To toto is derived from the Japanese word “TO” (translated as “over here” or “over there”). In English, it means “over here”, and the sound that comes from it is a high pitched “ou” sound. This is not a sound that you will hear if you pronounce it with an “ah” or a “uum.” You will need to master these other important literary Japanese phrases, before speaking your first ” tou ” sentence.
First, you should understand what exactly ” tou ” means. Most American English speakers know the basic definition of the phrase, which is “over here,” but very few American English speakers have any idea what ” tou ” actually means. Question 1 of this article is the primary character of a story, the lead or primary protagonist.
Do you recognize the antonyms of leading character, or the opposites of leading characters? (The phrase “The Tin Man” by Agatha Christie contains a perfectly clear example.) In English, the word ” tou ” actually means “over there,” but the term is used in contexts where someone is speaking about being “over there” or about “down there.” A reader might be saying to me “you were just over there reading a book.”
A reader wants to be able to make a connection between where they are sitting and the location where they are reading. “You’re sitting over there reading a novel,” they say. That’s where I’m sitting right now. “You can’t read that anywhere,” they say. “You can’t be sitting anywhere at all,” they contend. That’s nonsense!
When a writer writes a novel in the first person, such as “Life During the Night,” the reader must somehow make a mental leap from the present to the future. The phrase in the title “Life During the Night” gives the reader the exact location of the event they are reading about: The city of New York. But that’s not really what the phrase means. It does not mean “life during the night,” but it more importantly means “the period immediately before the beginning of the novel.” This adds considerable weight to the importance of the toto point, and in most cases, the toto is used to create a jump from one part of the plotline to another.
For example, the third person narrator might start a new chapter by talking about the previous day’s events. The first person narrator might add something like “The next morning, Joe went to the morgue to see if his father had died.” The former is a past tense statement, while the latter is a present tense. The reader has to make the leap to match up these two paragraphs. Using the toto in conjunction with other tools such as the English translation mark can help make sure your novel stays interesting and smooth-flowing.