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.