by Shion Miura
“The illustration in the Great Dictionary of Japanese doesn’t show it carrying anything,” she reported.
“That’s what I thought.” He folded his arms and nodded. “The one carrying a sake flask is the Shigaraki-ware raccoon dog, all right.”
“It’s okay, though, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, why shouldn’t a kappa carry a sake flask?” She seated herself again in the chair by his desk. “After all, real raccoon dogs don’t carry sake around, and we have no way of knowing what a kappa might or might not carry.”
“All the more reason to be as accurate as we can.” He said this almost to himself. “You could put an illustration of a raccoon dog figurine carrying a sake bottle next to Shigaraki ware in the dictionary, but not next to raccoon dog. That would be highly problematic. For the same reason, we can’t put up a picture of a kappa holding a bottle of sake without any justification. Some people believe in kappa, and take them very seriously. We can’t just . . . have any old thing.”
Left to his own devices, Majime would probably go all the way to the folklore-rich city of Tono in Iwate Prefecture, supposedly the hometown of the mythical kappa, to capture one. She could just see him inquiring of his quarry, “Do you ever carry a sake flask?” Quickly she said, “There are various theories about the appearance of kappa, so I think it would be all right to leave it this way, but if it really bothers you, why not just ask the illustrator to erase the sake bottle?”
“Right. If I’d known it was going to be this much trouble, maybe I should have just gone with an illustration by Toriyama Sekien, the eighteenth-century folklore artist.”
He turned to his computer and started to type an e-mail. He was going to politely ask the illustrator to correct the picture. Without a pause, he said, “What were you going to ask me?”
“It’s about the entry for ai, ‘love.’” She brought over the proof to show him. “I understand the first definition: ‘A feeling of tender affection for someone or something irreplaceable.’ But look at the sample compounds using the character ai: aisai.” (Beloved wife.) “Aijin.” (Lover.) “Aibyo.” (Pet cat.)
“Is there something wrong?”
“There certainly is!” Her tone was bristling. “Listing lover right alongside beloved wife implies that you can have both at the same time, but the definition says this is impossible—because the object of one’s affection is ‘irreplaceable.’ It’s as if we’re asking someone to choose between his lover and his wife! And while I’m on the subject, I object to equating love for another human being with love for a cat.”
“Love is love, without any distinction or ranking. I love my cat as much as I do my wife.”
“That may be,” she said heatedly, “but I’ll bet you and your cat don’t have intercourse!” Then, feeling the eyes of the part-timers on her, she tried to make herself small.
It took a few seconds for her meaning to register with Majime; the word she had used, seiko, had various other meanings, including “succeed.” He seemed to sift through the possible compounds, mentally trying out different combinations of characters. Suddenly he turned red and mumbled, “Well, no . . .”
“See?” Kishibe threw out her chest in triumph. “What’s even stranger is the second definition: ‘Being enamored of a member of the opposite sex, sometimes accompanied by sexual desire. Romantic love.’”
“What’s strange about that?” Majime looked at her, trying to read her face. He seemed to have lost all confidence.
“Why limit it to a member of the opposite sex? If a homosexual person is enamored of someone and feels intermittent sexual desire for them, are we saying it’s not love?”
“No, I didn’t have any such intention. But does it really—”
“Matter?” She cut him off. “Yes, it matters. The Great Passage is supposed to be a dictionary for a new age. If we yield to the majority and stay bound to stale ways of thinking and feeling, how can we ever offer true definitions of kaleidoscopic words—words that are in constant flux but have underlying bedrock meanings?”
“You’re right.” Majime’s shoulders sagged. “When I was young, I remember having the same doubts about the meaning of ren’ai, ‘romantic attachment.’ And yet somehow in the course of working on so many other things I forgot about it. I’m ashamed of myself.”
Lately Kishibe had begun to feel more confident about her work on the dictionary. Majime often accepted her opinions, and he made her feel that he regarded her as a powerful ally. With a sense of relief and pride, she took back the proofs.
“Now that I think of it,” he mused, “Nishioka said once that I should put myself in the shoes of the dictionary user and imagine whether the definition they encountered would boost their spirits. If a young person thinking he or she might be homosexual looked up the word ai in our dictionary and read, ‘Being enamored of a member of the opposite sex,’ how would they feel? I didn’t have enough imagination.”
“No,” Kishibe agreed, “you didn’t.” Then, seeing his remorse, she added forgivingly, “But it’s understandable. You’re a member of the elite, someone who’s always been on the winning side.”
“The elite? Me?”
“Yes. You have a graduate degree and a beautiful, talented wife, and you’re a leading expert on the editing of dictionaries. You don’t seem to have any problems related to being a minority.”
“Is that how I seem to you?” He gave a troubled laugh. “Anyway, I think your point about ai is well taken. Now, how to fix it?”
“Since you are so devoted to your cat, we’ll leave in aibyo, ‘pet cat,’ and take out aijin, ‘lover.’ How’s that? And we could change ‘a member of the opposite sex’ to ‘another person.’”
“Sounds good to me. Professor Matsumoto will be here soon, so I’ll ask him to go over the changes.”
At that point Miyamoto called to say that the latest paper sample for The Great Passage was finished. “We have finally produced the ultimate paper!” he told Kishibe in triumph.
“Excellent,” said Majime. Then he glanced around the office, where proofreaders and student workers milled around and a slew of galley proofs covered all the desks. “But there’s no space here to spread out paper samples. Miss Kishibe, I’m sorry to trouble you, but would you go to the Akebono office and check the sample yourself? If you think it’s good you can tell them to go ahead and start production.”
Paper used in dictionaries was distinctive and needed in large quantity, so unless they started to make it at least six months before publication, it wouldn’t be ready in time. Kishibe understood this, but she wasn’t comfortable making such an important decision on her own.
“Can’t you go instead of me?”
“No, because I have to discuss some things with Professor Matsumoto.” He looked at her and nodded encouragingly. “You’ll be fine. You’re a dictionary editor of the first water. You make shrewd judgments and you know as much about paper as anyone, if not more, since you’ve been in on all the trials so far. I have full confidence in your judgment.”
Charged with such an important mission, Kishibe left Gembu Books feeling slightly nervous.
The cherry blossoms were almost ready to bloom, but a cold rain was falling. She could just see her breath. Opening her plastic umbrella, she walked past the cherry buds, their color deepening in the rain, and headed for the subway.
She had spoken confidently to Majime just now, but in fact she was still far from sure of her abilities as a dictionary editor. Her insight about limiting the meaning of love to members of the opposite sex was based on a fluke. A boy in her college seminar had confessed at a drinking party shortly before graduation, “Know what? I’m gay.” She and all his friends had suspected as much. Everyone who happened to be present when he said this had felt like saying, “Yeah, we know.” They bit back the words, however, realizing that considerable anguish and courage had led up to the admission. So instead of “We know” they’d said things like, “Oh, yeah? Here, drink up,” and continued their fri
endship as before. That experience was what had led her to question the definition. She was appalled to think that she had accused Majime of being a member of the elite, with no struggles or complexes of any kind. She turned red at the thought.
Just because I’ve finally started getting a little used to dictionary editing doesn’t give me the right to sound off like that! She knew perfectly well that Majime suffered and agonized over his work at the helm of The Great Passage. She frequently saw him in the throes of anxiety. She wasn’t a member of the elite in any sense, but she, not he, was the one who had lived oblivious to her own emotions, without cares or complexes to speak of. She had pursued her life and her career without thinking, drifting along like someone who comes to a fork in the road and unhesitatingly takes the easier way.
Working on the dictionary, delving into words the way we do, has changed me, she thought. Awakening to the power of words—the power not to hurt others but to protect them, to tell them things, to form connections with them—had taught her to probe her own mind and inclined her to make allowances for other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Through her work on The Great Passage, she was seeking and gaining access to the power of words as never before.
The Akebono Paper Company building faced a main street in Ginza. Kishibe was shown into a conference room on the eighth floor. Besides Miyamoto, four other men were present in the conference room: the head of the sales department and his deputy, the head of development, and the project chief. The presence of this executive team made it painfully clear to Kishibe that developing paper for a dictionary was a major undertaking that Akebono took seriously. She greeted them in a flurry, afraid they were thinking, “What? This kid is the only one who came?” She cursed Majime for his lack of consideration.
Her fears notwithstanding, the faces in the room were friendly, if a bit tense, as they returned her greeting. Lying on the table in the center of the room was a sheaf of paper.
“This must be the paper for The Great Passage,” she said, taking a step toward the table. Immediately the men fell back on either side, opening the way for her. She felt like Moses at the Red Sea.
“We devoted all our efforts to the creation of this paper.” Miyamoto was the group spokesman. “We gave full consideration to waxiness.”
The others were nodding. She sensed how hard this team must have worked, night and day, to satisfy Majime’s demand.
Cautiously she slid her hand across what Miyamoto had called “the ultimate paper.” It was thin and smooth, pleasant to the touch. It felt cool against her skin, and yet it had a warm yellowish tinge. She held a sheet up to the light and saw it had a touch of red. This was the coloration that Miyamoto was so proud of, that only Akebono could produce.
“We did a test run,” he said cautiously. “It takes the ink very well with no show-through.” Everyone nodded vigorously to back him up.
After Majime had forced Akebono back to the drawing board, Miyamoto had brought four other samples, produced by trial and error, visiting the office time and again to get a fix on their wishes. Each time, Kishibe had received him, and together they had exchanged opinions and contemplated the whys and wherefores of dictionary paper.
Kishibe was an employee of Gembu Books, but at the same time she and Miyamoto had become colleagues. She had no intention of toning down any criticism she might have on his behalf, and yet for his sake she hoped with all her heart that this was indeed the ultimate paper.
To help Miyamoto if she could, and to create the finest paper possible for The Great Passage, she had spent the last year and eight months exploring a variety of dictionaries. Before, she had never noticed, but it was definitely true that depending on the dictionary and the publisher, the paper differed in color, feel, and texture. Again and again she had turned the pages of the office dictionaries, getting to know them through her fingertips. In the end, she could touch a dictionary with her eyes closed and guess its publisher and title. She was hardly ever wrong. Mrs. Sasaki marveled that if there were a test for such ability, Kishibe would surely qualify at the highest level.
The paper in front of her was impeccable in color, thickness, and feel. The big question was its waxiness—the quality Majime valued over all else. How would that be?
Silently she swallowed and slowly turned a page. As if leafing through a dictionary, she went on, page after page.
Painfully loud silence enveloped the room. Finally the project chief, his nerves apparently stretched to the limit, spoke up. He was a thin, bespectacled man in his midthirties. “Well?” He looked at Kishibe with mingled confidence and anxiety.
It’s wonderful, she meant to say, but her voice caught with emotion. She coughed once before she could get the word out. “Wonderful.”
Cheers erupted. The project chief raised both arms in triumph, and the head of development shook hands with the head of sales. Miyamoto and the deputy manager of sales were hugging, overcome with emotion. Kishibe had never seen grown men behave like this.
“I’m really glad.” Miyamoto let go of the sales division manager and gave his face, moist with perspiration or tears, a wipe with his sleeve. “We thought this would do the trick, but it’s so good to hear you give the thumbs-up.”
He trusts me. Even though I’m a total amateur where paper is concerned. The thought made Kishibe happy. She reflected back on all the times they had met to discuss paper. Now this “ultimate” paper had been created, and everyone in Akebono Paper Company was full of joy. She, too, was overcome, on the edge of tears.
She looked down at the sample before her. This paper was truly superb. When she turned the page, it clung naturally to the ball of her thumb, but never more than a page at a time. Nor did she feel any static electricity. It left her hand with the ease of dry sand slipping through the fingers. Majime was sure to be pleased.
“What a relief!” said the head of sales. “After all, how paper feels is something sensuous. Urabe here was very concerned about how to convey your wishes to the development team. Isn’t that right, Urabe?”
“Um, yes,” the man called Urabe answered with a weak smile. Compared to the dynamic, open-hearted head of sales, he seemed much quieter.
“So I told them flat out,” said the head of sales. “I said, ‘Make a paper that’s like a beautiful woman you love but have to leave.’ What do you think? Doesn’t that sum it up perfectly?”
Not really, thought Kishibe, but she let it go with a smile. A comparison so hard to make heads or tails of must have caused the workers even more trouble.
“Well,” he said, “as soon as you know the exact size of the first printing and the number of pages, let us know.”
Miyamoto came over, perhaps worried that the man’s previous remark could be construed as sexual harassment. He sent Kishibe a glance that said, “Sorry about that.”
“We should be working on the fourth proofs of the second half by the rainy season, so when that happens I’ll be sure to let you know.” At the same time her eyes signaled to Miyamoto, “It’s okay, no problem.”
“Our papermaking machine is standing by, ready to go,” the head of development said with enthusiasm.
The project chief smiled and gave her a sample of the “ultimate” paper to take with her. There were about a hundred sheets, cut to dictionary size. She was glad to have them, just in case her judgment was off somehow. She could show these sheets to Majime and get his final approval.
Carrying the paper in a bag, Kishibe decided it was time to leave Akebono Paper Company. Everyone trooped out to the elevator to see her off.
“Is it heavy?” asked Miyamoto worriedly, eyeing the paper bag.
“No, it’s fine, thanks to the lightness of the paper you all made.”
He scratched the tip of his nose in embarrassed pleasure. “I’ll see her down,” he told the others, and got into the elevator with her.
“Good idea,” said the division head. “Well, thank you very much, Miss Kishibe. It’s been a pleasure.”
/> “Likewise. Thank you all very much.” She bowed her head politely, and the elevator doors closed. No one was in the elevator but the two of them. She was acutely conscious of being alone with Miyamoto in an enclosed space.
“I’m so relieved, I hardly know what to do with myself.” Miyamoto moved his shoulders up and down.
“Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. “Now it’s up to us at Gembu to make the content as good as we possibly can, to match the quality of the paper you’ve given us.”
“Miss Kishibe.” The elevator reached the first floor, and they walked toward the entrance. “Would you have dinner with me tonight? To celebrate.”
“Just us?”
He nodded. “Is that a bad idea?”
“Oh, no. But please let it be on me.”
There was some back-and-forth, but in the end he yielded. “I’ll go get my coat and things. Wait here. I’ll be right back.” He turned and ran up the stairs, as if he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the elevator.
While he was gone, Kishibe called the office.
“Mr. Majime? This is Kishibe. The paper couldn’t be better.”
“That’s good. One less headache.”
“They gave me a sample, but . . .” She paused. “Would it be all right if I went straight home tonight?”
“Absolutely. If you think the paper will do, I don’t even need to see the sample.”
“Oh, no, I’ll bring it in tomorrow. And one more thing . . .” She hesitated, then plunged on. “May I take Miyamoto to dinner and charge it to the company?”
“Of course. I was just leaving for Seven Treasures Garden with Professor Matsumoto. Shall we meet there?”
Majime could on occasion be considerate after all, but this time his consideration was wasted. Kishibe wanted to dine with Miyamoto alone. She politely declined the offer and telephoned a restaurant she had in mind to make a reservation.