The Darkness We Return To

Japanese has an unusually large number of homophones, and this comes from how the language developed. Japanese doesn’t rely on the form of a word to fix its meaning; context—the topic, situation, and surrounding vocabulary—decides what a word means. Because the language has a small set of possible sounds, many different words naturally ended up sharing the same pronunciation, but native speakers can easily distinguish them through context, so there was no need to create separate words.

Japanese often expresses emotions as states — quiet, layered conditions that exist without being narrated. English, however, tends to express emotions through stories — events, actions, images. So when we translate Japanese lyrics, we often have to turn a “state” into a “story.” And when that happens, the multiple layers of meaning in Japanese collapse into a single layer in English.

Let me give an example from a line in Lemon by Kenshi Yonezu.

切り分けた果実の片方のように If we translate this literally, we get something like:

“like the other half of a fruit we once cut apart.”

In Japanese, this is not a story. It’s a structure of relationship: something once whole, now divided, yet still connected. English doesn’t encode emotional states through shared objects in this way. So translators often replace the structure with a narrative image — stars, darkness, longing.

For example, the line is often rendered as something like:

“Like the sour fruit we shared in the dark, my feelings for you remain…”

This is already a story — a scene, an event, a mood.

Another example:

今でもあなたは私の光 becomes:

“You are still my shining star.”

But in Japanese, 光 (“light”) does not simply mean light. It quietly contains time shared, memory, support, warmth, and even the shadow of loss. All of these layers collapse into a single, more literal image in English.

Understanding the layered meaning of 光 is essential, because Lemon is built entirely on this kind of emotional state.

The song does not tell a story in the English sense. It does not move through events or scenes. Instead, it creates a series of emotional states — loss, memory, connection, absence, afterglow — and lets them coexist in the same space.

The metaphor of the “cut fruit” is one such state: something once whole, now divided, yet still connected. 光 is another: a presence that is also an absence, a memory that still illuminates, a quiet proof that the relationship continues even after it has ended.

These metaphors do not “explain” anything. They hold emotions.

And this is why translating Lemon into English is so difficult: English requires the translator to turn these states into stories — to choose one meaning, one layer, one emotional direction.

But in Japanese, all of these layers exist at once. The song’s emotional power comes from that simultaneity.

In Japanese literature, the word koi is often translated as “love.” But koi is not love. It is a multi‑layered emotional state that English does not encode — a mixture of longing, ache, danger, and self‑loss.

Japanese is a language where a single word can carry several meanings at once — emotional, cultural, historical, and relational. Many of these meanings never appear in dictionaries, yet they are shared unconsciously among Japanese speakers, inherited from ancient times. This is why reading Japanese literature in translation often feels different from reading it in the original.

Let me give an example from Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro. The character known as “Sensei” says the famous line: “Koi is a sin.” In English, this is usually translated as “Love is a sin.”

But in Sōseki’s context, koi does not mean romantic love. It refers to a dangerous emotional state that threatens one’s identity, ethics, and relationships. It is a force that destabilizes the self.

When Sōseki writes “Koi is a sin,” he is not talking about morality. He is describing the collapse of the traditional Japanese self under the pressure of modern individual desire. This deeper layer disappears when koi is translated simply as “love.”

This is part of a larger theme in Japanese literature: the pain of modernity. As Japan entered the modern era, the traditional self — shaped by community, duty, and shared moral codes — began to collapse. Modernity brought freedom, but also isolation. It created a new kind of self that had to make personal choices without the protection of the old communal structure.

Sensei’s koi is not just personal emotion. It is the emotional shock of a society moving from collective identity to individual identity. His guilt, loneliness, and self‑destruction are symptoms of this transition — the pain of modernity.