JSLL #29 - Urashima Tarou - Thirtieth and thirty-first sentences

 The next two sentences in the Urashima Tarou story are short, so we'll do both in one go.

村には自分の家はありませんでした。お父さんもお母さんもいくら呼んでも見つかりません。

むらにはじぶんのいえはありませんでした。おとうさんもおかあさんもいくらよんでもみつかりません。

Mura ni ha jibun no ie ha arimasen deshita. Otousan mo okaasan mo ikura yondemo mitzukarimasen.

The first sentence has two topics, which is unusual: 村に ("in the village") and 自分の家 ("his own house, his home"). The polite negative past tense ありませんでした comes from ある, the form of "to be, to exist" reserved for things without a heart. So the first sentence in its entirety reads, "In [his] village, his own house wasn't there."

Several new kanji in this first sentence:

• 自分 as a combination means "self, oneself, himself, herself" etc. Combined with の it becomes "of himself/herself" etc. Or less literally, "his/her (own)."
• 自 is an N4 kanji that occurs in 99 common words. Although it means "self" in most of those words, it does lead to perhaps unexpected words: 自転車 (literally "vehicle that one drives oneself") means "bicycle," while 自動車 ("vehicle that moves by itself") is "car" (or more in keeping with the Japanese word, "automobile").
• 分 is a kanji without an N-level according to the dictionary for some reason, but it's so common that it must be N5. It occurs in 104 common words, and it's very frequent, because it means "minute" (５分 = 5 minutes) and is also the main kanji in the verb 分かる (わかる, "to understand"), which is widely used in conversation: 分かりました ("I have understood") is the common response to an assigment or instruction.
• 家 is an N4 kanji in 79 common words, which connote things like home, family and so on.

The second sentence has a complex topic of the form XもYも, which means "Both X and Y" or "Neither X nor Y" depending on whether the verb is affirmative or negative. Here the X and Y are お父さん ("father") and お母さん ("mother"), respectively. 

The next word, いくら, may be familiar if you know some conversational Japanese: いくらですか ("How much is it?") is one of those practical sentences for tourists to learn. いくら means "how much," but if it's followed by a te-form + も, it means "however much, no matter how much." The topic of the sentence may be Tarou's parents, but Tarou is still the subject of the sentence, and the verb in the te-form is 呼んで, from 呼ぶ ("to call, to call out"). So the part いくら呼んでも means "No matter how much he called, ..." 

The verb at the end, 見つかりません, is negative, and comes from 見つかる ("to be found, to be discovered") --not to be confused with 見つける, "to find."

The logical translation for this sentence would be: "Neither his father nor his mother were to be found, no matter how much he called." One problem with this translation is that the main verb is in the non-past tense. The past would be 見つかりませんでした. I can't really explain this tense switch, but from context, it's pretty clear that the translation should be in the past tense.

So the two sentences back to back:

In his village, his own house wasn't there. Neither his father nor his mother were to be found, no matter how much he called.