by Shion Miura
Out of the corner of her eye, Kishibe saw Majime get up. Hastily she shoved the pages into the space between her knees and the desk.
“Miss Kishibe, there’s something I forgot to tell you.”
“Yes?”
He came around her desk and stood beside her chair. She looked up at him, scarcely able to keep from going into convulsions at the thought of that love letter.
He seemed at a distance from the world, as if he’d lived for centuries in the Dictionary Editorial Department, as far removed from love and lust as a withered tree or a dried-up sheet of paper. And yet even he had once fallen in love, had yearned and written a love letter that didn’t hold anything back, like some kind of midnight diary. And now look at him, a language expert immersed in the task of compiling a dictionary. To hide the spasm of laughter that came over her, she awkwardly pretended to go into a fit of sneezing. Judging from that letter, he was the last person who should give people language advice. He was certainly no master of language. His turns of phrase were clumsy; his ardor spun in circles.
Having got that far in her thinking, Kishibe experienced a revelation. Majime seemed unapproachable, but maybe when he was young he’d been much like her. Maybe he still was, for that matter, in his worries about his relationships with other people, his worries about whether he could properly edit a dictionary, and his general floundering about. She could imagine him upset at his inability to express himself or communicate with others, yet he was forced in the end to put his heart clumsily into words and trust that the other person would understand what he meant. Maybe his linguistic anxieties and hopes were the very thing driving Majime to make a dictionary chock full of words.
In that case, I can make a go of it here, too. I also want to know how to dispel my fears. If I can, I’d like to communicate with Majime in words, pass the time pleasantly with him at work.
Gathering a huge number of words together with as much accuracy as possible was like finding a mirror without distortion. The less distortion in the word-mirror, the greater chance that when you opened up to someone and revealed your inner self, your feelings and thoughts would be reflected there with clarity and depth. You could look together in the mirror and laugh, weep, get angry.
Dictionary making might actually be fun and important work.
Thanks to the love letter, Kishibe felt somewhat closer to Majime. For the first time since coming to the Dictionary Editorial Department, she felt optimistic.
Majime, unaware of Kishibe’s inner transformation, was completely taken in by her theatrical sneeze.
“Caught a cold?”
“Maybe. What is it that you forgot to tell me?”
“Starting tomorrow, we’ll be entering the final stage of editing The Great Passage. We’ll use both floors of the annex. Mobilize everyone we can to check all the usage examples, and send material to press as we go.”
“Really?” Surely you didn’t wait till the day before to tell me something so important . . .
“Let’s move the desks around and get ready,” said Majime.
Ignoring her stupefaction, he rolled up his sleeves, black covers and all.
It took them all day to move desks and transfer materials. The custodian helped. Mrs. Sasaki copied instructions and laid out writing materials for the staff, which was expected to grow considerably.
By the time everything was ready, Kishibe’s entire body ached.
“Nice to be young,” said Majime enviously. “Right now all I can feel is back pain.”
He shuffled off like an actor on the Noh stage, holding his back erect and sliding his feet along the floor. Actually, it looked to her as if that posture might put extra strain on the back.
After seeing Majime off, Kishibe composed a quick e-mail to Nishioka: “I found the document, and thanks to you I do feel better now. Starting tomorrow, the editing of The Great Passage moves into the final stage . . . but right now my muscles are so stiff I don’t know if I’ll be able to come to work.”
Thanks largely to Majime’s determination, work on The Great Passage had continued bit by bit over the past thirteen years. He, Araki, and Professor Matsumoto were 90 percent finished with definitions of general words. The remaining 10 percent consisted of neologisms that had been coined in the intervening thirteen years and words whose inclusion was still under debate. Majime and Professor Matsumoto would go over these together, and Majime would write definitions for those to be included.
Certain other words that had originally been marked for inclusion were now out of date. Kishibe and Mrs. Sasaki would go over these and decide which should stay and which should go.
“Once a word makes it into a dictionary,” explained Araki for Kishibe’s benefit, “it tends not to get cut. That’s because it’s better to have as many words as possible, including archaic terms. But if you’re not careful, by the time of publication you can end up with a dictionary full of obsolete words.”
“But including some obsolete words is okay.” She nodded, looking at the bundle of draft definitions written according to the guidelines. Encyclopedic entries and technical terms were the province of college professors, who wrote drafts as requested. “I wondered why we were including the word getabako.” Literally “geta box,” the word referred to shelves in an entranceway for storing footwear; geta were wooden clogs formerly worn with kimonos or other traditional wear.
“Are you saying no one uses getabako anymore?”
“At the school I went to it was called kutsubako.” (Shoe box.) “Ah, but come to think of it, our definition of getabako doesn’t say, ‘Same as kutsubako.’ And kutsubako should be an entry word in its own right, meaning ‘shelves or a box for storing shoes.’”
“Times do change,” mused Araki. Then he shouted, “Majime! We’ve got trouble! An extra entry word!”
Gradually Kishibe became more used to reading dictionary entries. These were all now on hand. Majime had gone around to the various universities and research institutes to collect them in person.
“Mr. Majime, did you ever by any chance take a look at the top-secret file?” Kishibe asked.
Majime nodded, beaming. “Thanks to Nishioka, all my struggles and tactics worked out perfectly.”
Then did he also know all about the concealed love letter? Cautiously she asked, “Did you look at the note on the last page?”
“It’s embarrassing to admit.” He scratched his cheek awkwardly. “Sometimes I would get discouraged and wonder if The Great Passage was ever really going to launch. At times like that, I’d take Nishioka up on his offer and e-mail him. He always was kind enough to take me out for a drink.”
“Oh, I see . . .” The twisted closeness between the two middle-aged men boggled her mind. Wearing a strained smile, Kishibe turned tail and fled. So for Majime, Nishioka’s e-mail address on the “top-secret” file led to an invitation to go drinking, and for anyone else it would lead to a revelation of the love letter’s existence.
Having all the manuscripts finished didn’t mean the dictionary was finished. All the entries had to be polished and trimmed as much as possible. With over two hundred thousand entry words, space was at a premium.
All usage examples had to be checked and double-checked. A usage example included a quotation showing a specific instance of the word in use along with the source. For modern words, rather than offer a quotation, they often invented illustrative sentences of their own. Every usage example had to be checked to make sure the sentence conveyed the appropriate meaning and any quotation was accurate. Over twenty college students were hired as part-time workers to do the job. Seated at the desks Kishibe and Majime had worked so hard to rearrange, they thumbed through reference works. As summer vacation came along, the number of student workers doubled.
When the checking was finished, the entire editorial staff worked on inserting instructions for font sizes, phonetic renderings, and the like. Everything had to be in accordance with the guidelines and conform to a single standard. If the font ch
anged for no apparent reason, or if different symbols were used depending on the entry, users would be confused.
Then, finally, the dictionary pages would be ready to send to the printer. They began with words starting with the first kana in the syllabary and proceeded in order.
The submitted pages came back in the form of galley proofs. The editorial staff and proofreaders went over these with a fine-tooth comb, looking for typographical errors as well as interpretation issues, places lacking in clarity, and a host of other possible mishaps. The company brought in a huge number of freelance proofreaders in addition to in-house ones.
When everyone was satisfied that all was well, the galleys were returned to the printer’s marked in red, and a second set of proofs was made. For a dictionary the size of The Great Passage, a minimum of five proofs was standard. Larger dictionaries often required as many as ten.
For the first two sets of proofs, they confined themselves to checking content and format; that was really all they could do, since some texts weren’t finished and the entries were not in perfect order. With the third proofs, finally all the entries were put in order following the kana syllabary. Now, for the first time, they were able to survey the entire dictionary, and could look for redundancies and omissions, and decide where to insert illustrations.
On the fourth proofs, page layouts were determined and the placement of illustrations was tweaked. At this point, changes affecting the total number of pages were to be avoided. Major edits to the sentences or entry words would change the number of pages, and that in turn would push up the price of the dictionary. But sometimes a new entry word needed to be added at the last minute. Such things happened if a new American president took office, for example, or if a municipal merger took place. On the chance that such a thing would happen, a bit of white space had to be left until the very end.
Naturally, work on the galley proofs also began at the front of the syllabary. “That’s why most dictionaries skimp on words toward the end of the syllabary,” said Majime with a grin. “By the time they get to words starting with ra and wa, the publication date is near, and it’s a battle for time. Words get left out just because there isn’t enough help to do the checking or space to squeeze in one more on the page.”
“Is that going to happen with The Great Passage, too?” asked Kishibe. What a shame that would be, she thought, after the years of labor the staff had put in.
“Well, after all,” said Professor Matsumoto from the side, “we’ve been working on it for thirteen years now. We’ll make sure we get every last word in, right down to the bitter end.”
“There’s an easy way to tell if you’re slighting words at the end of the dictionary,” said Majime. He lugged over a number of medium-sized dictionaries and lined them up in front of Kishibe, unopened. “Dictionaries have black markers called thumb indexes, like these, cut into the pages to locate entries starting at a particular section. As you can see, a preponderance of Japanese words start with sounds from the first three columns of the kana syllabary: those headed by a, ka, and sa.”
Kishibe compared the various dictionaries. In each one, words from those first three columns took up more than half the pages.
“Whereas words from the last three columns, those headed by ya, ra, and wa, take up very little space. That’s because few wago begin with those sounds.”
“Wago?”
“Native Japanese words, as opposed to kango”—Chinese loanwords—“and gairaigo,” (words borrowed from foreign countries other than China). “Anyway, when you line up words in order, you see most of them are concentrated at the beginning: words starting with a-i-u-e-o, ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, sa-shi-su-se-so. So if the lead word on the middle page of a dictionary starts with su or se, you know that the words chosen are evenly distributed throughout the syllabary.”
“It’s interesting that the center of the dictionary comes so far at the front of the syllabary.” Kishibe folded her arms and looked at the black thumb indexes.
“Well,” said Professor Matsumoto, “it’s helpful to know that words aren’t scattered evenly through the syllabary.” He traced a thumb index fondly with a finger. “That’s why, if you want to win at the word game shiritori, you need to pick words that end with ra or wa or some other kana from the end of the syllabary.” He smiled. “The trouble is, it’s hard to come up with such words on the spur of the moment.”
“Even for you?” she asked in surprise.
“The ocean of words is wide and deep.” He laughed. “I still have a long way to go before I can be like an ama, someone who dives down and fetches pearls.”
The editing of The Great Passage went on seemingly without end.
Summer vacation came and went, and the student workers continued to haunt the office. Kishibe and the rest of the staff almost always took the last train home. Day after day they kept on checking entry words, making final calls regarding usage samples, adding phonetic readings of characters, and otherwise marking the proofs with red-pencil corrections. There was so much to do that Kishibe often felt like shouting out. Sometimes she would actually go into the annex restroom, shut the door, and let out a little scream.
Seeing her frustration, Mrs. Sasaki would point to the schedule and the work checklist and say comfortingly, “It’s all right. We’re doing fine. I know what has to be done, and if anything gets left out, I’ll speak up right away. Just relax and do the work in front of you.”
There was way too much work in front of her; that was the whole problem. She had to carry out various tasks simultaneously and wound up confused.
As she was tearing her hair out, Araki came around to give her warm encouragement. “For someone working on her first dictionary, you’re doing fine, Miss Kishibe. Look at our Majime. All the time we worked on the Sokéboo Encyclopedia, he was in his element—he knew more about that world than we ever would. Now look at him.”
Majime was sitting facing the galley proofs, head in hands. Once in a while he would raise his head and mime moving a box or something in midair. Had overwork finally driven him to playing with invisible blocks?
As Kishibe was flinching at this thought, Araki explained, “He’s mentally figuring how much space the entries will take. How he can fit them all into a fixed number of pages by cutting a word here and a line there. It’s like a complicated puzzle. Even he appears to be struggling.”
There was more work not only in the office, but outside it as well. As head of the Dictionary Editorial Department, Majime was often called to meetings with the sales and advertising departments. He also had to consult with a designer and production editor to decide on the binding for The Great Passage. Kishibe fully expected him to cave under pressure from others and come back looking dejected, but he proved a surprisingly tenacious negotiator. When it came to his precious dictionary, he could apparently hold his own. He delayed the release date and worked up to the last minute to perfect the contents, and he didn’t agree readily to everything suggested by outsiders, either, refusing to be pushed around and admirably sticking to his guns.
Kishibe also would have liked to attend the meetings with advertising, but the editorial department was shorthanded to begin with and couldn’t spare two people at once. A major publication like The Great Passage called for a major ad campaign. Rumor had it they were going to plaster train stations with posters featuring a popular celebrity. The idea made Kishibe a bit nervous. Did Majime have any idea who was who in today’s entertainment world?
Despite her anxiety, he would return from such meetings in high spirits.
“Did they come up with the name of a celebrity you particularly like?” she asked.
“No,” he said, laughing shamefacedly, “I never heard of any of them. But that’s all right. Nishioka’s gung-ho and full of ideas.”
That name again. Remembering his goofy e-mail, she sighed. Still, it was nice to think there was somebody in advertising who used to work here.
The Dictionary Editorial Department and The Great Pas
sage both had long been the butt of jokes at Gembu, derided as “money pits,” but now thanks to Nishioka’s exertions the dictionary was set to make a smashing debut.
It was spring—Kishibe’s second spring in the Dictionary Editorial Department. Since leaving the staff of Belle two years ago in July, she had toiled with the others for the past year and eight months, checking proofs for The Great Passage. Now the first part of the dictionary was on its fourth set of proofs, the last part on its third set. The end was not yet in sight. And yet the release date was set for early March of the following year. Spring vacation was when dictionary sales heated up, in advance of the new school year in April. People bought them to prepare for their own studies or as gifts. Would The Great Passage be ready in time? Its slow progress made Kishibe antsy.
Majime was sitting at his desk gazing at something, seemingly as insouciant as ever. Kishibe, checking the words beginning with a, was bothered by something and went to ask his opinion.
“Could I ask you something?” Standing next to him, she glanced down at his desktop. He was staring at a picture of a kappa, a traditional Japanese river imp. They had commissioned the illustration to accompany the entry word. It was drawn in narrow lines using a realistic style (not that she had ever seen an actual kappa), depicting a creature with a turtle shell and a fringe of hair, carrying a sake flask. True to folklore, the top of its head was bald.
“First let me ask you a question,” he said, motioning for her to sit down in a nearby chair. “What do you think of this illustration?”
Difficult question. She was no judge of kappa. She studied the picture and said, “It’s good, isn’t it?”
Majime scratched his head. “Does a kappa carry a bottle of sake? I have a feeling it’s Shigaraki-ware raccoon dogs who do that.”
“Now that you mention it . . . The TV commercials for sake that show kappa with a sake bottle and cup may have imprinted that image on people’s minds.” Lately, Kishibe had come to appreciate the department’s dictum to try to get to the bottom of anything that wasn’t crystal clear in its meaning, rather than leave things vague or depend on mistaken assumptions. Leaving aside her own question, she went to the bookshelves and looked up kappa in another company’s dictionary.
