Through a series of circumstances, the current online version of "Death of the Honest Men", one of Touhou canon's most debated mysteries, has been proven to be incomplete. Thanks to help from a Touhou fan who has an original copy of the text, the story has now been restored.
"Death of the Honest Men" is how some fans refer to the story from the liner note of the first version of "Hourai Ningyou ~ Dolls in Pseudo Paradise". This version was released together with the first version of EoSD at Comiket 62 (August 2002). Both Comiket 62 releases were simply burnt on CD-R, accompanied by self-made liner notes. Due to their historical significance and rarity (only a few dozens of copies are likely to exist), they would have been some of the most sought after Touhou items, if not for that no one is selling them. The way we, the majority of people read this story is by using a transcript circulating on the internet.
Unlike the later, mass-produced version of DiPP, the C62 liner note tells a gothic mystery story about eight "honest men". This story, told by seemingly unreliable narrators in a fragmentary, contradictory manner, has always confounded Touhou fans trying to unravel its secret. Now it turns out that one crucial line has been omitted from the existing text. Adding the line back will NOT provide a definite answer to the mystery, but, hey, it is restored.
OK, so much for the inverted pyramid. Let's see how it happened! Story time.
It started with the new Chinese wiki. They have been producing scans of official game and CD liner notes themselves. Of course, no one has the original copies of DiPP, EoSD or the PCB demo, so photos found on the internet were used, by removing the backgrounds of the liner notes in Photoshop.
This is the image of the DiPP liner note produced this way, using a Twitpic
photo.
One particular Japanese Touhou fan, 塢城
@hk_tk1 noticed this image. Realizing that many characters are faintly readable from the image, he compared it with the internet version, and suspected there are discrepancies between the two. He tweeted about it in the night of November 12, 2014.
After some discussion, he and other fans
found that, among other things, there seemed to be one small segment in the Track 6 Enigmatic Doll section that's missing from the internet text.
The segment with blue underlines is missing.The other two notable omissions were:
What seemed to be an English sentence at the end of the story.
ZUN's contact info (presumably intentionally omitted by the transcriber)
After hearing this news, I immediately did a comparison myself, using the image, the Chinese wiki, and
Kafka Fuura's version, which unlike other current versions, have preserved much of the original line breaks of the transcript. Deciding that because there is too little available info, we should preserve as much info as possible, line breaks included, I restored the original line breaks on the Chinese wiki, and noticed some more details, including:
1) There is another omission in the Track 1 Hourai Legend section.
2) Some lines were indented in the original text (i.e. they have a whitespace at the beginning). These are either inner monologues, or the shrine maiden's diary at the end. There is also a weird whitespace in the Track 10 Reincarnation section.
3) The contact info is practically the same as those in the
EoSD manual.
Fortunately, soon a holder of the real CD emerged. This person has permitted 塢城 to
publish a comparison between the real text and the transcript. Aside from the two omissions which are obviously unintended by the transcriber, most discrepancies turned out to be minor typos.
Here they are (above: original; below: internet transcript):
１．蓬莱伝説
提 僕は動く事も喋る事も出来なくなって
ネ 僕は動くことも出来なくなって
２．二色蓮花蝶 ～ Red and White
提 踊ってるのが見えた。
ネ 踊っているのが見えた。
６．エニグマティクドール
提 すぐに僕らの中にピエロがいたことに気づいてしまった。ふと後ろに気配を感じたが、身を任せた。
ネ すぐに後ろに気配を感じたが、身を任せた。
８．人形の森
提 楽園は、僕らが住むにちょうど良い
ネ 楽園は、僕らが住むにはちょうど良い
９．Witch of Love Potion
提 いつもならだた苦いだけの珈琲 // Typo in original text.
ネ いつもならただ苦いだけの珈琲
１０．リーインカーネイション
提 どっちが僕を木に打ち付けてるのだろうか？
ネ どっちが僕を木に打ち付けているのだろうか？
提 -interlude
ネ Interlude
１２．永遠の巫女
提 首をはねられてたなんて
ネ 首をはねられていたなんて
１３．空飛ぶ巫女の不思議な毎日
提 ８月○日
ネ 八月○日
提 見たような気がしたけど
ネ 見たような気がしらけど
Music Compose/Arrange and Story ZUN // The missing English at the end of the story.
The fully restored text, indentation and line breaks included, can now be
found on the Chinese wiki. The two most important omissions are marked in red.
Also, it has been long rumored, based on the "Interlude" section of the story, that the C62 version has an "Interlude" track not found in the common version. This is not true.
So the immediate takeaways from the text are:
1) Omission 1: in the Track 1 Hourai Legend section, when the curious one received the Jeweled Branch of Hourai, they
"could neither move nor make sound, as if my head had been separated from my body". It happens that translators tended to think their head was separated from the body literally.
2) Omission 2: In the Track 6 Enigmatic Doll section, when the clever one was alone in darkness, they
"soon realized that the pierro is among us".
3) In the original text, most lines are 26 full-width characters long, with some exceeding it.
4) Conveying the emphasis dots (placed above or below the characters to be emphasized) has always been a trouble, since this feature, common in Chinese and Japanese print text, is not well supported by HTML. Both the Chinese translator and Kafka Fuura mistook the transcript's emphasis dots for elipses (in Interlude and Track 12 Eternal Shrine Maiden sections). The Chinese wiki currently represent emphases in canon text using bold text. The English wiki's PiDD story (and other places?) uses ruby text.
