Translations of this text should be considered rough at best. I claim no special gift of translation, nor have I any great knowledge of other languages, including Japanese. Before I set out to try and translate the book that accompanies the J. K Waite, I did an extensive search online to see if it had already been translated before. I knew before I started translating that it would be a very time demanding and difficult task, and I would have rather guided others to an existing translation but the search results came back with nothing.
What I can say is that I have done my best to translate this through the help of using various programs. Sometimes pages were scanned multiple times to get a more balanced understanding of what was being said, when the initial scan proved indecipherable. After this, we viewed the results. Of course, dealing with scanned images, in theory, sounds straight forward, but there are occasions when certain words are not picked up properly, or do not translate easily from Japanese to English. In these instances, we had to make editorial decisions.
This is where we had to rely on what we already knew in this particular field. It is here that I must confess that there is much more to the book than what I have translated here. There is a little on the history of Tarot and the various tarot decks referred to in this translation. Since I know virtually nothing of astrology, It would have made even less sense to translate something I cannot verify is a logical translation.
Instead we focused specifically on the cards themselves. I am only an artist and so will leave a full translation of the book for those better equipped for such tasks. Sometimes this translation may read a little strange here and there, but I have generally refrained from making it read "better", instead wanting to let the author, through this rough translation, do the talking.
The original book that accompanied the deck reads from right to left, and so rather than arriving at the Fool first, we begin with the King of Wands. Of particular interest is Mokusei-ou's view of the narrative going on in some of the cards. An example of this is the 10 of Wands through to the 4 of Wands. While in the West, we might find a narrative going from left to right, for example we've often talked about the sequence of events going from the 4 of Pentacles through to the 6 of Pentacles, Mokusei-ou sees some storytelling going on from right to left.
