I’ve been reading a children’s short story book that I had received a long time ago and had promptly ignored until recently. Upon picking it up I noticed that there was a way of writing which was odd to me. It was like having mixed tenses. Past changing suddenly to present (I am multilingual and have never seen such a thing happen in any other language that I know). The following excerpt is typical.
Excerpt:
「残業また残業で、男が自宅まで帰り着くのはいつも深夜だった。男は帰宅したときには、妻は5歳になる息子を寝かしつけながら、そのまま一緒に寝てしまっ**ている**。」
What I think makes sense:
妻は5歳になる息子を寝かしつけながら、そのまま一緒に寝てしまっ**ていた**。
Problem:
Why いる and not いた?
What is the reason the tenses are mixed?
How do I wrap my head around this?
I’m not a noob to Japanese. I’ve N2 and I work as a translator/interpreter JP-EN. Most of the Japanese reading I do, I do for work and my active vocabulary reflects this quite strongly, I presume. But only in this book have I encountered such a thing. I have not read any literary works in Japanese. I do read regularly in English and have read works in other languages in the past.
7 comments
I think it’s because the first sentence describes what’s happening now, while the second describes what always happens. It’s clearer if the author added an いつも somewhere in the second sentence (e.g. at the beginngin), but as a native Japanese speaker I can perfectly understand what they’re trying to say here.
If you’re thinking in terms of tense, the verb inflections don’t seem to match up with the narrative timeline, but what’s actually being highlighted is that “-ta” and “-ru” are not tense markers in the traditional sense. Sometimes they are considered aspect markers (perfective and imperfective as opposed to past and nonpast), but aspect is not necessarily an ideal way of thinking about Japanese verbs either.
I think this is too complex of a topic for me to summarize well in a reddit post, but *The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation* by Yoko Hasegawa has a good section on this issue titled “Tense and aspect.” Hasegawa also includes several literary passages that show the same kind of unexpected verb inflections as your example.
I also suck at these kinds of nuances, but
>男は帰宅したときには、妻は5歳になる息子を寝かしつけながら、そのまま一緒に寝てしまっている。
I’m pretty sure what this means is that the wife slept beside their son and continued on sleeping even when the husband got home.
>妻は5歳になる息子を寝かしつけながら、そのまま一緒に寝てしまっていた。
With this (and with the 男は帰宅したときには part in tact), it would mean that the wife still slept beside her son but wasn’t actually still asleep but rather woke up when the husband came home.
Someone feel free to correct me as well.
Yeah try searching for “historical present” on Japanese stack exchange.
いた would imply that she had been lying down at some point before the man came home, and that the action had been completed in the past as well. 寝る describes the state of lying down, and since she was still in that state when the man saw her, いる is used.
The tenses are different because 帰宅した controls the timeframe of the scenario, while 寝てしまっている is used to describe the persistent state while in that timeframe. しまう is for the mood.
There is nothing crazy going on here. It’s just the historical present. It’s used a lot more frequently in Japanese literature than it is in English, but it’s the same.
いつも深夜だった – this is giving background information.
一緒に寝てしまっている – this is what is happening now (not technically now, but the historical/past now)
If this were spoken Japanese, it would all be past tense, but in writing (and sometimes spoken narration) the historical present is used for effect.
OP you should get yourself some JP/Eng parallel texts such as “Read Real Japanese Fiction” in which they explain all that stuff in some amazing notes. As others pointed out, what you’re looking for is “historical present”.