Diving into "komu"

Komu is a highly useful verb which combines with other verbs to mean into.

Last time I wrote about settling in to my new place in Long Beach, which in Japanese is 住み込む, or sumi-komu, and we talked at length about sumu (living). Now it’s time to delve into the komu part,

Komu (こむ or 込む) is a quintessentially native Japanese word you use dozens or hundreds of times a day. It’s almost always used in combination with another verb—as the second part of a so-called “compound verb” (複合動詞), that uniquely Japanese construct where two words are jammed together. It’s one of the main ways meanings are composed in Japanese.

Roll this word around in your mouth, savoring its sound. Komu has that “K” sound which gives us an angular, quick motion. It has that “M” sound which evokes smallish enclosed spaces. Together, they paint a vivid picture of something turning, jerking, and entering into that small space.

So komu means “into”. Komu looks like a verb and acts like a verb, but inside it’s really what we think of in English as a preposition. It’s tempting to think of parts of speech, like English verbs and Japanese 動詞 (dōshi, verbs), or English nouns and Japanese 名詞 (meishi, nouns) or English adjectives and Japanese 形容詞 (keiyōshi), as always aligning with each other, but the reality is they never do, and they don’t need to. One of the major causes of awkward, stilted translations is succumbing to the familiar temptation of always translating Japanese “verbs” as English verbs, and so on. Don’t do that!

Komu can be attached to almost anything. It can generate a new word from any other verb. Children don’t learn these komu words as separate, identifiable lexical items; they learn how to produce the komu forms. The majority of the komu words don’t have dictionary entries and don’t need them, any more that “go into” would have its own entry in an English dictionary. Komu is one of about two dozen of these “V2” verbs which can be attached to almost any other verb, including owaru (stop doing something), hajimeru (start doing something), tsukusu (do something to exhaustion), kiru (do something completely), dasu (being doing something), and sugiru (do something too much). You can’t really speak Japanese without learning these.

The word komu doesn’t have to be just about something physically entering. It extends to something that is already inside entering further. It can be about entering into a state like 考え込む/kangae-komu, become lost in thought. It can refer to entering and then remaining stably in that state, which is the case with sumikomu/settle down into. It can refer to repeatedly doing something until penetration is achieved or maintained.

The character 込む was invented by the Japanese. It’s a 国字/kokuji. Unlike many other kokuji, it was never re-exported to China. The derivation is quite clear: something is moving along (辶, shin-nyō, the walking radical) )and then entering.(入). It has no Chinese on reading. I am unable to find any record of when this character was invented.

In total, there are a total of 225 known cases of komu combining with other words! A lot of them involve verbs of motion, like hairikomu/go in, haikomu/crawl in, tobikomu/dive in, horikomu/dig in, hoorikomu/throw in, tsukkomu/stick in, and bukkomu/crash in, to name just a few. How many komu words can you think of?