Editor’s Corner

As we’ve mentioned in the notes for previous volumes, one thing we have to constantly negotiate in this series is how much the reader can be expected to know about obscure bits of Japanese culture. A lot of the time we’re lucky because the detail is so obscure that even Japanese readers wouldn’t be familiar with it, and neither would the characters, so Holmes does his job of explaining it to us. Other times it’s easy to slip in a definition.

But sometimes we get stuck with a detail that’s too obscure to leave alone, in a situation where it’s too awkward to insert an explanation. We had one of those in this volume, when Holmes says that the size of a garden is twenty-four hectares and Aoi finds that hard to visualize:

“How big is twenty-four hectares anyway? I can’t really imagine it.”

“Hmm. People often use Tokyo Dome for scale, so around five of those?”

“To be honest, I can’t really think in terms of Tokyo Dome either. How many tatami mats is that?”

“About a hundred and forty-four thousand.”

“A hundred and...” Nope, no idea.

This very brief, slightly amusing little exchange was the source of much agonizing behind the scenes over units of measure.

Tokyo Dome is basically a conventional measure—the American equivalent would be saying how many football fields long something is—and it wasn’t too hard to add “People often use Tokyo Dome for scale” for the reader who doesn’t know that. But when Tokyo Dome didn’t help, what Aoi asked in the original was actually “How many tsubo?”

Tsubo is a traditional unit of measure usually used for plots of land, so it makes sense for her to use it here. But adding yet another explanation in this quick back-and-forth exchange seemed like it would be too distracting. So we decided to replace the measurement with acres.

However... One of the interesting things about working for J-Novel Club is that we get feedback from readers as parts of the books are posted weekly. One reader found that this substitution itself was distracting. Would a teenage girl in Japan really think in terms of acres?

My initial alternative suggestion was that we use square kilometers, but when Minna did the math, she reported that 24 hectares is 0.24 square km, which made it seem like that answer didn’t really add much, and would be uncharacteristically unhelpful for Holmes. Back to the drawing board.

There was of course another traditional unit of measure that would probably be familiar to our readers: tatami mats. I had resisted this because I suspected that the number of tatami mats would be ridiculously huge, and Minna again reported back: yeah, 144,000.

I’m pretty sure no one measures anything in tatami mats at that scale. On the other hand, the original number was 72,000 tsubo, and the point of the conversation seems to be that that’s so large that it didn’t help Aoi picture it either.

So I threw up my hands: maybe we’re the first to ever measure anything in hundreds of thousands of tatami mats, but who says you can’t? And while I don’t know about you, after all that, I still have exactly zero mental image of how big that garden is—but neither does Aoi, so I guess that means we conveyed the right meaning in the end!