When Dazai Osamu's narrator in Ningen Shikkaku declares himself beyond redemption — permanently estranged from both God and fellow humans, he is drawing on a moral vocabulary inherited from a single translation decision made in Meiji-era Japan. This paper argues that the Meiji Bible translators' rendering of the Greek hamartia as tsumi (罪) produced a structurally consequential misalignment: one that introduced Protestant Christianity to Japan primarily through the register of divine judgment, while suppressing the corresponding vocabulary of grace and redemption. Drawing on corpus analysis of the Gospels using Voyant Tools, this paper demonstrates that tsumi was applied far beyond the Greek term's semantic range, encompassing condemnation, judgment, legal charge, and social transgression. Gendered asymmetries in the data reveal further ideological work: where women's transgressions are rendered as akugyō (evil deeds) rather than tsumi, the translation locates female wrongdoing in the behavioral rather than the theological, a distinction with its own literary afterlife. Situating this analysis within Toury's descriptive translation studies and Venuti's concept of the translator's ideological invisibility, the paper reads the tsumi translation not as a failure of equivalence but as an institutional act, one that encoded a particular moral theology into modern Japanese literary language at the precise moment that language was being standardized. The Meiji Bible's mediation of sin demonstrates that translation is never a neutral transfer: it is a structuring act whose consequences exceed its agents' intentions, shaping the moral imagination of a literary culture for generations.

Authors:
Brenna Tanner, University of Tsukuba, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Brenna Tanner is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Tsukuba. Her research examines the Meiji-era translation of the Bible and American missionary texts, analyzing their cross-cultural literary impact.

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