Forum › Hana Ni Arashi discussion
Hmmm... so their friend ACTUALLY said HIM... I was wondering if she was image was everyone else's imagination of the presumed guy since there's no face. If she had used gender neutral terms I would have suspected that the person she was crushing on at her cram school was female...
These two certainly can get overheated just from the thought of kissing each other!
Ah, the gender of the crush is actually ambiguous in the raws. Here is what schuyguy said when we were quality checking:
"Kumako doesn't refer to her crush by gender in the original. In fact, no one refers to her crush in any gendered manner throughout the entire conversation. But this is very common in Japanese. Usage of pronouns is rare, because once the subject is brought up you don't need to explicitly state it for the rest of the conversation. Unfortunately, you have to make a choice in English. Any translation of that exchange that avoided the use of gendered pronouns would sound unnatural in a way the original doesn't. If I used "them" then it would draw attention to the lack of a defined gender in a way the original doesn't. It just doesn't work the same way in English. If you refer to a singular person as "they", people ask for clarification."
So, here, Kumako doesn't refer to this person as "him" until someone else does first. They made an assumption, and she went along with it.
