In my my article on the creepy TV show episode, Your Story, the title of the TV show presents a couple of talking points to help Japanese learners become more fluent and deepen their understanding. So let's get right into them. Remember! It's much easier to read these articles, and they won't display gooble-de-gook if you're doing so on a device that can read Japanese characters.
First of all, let's look at the title of the TV show, 世にも奇妙な物語, which reads Yo ni mo Kimyo na Monogatari. The yo (世) is commonly read this way when it is alone, though I think a lot of foreign speakers I've spoken to are used to seeing it read as se in sekai (世界). Both yo and sekai mean world, but yo has a less literal and more figurative meaning. You'll see the word used in more factual and formal circumstances such as the World Bank, sekai ginkou (世界銀行), the concept of world peace, sekai heiwa (世界平和), or the actual designation of a world. In many video games, the dark world is yami no sekai (闇の世界) and the light world, hikari no sekai (光の世界).
Yo (世）is a much older term and more poetic. It stands for society, the perceived world, the human idea of what a world is. If you want to say "That's just the way it is!" in Japanese, you'd probably say something like, "Yo no naka wa sonna mon da!" (「世の中はそんなもんだ！」). Here, yo no naka (世の中), means the everyday world we're accustomed to live in. Paintings of the floating world were known as ukiyo-e (浮世絵), a study of the opinions in a society is known as a yoronchousa (世論調査) and the expression in the title of this show yo ni mo (世にも) is a saying that emphasizes that the thing that comes after the "mo" is something so extreme it could hardly be thought to be part of this world.
One of the most famous usages of the yo ni mo expression is yo ni mo
fushigi na mono (世にも不思議なもの). This means something close a thing or idea
that is "out of this world mysterious."
Now that you have a better idea of what the title is saying when it uses yo ni mo (世にも), next comes kimyou (奇妙), which means bizarre, strange, unlikely, weird or peculiar. The title uses kimyou (奇妙) instead of fushigi (不思議), perhaps because the ki (奇) in that word can take part in words that mean anything from a miracle (kiseki, 奇跡), to novel, as in new and interesting (kibatsu, 奇抜) to rare and marvelous talent (kisai 奇才).
Meanwhile, myou (妙) can often be used by itself to describe that is odd and out of place. If you got up from your desk and noticed that your cup wasn't where you left it last, you might say myou da na (妙だな), meaning, "Well, that's a little off/odd/strange."
Put them together and you have a perfect to describe the many arresting, novel stories of people beset with odd situations and strange, miraculous powers.
The last part of the title is monogatari (物語) part. You might notice the title is written na monogatari (な物語), but the oft-used expression is written na mono (なもの. Well beside the na character being there to designate a noun after an adjective, there isn't much of one. The title could be written in hiragana characters and still be the same. The mono (もの) used is the same meaning as the one used in monogatari (物語). That mono is hard to explain. Mono are things that are true about life, on a deep and irrefutable level. They are also physical things, like lamps and paper. Sometimes mono can also be living things, but in this case, it isn't. Mono are different from koto (こと/事), which is an incident. So for instance, if the name was yo ni mo kimyou na jiken (世にも奇妙な事件), which is jiken but contains the character and meaning of koto (事), then it would be about strange and peculiar instances. But because it uses mono, these are stories, in other words, by the Japanese way of reckoning, a telling of the way things are on their most basic and true levels. Katari (語り) is just that, using words to tell about something. It just loses the ri (り) character in writing and becomes gatari after mono for grammar reasons too tedious to expound upon now.
So if you put it all together, it's a novel truth about life and society told in such a way that it is too strange to be believed as part of this world.
Now you see why some people (like me) get headaches from trying to translate Japanese into English properly!
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