A delightful novel of Japanese dictionary-making

"Kohei Araki had devoted his entire life—his entire working life—to dictionaries."

With that first sentence, Shion Miura establishes his subject and theme: dictionaries, their creation, and their creators. Miura's novel, The Great Passage, is the story of producing a new dictionary. Simon Winchester was able to write a fascinating non-fiction book about creating a dictionary, The Professor and the Madman, but a novel? How interesting could that be? (Of course, Winchester's subtitle helped attract readers: "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.")

Kohei Araki is the head of the Dictionary Editorial Department, a backwater at Gembu Books, a major, fictional Japanese publisher. ("Gembu" in the Taoist tradition is the black turtle-snake that defends the north.) Araki and his academic consultant friend, Professor Matsumoto, have persuaded the firm to publish a major new dictionary to join the Gembu Dictionary of Modern Japanese, the Gembu Student's Dictionary of Japanese, and Wordmaster. Araki has to retire under corporate rules although he will work on as a consultant, but he manages to find an equally-driven word-drunk young man in the sales department, Mitsuya Majime.

Hearing the last name as a nickname, Araki thinks, "Majime, eh? Serious diligent. Araki nodded in satisfaction. This was very good. Lexicography was slow and steady work—exactly the sort of work that required someone majime at the helm."

It's a problem with Japanese: homonyms are common. "Majime" (真面目) does mean "serious, sober, earnest, steady" but "majime" (馬じめ) with the same sound means "horse dealer." Majime's ancestors probably rented horses at post stations along the Tokaido road. I imagine that the translator, the brilliant Juliet Winters Carpenter, had fun playing with the language in this novel about language and the challenges of capturing a word's meaning with other words.

For example, the verbs "agaru" and 'noboru" both mean "to go up." When do you use one and when do you use the other or are they perfectly interchangeable? No. "Agaru" carries the sense of going up to a destination, a place: I went upstairs. "Noboru" has the sense of the process of going up: I climbed the mountain.

The Great Passage is interesting not only for insight into Japanese—which is almost a side issue—but for the personal and professional efforts by Araki, Matsumoto, Majime, and their associates to create this massive new work. Miura describes the efforts of a paper manufacturer to develop a new thin, strong, opaque paper appropriate for a fat dictionary.

At one point late in the production process—one that requires five rounds of proofreading (!)—they discover the word for "blood" is missing. The mistake is so egregious and so serious, Majime and Araki call in all the college interns and part-timers who've been helping to live in the office full time for a month while they review the entire dictionary to ensure there are no other such omissions.

The novel's timeline covers more than fifteen years, from the conception of the dictionary to its (spoiler alert) publication. In the course of the action Majime falls in love—timidly, awkwardly—with a co-worker, writing her a long letter declaring himself in almost unreadable Japanese. A sweet romance that makes this more than a dry case history.

As one who has spent a lot of time in considerable time in Japanese dictionaries, I thoroughly enjoyed The Great Passage. Using the creation of a new dictionary as the armature on which to wind the characters' personal stories, the tensions and pressures within a business, and much more, Shion Miura engages the reader in a fascinating portrayal of Japanese life.

Strange weather in Tokyo; love is in the air

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (translated by Allison Markin Powell) is a slim, poignant, big-city love story. Tsukiko Omachi, who narrates the book, is a single, unmarried woman in her late thirties. One evening when she is eating dinner alone, she is greeted by Mr. Harutuma Matsumoto, her Japanese language teacher in secondary school, now retired. He remembers her, has occasionally spotted her in the bar, and this evening greets her. She cannot recall his name and so calls him "Sensei" (teacher) throughout the book.

That first evening, they drink five flasks of saké between them and, she notes, Sensei pays. The next time they met at the bar, Tsukiko pays. The third time and from then on, they got separate checks. "We both seemed to be the type of person who liked to stop in every so often at the local bar . . . Despite the age difference of more than thirty years, I felt much more at ease with him than with friends my own age."

They begin a friendship that eventually, slowly. grows into something more. "We never made plans, but always happened to meet by chance. Weeks went by when our paths didn't cross, and there were stretches when we'd see each other every night." As the seasons change—and the menu at their favorite bar follows—Tukiko and Sensei gradually learn more about each other, but not with out fits and starts. Early on they have a disagreement about a baseball team and don't speak for weeks.

But without the occasional meetings with Sensei, Tsukiko realizes she has been lonely. "I took the bus alone, I walked around the city alone, I did my shopping alone, and I drank alone." She impulsively buys Sensei a vegetable grater and in thanking her he quotes a Basho haiku that mentions grated yam and they begin talking again.

They go into the mountains to hunt mushrooms with the bar owner. Tsukiko spends the New Year with her mother and brother and his family.Tsukiko attracts a suitor and they go to a cherry blossom party. He kisses her but she fends him off. Ultimately, she realizes she loves Sensei.

It's an interesting love story. The couple have to adjust to the difference in their ages, in their status, and in their expectations. Sensei sounds as if he as a widower—he has an adult son—is as lonely and as afraid of intimacy as Tsukiko. Gradually, slowly, slowly, through one small incident after another, the two finally come together.

It is also an interesting slice of what I suspect is not untypical Japanese life. While at one time the vast majority of Japanese marriages were arranged by families, today fewer than 30 percent are arranged. More and more young men and women want a love marriage. The down side of that trend is that Tokyo and other big cities are filled with lonely people like Tsukiko. All of which is to say that Strange Weather in Tokyo is a sweet, convincing novel of two mature adults finding an unlikely love.