Large qualifiers before nouns or unusual sentence orders?

Question

Often I find that there are nouns which are tacked on to the end of a phrase. For example, this from an article:

来年公開の映画『獣道』でも主演に抜擢されている伊藤。

Is this giving a description of Itou? Translated as "on the subject of Itou, who is also selected to star in the movie animal trail coming out next year"

Also consider this except from a book:

現に、採集マニアのなかには採集自体よりも、殺虫瓶のなかの青酸カリに魅せられて、どうしても足を洗うことが出来なくなった者さえいるそうだ。

I'm pretty sure that everything after the second comma is being used to describe 者, so the translation would be

"in fact, among collectors, there are even seems to be people who are more interested in the potassium cyanide in their insect bottles than the collecting itself, and no matter how they try they've become unable to wash their feet of it".

Am I wrong? Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you are correct. I think this is quite common in Japanese to have a very long modifier like this. Although, your translation of 足をあらう is too literal, it's being used idiomatically to mean to clean up and stop doing bad things. Find the definition here.

Answer 2

• Relative clauses can be very long both in English and Japanese. In your second example, "採集自体よりも殺虫瓶のなかの青酸カリに魅せられて、どうしても足を洗うことが出来なくなった" modifies 者 as a relative clause.
• Most Japanese sentences end with a verb, but sentences that end with a noun are relatively common. It's a type of rhetoric device called 体言止め. See: what exactly is "体言止{たいげんど}め"? Making sentences 体言止め makes them more vivid, rhythmical, compact, etc. In your case, I feel 体言止め is used for the sake of brevity, so you can simply translate it as if it were a normal sentence (ie "伊藤 is also selected as ...").