不在
ふざい · fuzai · JLPT N1 · noun
absence
🏖️ fu = not, zai = be at/exist: 不在 literally means 'not being there'
不 (bù) means 'not' and 在 (zài) means 'to be located/present'. Put together they say someone or something is not present, i.e. absence. Note the tone change: fuzai is the Japanese reading, while Chinese reads it bu zai.
不 — single pictograph; bird flying upward
Originally a pictograph in oracle bone script, traditionally interpreted as a bird flying up toward the sky and unable to come down, suggesting negation or refusal. Over time it became the standard negation word in Chinese, used before verbs and adjectives to mean 'not'.
在 — earth 土 + phonetic 才
Originally a phono-semantic compound: 土 (earth) gives the meaning of a place or location, while 才 supplies the sound. It came to mean 'to be present/located at,' and now also serves as a grammatical marker for ongoing actions, like 'in the middle of doing.'