How to Good-bye Depression might not kill you, but it is probably the least comprehensible…thing I have ever read, with the Hybrid RPG site coming in a very close second, mostly due to the author of that being fluent in English.
Mr. Nishigaki clearly does not have English as a first, second, or even third language, because no one with a component grasp of English would ever title a chapter “Erase your bad stickiness and mulitply various good feeling”. Published by iuniverse,which still has an accessible website, their lack of quality control makes me suspect that they are a vanity publisher.
The first part of the book is copy and pasting the responses to his anus constriction technique to a depression forum on usenet, and only goes downhill from there.
The comedy website 1-900-Hotdog has a free article all about it:
I didn’t look at all of them but “how to good-bye depression” is a direct translation of a Japanese phrase.
~ni sayonara suru (say “good-bye” to~) is the phrase. It should have been “how to say goodbye to depression” but instead we get the sorry case of the direct translation
I will say though, Japan has been getting better about not doing cringy direct translations. I still sometimes see weird things on T-shirts or other objects, but it’s getting a lot rarer. Not to say what they wrote in English actually makes 100% sense, but it’s understandable.
Also, I’ve been seeing fewer T-shirts with random “pretty English words”.
Used to be a lot of things like this: “Clover fun. Happiness. Living the life forever luck. Happy life.”
