JSLL #12 - Urashima Tarou - Eleventh sentence

 Here's the 11th sentence from the story:

ふりかえってみますと、一匹の大きい亀が舟のそばに来ていました。

ふりかえってみますと、いっぴきのおおきいかめがふねのそばにきていました。

Furikaette mimasu to, ippiki no ookii kame ga fune no soba ni kiteimashita.

The relative clause ふりかえってみますと、would more typically be written with kanji, like so: 振り返ってみますと、

The clause ends in と, which we know means "when" or "whenever." The ～てみます ending means "try to X" where X is the verb to its left. The main verb of this clause is 振り返る which means "to turn one's head, to look over one's shoulder, to turn around, to look back." So the whole thing means "when he tried to turn his head, ..." 

As we will see, the trying part doesn't make much sense when translated to English. A subtlety of ～てみる is that it can't be used for unsuccessful attempts to do something. It literally means "to X and see" meaning "to actually do X and see how it works out/how you like it." It's the "try" in "Try the food, it's delicious."

In the main sentence, the subject is 一匹の大きい亀 (marked with the subject particle が).　一匹, as we saw before, is the number 1 (一) followed by the counter for small animals (匹). It's interesting that this counter is used because what follows immediately after の, which is used appositively here, I think, is 大きい (おおきい), which means "big." Following that is 亀 (turtle). So our subject is "one big turtle" or simply "a big turtle." The only new kanji we've encountered, 大, is an N5 kanji that occurs in 191 common words, among them 大学 (university, literally "big school"), 大人 (adult, literally "big person") and so on.

Next is an indication of place: 舟のそばに. The word "boat" (ふね, fune) can actually be written as either the N2 kanji 舟 or the N3 kanji 船. The book uses 舟 throughout for some reason, and in an earlier post I made a mistake by writing it 船. The online dictionary says that that is the more common kanji, and gives just 1 common word that "contains" 舟: the word 船 (with 舟 given as the alternative "spelling").

The word そば is typically written just with kanji, and means "near, close, beside, vicinity, proximity, besides, while." So 舟のそばに means "in the vicinity of the boat" or just "near the boat."

Finally the verb 来ていました is the progressive polite past tense of 来る (くる, kuru, "to come"). 来る and the verb する, which we've encountered earlier, are the only really irregular verbs in Japanese.

The whole sentence reads, "When he [= Tarou] tried to turn around, a big turtle was coming near the boat." or "When he turned around, a big turtle was coming near the boat."