JSLL #72 - The Spider's Thread, part 20

 We're entering part 3 of "The Spider's Thread" by Ukatagawa Ryousuke. Here's sentence 1 from that part.

Sentence:

しかし地獄と極楽との間は、何万里となくございますから、いくら焦ってみたところで、容易に上へは出られません。

しかしじごくとごくらくとのあいだは、なんまんりとなくございますから、いくるあせってみたところで、とうにうえへはでられません。

Vocabulary

• 万 means "10,000." Unlike English which renews its counting after 3 zeroes (ten, hundred, thousand; ten thousand, hundred thousand, million; and so on), Japanese renews its counting after 4 zeroes: 十 (ten), 百 (100), 千 (1000), 万 (10,000), 十万 (100,000), 百万 (1,000,000), 千万 (10,000,000); and so on).
• 里 is an old unit of measurement for distance, corresponding to roughly 4 km or 2.4 miles.
• となく according to jisho.org "adds vagueness and indirectness to the word or phrase it is used with"
• いくら means "how many, how much" or, in some context, "no matter how many, no matter how much"
• 焦る means "to be in a hurry, to be impatient, to be anxious, to fret; to get a fright, to panic, to get flustered, to be startled." The second sense is given as "colloquial," so we can probably disregard it.
• 容易 means "easy, simple, plain," but strangely, it's given both as a na-adjective and as a noun.

Kanji

Kanji	N-level	Occurs in how many common words?
万	N5	20
里	None, but a jouyou kanji	10
焦	N1	4
易	N3	10

Translation

However, because the space between Hell and Heaven is many tens of thousands of kilometers, no matter how much you fret, you can't get up out of it.