金之助

Here’s a neat little phrase I stumbled across recently. 

I was telling a Japanese friend that I'm going out for a meal with another friend, and he dropped this on me:

サシで？

I had no idea what it meant, so I asked. Turns out, サシ comes from 差し向かい, which means “face to face.” So when someone asks 「サシで？」, they’re basically saying, “Just the two of you?”

It is used with the で particle, like in:

サシで飲む to have a private drink

or

サシで話す to talk one-on-one

From サシで飲む also comes the noun サシ飲み (a private drink), which seems to be pretty common.

It can also be written in kanji as 「差し」.

恋人繋ぎ・こいびとつなぎ noun = intimately holding hands with interlocked fingers (lit. lovers' interlock)

Upon reading Murakami’s 1Q84, I came across the following sentence:

鍵はかかっていたが、鍵のうちには入らないようなものだった。

I couldn’t make sense of the second part of the sentence, so I asked my Japanese friend for help.

Apparently, Nのうちに入らない means something like “can’t be regarded as N” or “not really a N”. So, you might translate the sentence as, “It was locked, but it wasn’t much of a lock.” 

This phrase seems to be more often used with verbs, as in Vたうちに入らない, rather than with nouns.

My friend also mentioned that Japanese teachers often use this phrase when students haven’t done something properly, e.g., cleaning the classroom:

こんなのやったうちに入らないだろ！ You can’t seriously think this counts as cleaning, right?!

When I thanked my friend for the help, he replied with:

こんなの助けたうちにも入らねーぜ。 This doesn’t even count as helpin’, man.

After some further research, I discovered that this is actually considered an N1-level grammar point.