading comprehension. Not enough to provide a formal translation, but at least enough to get the gist of a text and confirm Autumn Belfontaine’s understanding of it before she put anything on the air.
However, today he wanted to run some rather sensitive text past someone who had a lot more experience with Japanese than he did. While Lou had studied conversational Japanese an academic subject, his clone-brother Tristan had spent significant amounts of time in Japan and Edo Settlement, and was fluent not only in the every-day language, but in technical vocabulary and usage. Not to mention some of the finer points of cultural nuance, which could be at play here.
Making connections with Tristan had proven easier said than done. Which was especially awkward when Autumn was waiting for him to get back to her. But he’d just missed Tristan at lunch, which meant tracking him down in Miskatonic Sector, where he was preparing for a class.
At least study lounges provided plenty of good places to consult. On the other hand, this particular one had a lot of younger kids coming and going, and about half the time they were singing rather garbled versions of the lyrics of whatever was playing on the stereo.
As half a dozen kids came traipsing through on their way to class, belting out a song he knew a little too well, Lou glowered at the stereo. “Sprue, why did you have to play that song right now?”
Tristan looked up from the tablet. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think a lot of people realize just how hentai that song is. Starting with the fact it’s about bukkake, not jewelry.”
As understanding dawned, Tristan grinned. “Especially you realize that bukkake became such a big trope in erotic anime because they had to work around Japanese decency laws. Sliding crap past the moral watchdogs’ radar has a long history on both sides of the Pacific.”
“Yeah. And there’s a bunch of that band’s stuff that probably went right past old Tipper because she didn’t know the slang meanings of certain words. Heck, she probably didn’t even know those words had dirty meanings.”
Both of them started laughing, then looked at each other. “Good grief. Here we are, in the middle of a solar storm watch that may turn into a warning at any time, talking about double meanings in music. And everybody thinks our geneset is such a bunch of straight-arrows.”