Since we’re all melting, let’s enjoy a Pet Shop of Horrors reread-and-translation-comparison thread that opens with The Beach Episode.

Start of Tokyopop volume 8, and Seven Seas volume 6. Originally liveblogged in separate threads on Mastodon / Bluesky, combined here.

TP volume 8 has a “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” warning on the front. None of the others have that! I just double-checked! Why only flag the Canon-Typical Violence that on this book…? (It’s the one with the cutest cover, too — Chris, surrounded by T-chan, Pon-chan, and Q-chan.)

Meanwhile: Chapter 2 of the Little Sister D fixit is up! Which is good, because I’m giving myself even more new plotbunnies in this one…

31: Deep

This got order-swapped with “Dummy” in SS compared to TP. (I don’t see any major continuity hiccups from switching the order, but I sure hope the translation team checked that before doing it…)

It is nice to have them back-to-back, in either direction. One has Leon going “dammit, guess I gotta run into a burning building after D,” the other gives him “dammit, guess I gotta jump into a stormy ocean after D.”

—

We open on an unidentified Beach Resort Island that’s only reachable by ferry. Leon took Chris there for a summer vacation, and Chris (in both translations) said he wasn’t going without D, sooooo Leon brought D. They’re staying at the same beach cabin! (Not clear whether Chris mandated that part too.)

D and Leon immediately start bickering, culminating in these matching grumpy thoughts:

TP:
D: This from the man who complained the whole drive because we wouldn’t stop at Hooters for lunch.
Leon: Silly me, I thought that letting Count D get a taste of fresh air and piña coladas before I send him to the slammer was actually a nice thing to do!

SS:
D: Hmph! He clearly intends for me to be Chris’s minder.
Leon: I can’t take my eyes off him for a whole week! He’d get up to trouble!

Okay, TP is funnier, but I like the specific character/motive info we get in the SS version. Wish TP had punched that up instead of all-out replacing it.

Also, very exciting that this is officially a D/Leon song now:

—

Leon gets distracted by a babe in a bikini, and, hey, here’s a great example of TP successfully keeping the basic info, while spicing up the phrasing:

TP: I’ll wager that girl’s packing some serious heat! I’d better go frisk her!
SS: Yeah! I’mma chat her up!! We’ll totally go on a date!!

(D, in turn, gets heart-eyes over…a sea slug. The TP translation says “seashell”. but looking at the art, that is very clearly a slug.)

—

Chris makes a friend, a little girl who’s lost an earring, so D recruits some fish to help her find it. In thanks, her grandpa takes them all for a ride on his boat — and reveals his Dramatic Backstory about wanting Revenge on a mermaid.

I’m noticing that TP’s text is longer and wordier in this one…but it’s not as obtrusive as it was in the Scorpion chapter.

An unnatural wave hits the boat, knocking D over the side. (Leon was busy holding onto Chris, okay.)

Underwater, a hand grabs his leg, and we get this mysterious plea (complete with a New Font, in both editions):

TP: Please…please…save him!
SS: Help me…please!!

Might be giving the game away a little too early there, TP…

—

The specific grumble Leon has while he’s about to dive in after D:

TP: Hmph…We don’t even know that he fell. My guess is the guy saw a starfish and jumped in after it.
SS: Ugh! Gotta bail him out, like always!

Definitely too long from TP (it barely fits in the dialogue bubble!), and also, please do not deprive us of references to how regularly Leon rescues D :(

—

Dolphins show up alongside the boat, Chris translates:

TP: They’re calling for us. They want us to follow them.
SS: That way! They say someone’s calling us.

The dolphins lead them to an isolated beach inlet where a waterlogged D has washed up on the sand. D wakes up…and doesn’t recognize them! I like the bit of extra intrigue in SS: if D has lost his memory, then who exactly was calling?

—

Okay, I spoke too soon about TP’s wordiness, it’s definitely getting obtrusive now. Compare this bit, from the island doctor who checks on D (not from exactly the same speech bubble, but this is him expositing the same info):

TP: Beyond that, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. He should probably be taken to a mainland hospital as soon as possible, and given a more thorough examination. After that, you should probably have a better idea of what you’re dealing with here.
SS: I strongly recommend a more thorough checkup at a hospital on the mainland.

And Leon reflecting on it that evening:

TP: Who knew island life was so complicated? Here, I thought the biggest problem these guys ever had was having to look for their lost shakers of salt.
SS: Guess even a little island like this has its issues.

…okay, I do think “adding a Margaritaville reference” was a solid choice here! It’s just, that could’ve been a sentence, not a paragraph.

—

D is in a state where he doesn’t even remember a lot of basic words, so Chris gets busy teaching him. He identifies things like a tree, a flower, Chris…then scandalizes Leon by cheerfully identifying him as:

TP: Drunk!
SS: Mister!

So, this was totally a Japanese word where “mister” is a literal translation, but it’s an inappropriate version of “mister” for the social context of D and Leon’s relationship, right?

(I did figure that out from the art…but I think “localizing it to a word that’s actively rude in English” was a better approach.)

—

Leon, suspicious of this “amnesia”:

TP: Forgetting people’s names and faces…shouldn’t matter if you’re accustomed to having them in your life.
SS: Even if people forget names and faces…they generally still remember normal everyday stuff.

Aw, now TP is possibly making up character/motive info that I wish was in the original. Tell us more about how you want to be an important part of D’s life, Leon.

—

Oh, I skipped a thing: Leon imagines a montage of folks (T-chan and Pon-chan, Jill and the Chief, the Mayor, the still-faceless Grandpa D) yelling at him.

TP just has him thinking the island is “still better than home.” SS makes it clear that Leon is imagining everyone’s reactions if he brings D home like this.

—

Faye and her grandfather stop by for a visit, and D identifies the grandpa by name: “Shido” in TP, “Cid” in SS.

He assumes D learned it from The Mermaid. Apparently he never told them himself.

Weird that you would let a stranger take you out on a boat without even getting their name! TP flourished their way into a continuity error, they wrote an islander referring to him as “Shido” while D and Leon were in the room — and even in SS where that didn’t happen on-page, isn’t that the natural thing Cid should assume happened?

This would’ve been so easy for Akino to solve, too! Have him introduce himself with a longer name, have D use a nickname, have Cido react with “I haven’t gone by that nickname since I was a young man — nobody on the island uses it — you can only have heard it from The Mermaid!”

—

That night, Leon spots D sneaking down to the beach…and, sure enough, hanging out with The Mermaid.

Ominous conversation — then Leon wakes up with amnesia. Not the same kind, though. He just blacked out the events of the previous night.

Seeing himself in the mirror:

TP: The hell?! This scar…when did this happen? How did this happen? Did I at least get her name?
SS: What the hell? How’d I get…this massive bruise?

…look, this is explained perfectly well by the events we saw on-page, but still: has somebody written a Leon/D/This Mermaid threesome fic? No? Do I have to do everything myself around here??

—

Unrest among the island animals all morning, then D starts warning Leon there’s a natural disaster incoming:

TP: This island is going to sink! We must tell the people!
SS: Tell the humans their island is sinking.

I really like the implications of the second one. Leon has picked up on a couple problems with the “amnesia” theory…but he’s also totally used to D making occasional sassy remarks about “humans.” He just figures it’s one of D’s ways of messing with him! So, yeah, this wouldn’t even register as part of the weirdness.

—

Soooo Leon starts threatening people with a gun until they all agree to evacuate the island. Yeah, that sounds like America.

D goes missing again during the evacuation. Cido and Faye pull up their boat next to the one Leon and Chris are on. Leon, who’s getting back vague memories of meeting The Mermaid, asks for a ride back to that isolated beach.

TP:
Shido: Disaster strikes after the mermaid appears…and many people lose their lives.
Leon, somberly: I’m not dead. I don’t think this mermaid has ever killed anybody.

SS:
Cid: That woman carries disaster! Lots of people are going to die!
Leon, somberly: No, they won’t. I won’t let them!

So, TP is possibly getting Leon to that realization a few pages early. But, well, I kinda feel like it’s more narratively satisfying for it to happen here. It’s still a big shock for Cido, since he has 50 years of “she causes disasters!!” to get over! Leon, meanwhile, has all the pieces of the puzzle by now — he’s only one good hunch away from the truth. And our guy does have good hunches sometimes.

—

Again, they find D and The Mermaid at the beach. (The kids stay behind for this part, it’s just Leon and Cido.)

Reveal 1: this wasn’t just a beach episode, it was a bodyswap episode! D’s “amnesia” has been The Mermaid piloting his body the whole time, so she could warn everyone of this disaster more effectively, by borrowing D’s incredible powers of Vocal Cords That Can Form English.

Wonder which of them actually hit Leon with the amnesia beam when he caught them together. Is that a spiritual power she could use from D’s body? Or is it tied to the mermaid-body, so D had to use it?

…real talk, I think Akino was a little stingy on the foreshadowing with this twist. When Leon met the pair of them last night, both of their faces had ominous, smirking, D-style expressions. Today, before they swap back, both faces have wide-eyed, earnest, innocent expressions. Readers deserved some panels where we could see “oh, now that they’re next to each other, it’s really clear that only one of them has D’s expressions and body language — and not the one who’s supposed to have them.”

—

Reveal 2: she rescued Cido back in the day, they lived together for months, they fell in love. She just wiped his memory when he decided to go home again, and he’s been running on “a vague sense that she’s intensely important to me” ever since.

Not a big surprise that, after all the reveals are over, he decides to stay this time.

(We don’t see Faye again. I do kinda think Cido should’ve had a moment like “tell my granddaughter to be a good girl, okay?” before D and Leon left.)

—

An exchange between D and Leon as they head out:

TP:
Leon: There is one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.
D: Anything! Of course, you do realize that no matter what I tell you…we’ll have forgotten it by the time we get back home.

SS:
Leon: Hey, can I ask you something?
D: Of course! I’ll gladly answer any question. You’ll forget it all by the time we’re back in Chinatown.

It’s well-established by now that D is not subject to Obligatory Mermaid Amnesia Rules. So it’s only the SS version — “you’ll” forget, not “we’ll” forget — that conveys D is genuinely in a mood to be 100% honest with Leon.

(We don’t see the question. It cuts from there back to Chinatown. Extremely good writing choice tbh. The setup is so tantalizing, and hitting the reader with “yeah, now you know the feeling of being aware that something emotional happened, but not remembering what it was” is so well-earned.)

—

At the shop, we find out Leon now has amnesia for the whole week. A lot of what happened isn’t secret — he’s in the news as the hero who helped save all the islanders! He’s getting thank-you letters! — but he’s lost it all, mermaid-related bits and not.

There is one thing that’s a mystery to D: why does he have a bump on his head? (There was a moment when The Mermaid piloted his body face-first into a plate-glass door. Oops.)

He and Leon start bickering over it, while Chris thinks to himself:

TP: They’re starting again…We just got back and already I need another vacation!
SS: I’ll keep the truth safely tucked away…in my heart forever.

All credit to TP, that’s a solid callback to the opening of the chapter, nice and fulfilling to read…but also, it is very cute and funny to be reminded that Chris is the only person here (except Q-chan) who remembers that scene. And he’s wisely choosing to keep quiet about it. What a good kid.

—

32: Deja Vu

A fashionable rich woman walks into the shop, requests The Best Pet. There’s a dialogue bubble that TP thinks is spoken by the customer, SS thinks it’s from D:

TP: Mrs. Burtley has given you her highest recommendation, and assured me that you will have no problem fulfilling it.
SS: I can hardly disappoint when Madam Lawrence personally recommended us.

TP makes it a callback! Anessa Burtley/Bartley was the rich girl who hit on D at a society party, way back in Dessert, the totetsu chapter. I don’t remember a Madam Lawrence at all. Anybody else know who that could mean?

—

Extremely cute moment when Chris reacts with “you can’t promise to sell her the best pet in the shop…because that’s obviously Q-chan!”

(Turn the page…)

“Everybody else is human!”

(That’s the SS version. TP makes it 3x as long, which totally flubs the comedic timing.)

—

Leon and Jill come over, apparently not for a case, just to hang out?

Chris is off on a Best Pet search. There’s a bit of dialogue that TP thinks is from Leon, and in SS could kinda be Leon or Jill:

TP: He take that weird goat with him?
SS: Ooh! I don’t see Tetsu either.

Ooh, self-induced continuity error for SS. Up til now, they’ve replaced the Japanese “totetsu” with the Chinese “taotie”. It’s more culturally-accurate for D, that’s fine — and you don’t have to replace “T-chan”, it still fits — but you have to remember to replace “Tetsu” when it comes up, too!

—

D asks Jill about the rich customer. Jill identifies her as “Edna Hurry” in TP, “Echidna Hughley” in SS.

I got to this part in SS, wondered why I didn’t remember any character having such a bizarre name, then went back to TP and ohhhh, that makes so much more sense.

(It’s a pen name. She’s a famous romance novelist. I don’t think Akino appreciated that “Echidna” sounds hilariously un-romantic in English.)

—

No prize for the first person to track down “which specific Alphonse Mucha painting this is a beautiful reference to”…

(I posted that famous Sailor Moon set a while back, but I’m stumped on this one.)

—

Chris, T-chan, and Pon-chan visit Honglong’s room. All three sisters say hi to Chris! Junrei, the child-influenced one, gets cute and blushy about it…Pon-chan is jealous. Meh.

Kanan, the Leon-influenced one, confidently announces that Q-chan is in no danger:

TP: She used magic to turn into her current form. So she can use magic to turn herself back! She just likes being difficult!
SS: He only looks the way he does because he was cursed by a wizard. Break the curse, and he’ll go back to normal.

Shuko, the D-influenced one, yells at Kanan not to tell lies. And, well, the SS version is a lie. But the TP version…is almost spot-on? (I would suspect the TP translators of looking ahead at spoilers, except that they got Q-chan’s pronouns wrong!)

Lots of ways you could interpret this. I am enjoying the idea that Akino’s original intent was “Kanan was making up nonsense on purpose, so it’s extra-funny in like 8 chapters when we find out she was accidentally 100% right.”

—

The little gang ends up in a room that’s an isolated landscape, with twin pets hanging out together: Penny Roe and Penny Sun (TP), or Penny Lou and Penny Sam (SS).

Akino has drawn the plainest, awkwardest, scrungliest girls she can come up with. They are still completely adorable. You tried.

They recognize T-chan’s species, so he promises not to eat them. I really like the TP flourish in the next line:

TP: Actually, I am pretty hungry, now that I think about it. Chris, you don’t need both your arms, do you?
SS: But I am getting hungry.

—

Chris thanks Penny Roe/Lou by name. TP adds a comedy bit about how, oops, she’s the other Penny:

TP: You’re getting us mixed up. I don’t know why. We don’t look anything alike. / Yeah, most of our friends have no trouble telling us apart. And our parents can do it without looking.

SS has her pleasantly-surprised Chris was right:

SS: Well, we look and sound exactly alike, right? / Even Ma and Pa mix us up sometimes, never mind our friends!

It’s a funny gag if they don’t realize they’re the same character design drawn twice, but, aww, I feel for Chris. Let him have a hunch :(

—

Leon, meanwhile, has gotten suspicious of the author, and investigated:

TP: Edna Hurry’s real name is Sarah Greenberg. Place of birth is Lola Village in Kenmay County, North Dakota.
SS: Echidna Hughley, originally Sara Greenburg. She was born in Rolla, a little town near Kenmare, North Dakota.

I would not have blamed Akino at all for making up random small towns here, as TP presumably figured she did…but props to SS for tracking down the actual place-names!

Leon delivers this exposition (including a suspected murder!) over the phone to D. He’s calling from a pay phone. In an airport. About to get on a red-eye flight to ND. D’s heavy sigh is my heavy sigh.

—

Customer comes back to the shop, D tells her it’ll be a short drive, and they go out the “back entrance” to a fancy town car. (D and the author ride in facing seats in the passenger compartment. Please accept my headcanon that the unseen driver is a homing pigeon.)

Crossing the landscape where Penny and Penny live. One of the Pennies is having a breakdown that the guy she likes proposed to her twin…runs off alone, stumbles into a bog…D follows her in and scoops her out:

TP: Our poor little Penny Sun. Or perhaps I should say…Peggy Greenberg. The girl you killed 13 years ago.
SS: Poor little Penny Sam. Or rather…Peggy Greenburg. The life you ended thirteen years ago.

SS better foreshadows that the “ending a life” part will turn out to be figurative, not a literal murder. (I guess you could say “Peggy Greenberg” is…her deadname. /rimshot)

—

Leon finds Sara(h), still living in ND, looking nothing like E(chi)dna. D reveals that Penny/Peggy is some kind of manifestation of the scrungly childhood E tried to “kill” by reinventing herself.

As with the mermaid guy and his granddaughter, the chapter doesn’t mention whether S finds out that her long-lost twin is secretly alive, let alone a romance-novel millionaire. She’s coming to the pet shop because she feels dissatisfied with her life, turns out she’s mourning her lost youth, isn’t that pointing to “go reconnect with your sister” as part of the solution…?

Looks like nope.

Last page, another conversation where TP inverts some dialogue:

Chris: Did the customer like the pet I picked out?
D: No, Chris, she didn’t. But she wound up taking home…the most beautiful bluebird your eyes have ever seen.

SS has it like this:

Chris: Did the customer not get along with the girl I found?
D: I wouldn’t say that. She adored Peggy Sam…and sees her as a beautiful blue bird.

Well, I did say earlier that I liked when Chris gets to be right. But I also like D’s subtlety in the TP version. He’s never tried to convince Chris of the “you see them as humans, others see them as pets” effect before — he even brushed it off earlier in this same chapter! And readers can figure out from context “oh yeah, that bluebird is totally the girl.”

—

I was stumped about the significance there, so I flipped to the endnotes, and:

TP: The bird that appears on a weather vane.
SS: You know…the one from Maurice Maeterlinck’s story…

Welp: Seems like the phrase “bluebird of happiness” was inspired by this play. It’s about learning to appreciate other people’s happiness without getting envious, and that wealth+luxury aren’t that great once you see them clearly. Very on-theme!

Thank you, SS team, for working out the original Belgian romanization of that name, instead of just giving up and vibing.

—

33: Flowers, the Detective, and the Detective’s Little Brother

D is sending Chris (supervised by T-chan and Pon-chan) to the store! Shopping list:

TP: I need some susuki, bush clover, and patrinia…arrowroot, wormwort…some Chinese bellflower and the latest copy of Reader’s Digest.
SS: Silver grass, bush clovers, golden lace…arrowroot, carnations…bellflowers, and eupatorium.

Most of those are alternate names for the same plants, except “wormwort” (did they mean wormwood? either way, no obvious connection between that and carnations)…and the magazine. D needing to keep up with Reader’s Digest may not be the original intended canon, but it’s canon in my heart now, okay.

—

D and Leon tail them, just to make sure they don’t get in trouble. D brings a camcorder, which TP says is for generic “clips of Americans making fools of themselves,” but SS specifically says D’s going to submit it to Old Enough!

Chris is pushing the upper age of participants there, but who cares, he’s Cute Enough.

Also! Leon makes a reference to Pon-chan, D corrects him:

TP: Pon-chan’s a European badger, not a raccoon…
SS: She’s a raccoon, not a trash panda.

…what are you doing, TP, she doesn’t look anything like a badger. Just say “tanuki”/”raccoon dog”, that’s the obvious plausible alternative. (My headcanon is that Pon-chan is a mythology-style tanuki, and I’m sticking with that, no matter what D tells Leon.)

—

Cute shenanigans on the errand. Chris trips and skins his knee, and Leon is the one who has to stop D from intervening. The softie.

These are ingredients for the Mooncake Festival, which happens based on the lunar calendar, anywhere from early September to early October.

So, hey, timeline info. Chris originally came here to attend a local special school, probably around September. He met Honglong at Christmas, had that island vacation in summer, and now it’s almost his “one year of living at the pet shop” anniversary.

—

Leon complains that “making dinner for the Moon” is silly, D sasses back:

TP: I’ve made dinner for you before, so it’s not like this is the first time I’ve cooked for an inanimate object!
SS: We know you’re here to eat, not admire!

The TP-flourish version barely fits in the dialogue bubble, but you know what, for a clapback this good, I’ll allow it. (…I swear I’m not just biased about liking the reminder that D keeps making food for Leon.)

D talks about moon-related myths. Leon gets excited about the sexy potential of a princess who’s also a bunnygirl. D has the totally normal, proportional reaction of somebody who isn’t jealous at all.

—

Then D makes it weird by announcing that the US astronauts who landed on the Moon, in 1969, killed all the moon rabbits.

TP calls this “35 years ago”. SS says “28 years ago”.

So, TP updated it as if D is speaking in 2004, the year when the English translation was released. It’s not too huge of a leap…but SS adding a couple more decades would definitely not work, so they stuck to Akino’s originally-written year of 1997.

This gives us an exact date for the chapter! The relevant Lunar Festival was September 16, 1997.

Fun fact: when I looked this up, the “AI overview” confidently told me “September 27, 1997” was the date. And linked this exact page as the source! Good thing I clicked through and confirmed it, instead of trusting the zillion-dollar autocomplete to not just make things up!

—

There’s a panel with some bamboo scenery, and TP puts some narration in a blank circle in the middle. SS puts their version of the same text off to the side…which makes it click that, oh, of course, that’s no text bubble, that’s the Moon.

(Chris asks if maybe the rabbits went and hid somewhere, so they’re still alive after all. D says yes, that’s possible. I say, again: softie.)