Category: False Friends

妹「いや。聞こえる。絶対に鈴の音だ！」と呼ぶや、サッシを開け放った。その時、サンタはすでに玄関まで到達し、庭には誰もいなかった。

原成男「酒と涙と男と天ぷら」

More often than one might imagine, we encounter “sashes” (サッシ or サッシュ) being opened in contemporary Japanese. In cases like the one above, this does not refer to a strip of cloth worn around the waist (or even around curtains), but to a less common sense of “sash” in English: “a frame holding the glass in a window, typically one of two sliding frames.” (Oxford American Dictionary)

For those unfamiliar with this usage, consider “The Night Before Christmas”:

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.

Note that the Kôjien lists サッシ (without the small “yu”) as only referring to the latter of the two meanings given above, while サッシュ can refer to either. Also note that this can refer to the frame of sliding glass doors as well, as in the image below.

… 手塚さんから受けた架空の恋愛相談の内容まで思い浮かぶほどだった。

角田光代「マザコン」

It pays to be careful with electronic dictionaries that give a one word translation, sans examples. If one were to use such a dictionary to process the phrase sôdan o ukeru, one might presume that it meant something along the lines of “to receive advice.” If that were the case, we would read the above sentence to mean that the narrator had received fictional love advice from Ms. Tezuka. In fact, however, it was the narrator who had given the advice.

Nikkoku defines sôdan as “conversing in order to determine how to proceed,” which is thus the whole process of consultation, and not just the resulting advice.

The phrase sôdan o ukeru means, then, not to receive advice but to be called in for consultation; that is, to be consulted. In the example above, a contorted literal translation might be “the fictional love advice I had been asked to give by Ms. Tezuka.”