Editor’s Corner

When I started editing for J-Novel Club, I didn’t anticipate spending time Googling to look at great works of Western painting. But Holmes is making me think about that kind of art too, although for kind of a funny reason, in this volume. In part 4, the characters are discussing Las Meninas by the Baroque period artist Diego Velázquez, and Aoi looks at a reproduction of it in a book. Her description of the painting in the first draft of the translation included the lines:

“The youngest of the three was stepping on the back of a dog that was lying down. It looked cruel at first glance, but the dog didn’t seem to be in pain, so it seemed to just be childish mischief.”

Now, it’s fair to say that I might be a little obsessed with dogs (hey, want to follow my pug on Instagram??). When I’m not working on light novels, most of what I do is write about dogs. So this jumped out at me—my reaction was “Whoa, does this masterpiece actually show a kid stepping on a dog?!” And if so, could it really not be hurting the dog? This seemed unrealistic to me. I’ve stepped lightly on my dog’s foot now and again, and let me tell you, even that is a major catastrophe, to hear her tell it.

Usually when we have to deal with confusing descriptions in translations, it’s tricky. We can’t get inside the author’s head to see exactly what they were visualizing—we have to go off the words on the page. But in this case it was simple: all I had to do was search online for an image of the painting. I was relieved to discover that the dog was rather large, the child was rather small, and what was going on was really more like she was resting her foot on its back in a way that a tolerant family pet might well ignore with no problem. I still wanted to tell the kid “Get your foot off that dog!” but it was clearly not nearly as bad as what the wording had brought to my mind.

So with a few changes, we went with, “The youngest of the three was placing one foot on the back of a dog that was lying down. It looked cruel at first glance, but the dog didn’t seem to be bothered.” I think that gets it across—but you can look up the painting yourself to see if you think we got it right.

The other puzzles that arose in this volume were more like what you’d expect: wrestling with differences between Japanese and English. For example, in Part 8, they’re talking about the name of the person—eventually revealed to be the forger himself—who lent a painting:

“Hmm.” Yanagihara tilted his head. “I think he said his name was Moriya?”

Taguchi answered immediately, “No, sir. It was Moria. A rather unusual surname.”

This looks fine on the page, and it works in the original because Moria and Moriya actually sound different in Japanese. But since this is dialogue, we need to make sure it would work when spoken aloud in English, and the problem is, the average English speaker would pronounce these names exactly the same. I’ll refrain from getting up on my former-linguistics-teacher soapbox and giving an introductory lecture about English phonology, but the short story is, we stick a y sound between the two vowels in a word like “Moria” without even realizing we’re doing it.

When I asked Minna about what we could do to fix this, she told me that we had to take into account the fact that Moriya is a real Japanese surname and Moria isn’t—so it makes sense that Moria would be hard to remember and that a similar real name would come to Yanagihara’s mind instead. She suggested another real name, Morita, which also differs from Moria by only one sound, so we used that instead.

Working out this detail actually made me feel oddly nostalgic, because it reminded me of my very first trip to Japan many years ago where I figured out—fortunately before I tried to take the wrong train—that there’s both a Keiyō line and a Keiō line in Tokyo, which sound exactly the same to an English speaker, for exactly the same reason, but go to very different places. I guess that mattered more back in the day when you might talk to a human being to ask for directions instead of consulting an app, but still, who knows, maybe along with all our readers are learning about art from this series, reading these notes will someday help one of you avoid ending up somewhere out in Chiba prefecture when that wasn’t where you meant to go.