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I was reading a book when I stumbled upon the term 真綿感. A trip to the dictionary didn't give me an exact match (it says that 真綿 is "silk floss" and that 真綿で首を絞める is "to drag things out" or "to strangle with a silk cord") and a quick google seach showed me two different uses.

The first of those uses is applied mainly to fabric, "a silky feeling".

The second of those uses, which by context seems to be the one I'm looking for, appears to be some kind of slang, youth or net term, but I couldn't find it even on an online zokugo dictionary. This is an example of use where the word comes up three times.

I had found another context where the sentence was closer to the one I found in the book I'm reading, but I'm not sure if the site is breaking copyright, so I better don't link to it. If you want, I can write the original sentence, but it's broken and needs context.

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  • The original sentence is なんなこの真綿感[まわたかん]...!? (the bracketed part is furigana for the term). The context is two highschool girls quarrelling and the sentence is uttered by the one losing, but the meaning seems to be the same as in the sentence なんと言えばいいのでしょうこのモヤモヤとした真綿感！ that appears in the source given.
    – Kemm
    Jul 9, 2015 at 19:13
  • Ok, I made a typo. It's なんなのこの真綿感...!? and just before saying it, the girl she was arguing with was comforting her about the topic they were arguing about.<br> A good bit of thinking about context and what each part of the word means makes me think that a suitable translation nuance-wise would be something like "kindness" in context or "fuzzy feeling" in general, but I'd still like to hear some opinions about it.
    – Kemm
    Jul 9, 2015 at 23:03
  • I have never heard of "真綿感". My guess is the first one was coined to mean "the touch of cotton." The second one is accompanied by "モヤモヤとした" twice and "裏切られた思いやりの行き場のない" that have negative connotations. So I guess he coined this (independently of the first example) to mean some unpleasant feeling.
    – eltonjohn
    Jul 10, 2015 at 0:57
  • @Kemm: Furigana Support
    – istrasci
    Jul 10, 2015 at 3:39

1 Answer 1

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真綿感 itself is not an idiomatic phrase, but this 真綿感 is a weak reference to the well-known idiom 真綿で首を絞める, meaning "something unpleasant is happening very slowly", "to torture slowly by an indirect means", etc. And this 真綿 (floss silk) represents something 'indirect', 'vague', or 'fuzzy'.

In the linked example, the author was disappointed by the quality of sushi, but did not exactly know who to blame or how to justify his anger. So this 真綿感 refers to essentially the same thing as "モヤモヤとした" just before it.

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