Loosely translating this I got:

The men faced towards the night's sky and began to fire arrows. (past)
However, the arrows were averted by wind magic. (past)
The next spell will cause a small tornado to blow the men off the cliff-top. (future)
"Oh, that's a wind spell isn't it?" muttered Waldo.

When read in English does this passage seem strange to you? My translation my not be perfectly literal but the general feeling seems perfectly logical to me.

I have no idea what the story this is from is about, but maybe the writing is from the point of view of the leader of the men and he knows that the next spell will knock his men off the cliff  (after the first one that stopped the arrows).

Edit: I know this is just a specific example and doesn't directly answer your question, but I think its perfectly normal to change tenses depending on situation in any language. I could be talking about something in the past and use this as the basis of what is going to happen in the future e.g. "That guy was mean to be yesterday. Therefore I am going to hit him today if he's mean again. I can't believe what he did yesterday. Grrr." Past and future and back to past in one paragraph.

Last edited by Kewickviper (2012 October 21, 5:15 pm)

Grammatically speaking, the first two sentences are in the perfective aspect. They don't always nicely correspond to an English sentence in the past tense. The present tenses in English and Japanese don't perfectly correspond to each other. Explaining this kind of thing in detail through translation into English is pretty much like explaining a rule of basketball by analogy to snowboarding, i.e., impossible because things are fundamentally different between the two.

A simple explanation that works for your particular case is that it's signaling where the narrator is on the time axis at each sentence. Time passes in the story's world as you proceed sentence by sentence. The narrator also moves forward on the time axis, but his speed may be different than the world in the story.

At first, the narrator is in the future when seen from the viewpoint of the men who just started shooting arrows. You move on to the next sentence, and time passes at roughly the same speed between the narrator and the story. So the narrator is still ahead of the event described by the second sentence on the time aixis. But the story catches up to the narrator on the time axis at the third sentence, so that he's seeing the men blown away by the magical tornado "now." But between this and the next sentences, longer time passes on the narrator's side while the story's world moves forward only slightly on the time axis. So, from the narrator's viewpoint, the mutter happened in the past.

This is a quite common technique to make one scene more vivid than others on the reader's mind. In your example, the author wanted to add some kind of "Look!" feel to the third sentence.

Things are a bit more complicated, but it's quite frequent so you'll get the hang of it soon. It's also common in spoken language.

Last edited by magamo (2012 October 21, 5:58 pm)

Thanks for all the detailed explanations! The change in tense really didn't hamper my understanding of the events as they took place, I just wanted to know why the author used that technique. The 'time axis' explanation was pretty cool, it got me thinking about the temporal differences between English and Japanese. And your right, it does seem to come up a lot in storytelling, so I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

I apologize for the lack of context here, but I'm pretty sure that "The next spell [that] will cause a small tornado to blow the men off the cliff-top" has already happened, as the sentence after Waldo's remark talks about the thudding noises when the men hit the ground (and it is in past tense as well).

Last edited by HououinKyouma (2012 October 21, 8:17 pm)