Editor’s Row

Ah, disinhibition. The bread and butter of mental alterations.

Once again, hello. I am Adam Fogle, editor of Kokoro Connect: Kizu Random. Or is it editor ‘for’ Kokoro Connect: Kizu Random? Well, I suppose the two phrasings are interchangeable.

That’s a lot of what I do. Looking for ways to make the text even a little bit better. Which means, yes, making quite a few nit-picky edits. It’s very different from the editor’s role for an original work (as opposed to a translated one), because the book has already been written. Normally, an editor would have a lot of back-and-forth with the author, giving feedback on which parts aren’t so great and need a little more attention.

My role as editor, the way we do things at J-Novel Club, is to make any and all changes I feel necessary, consulting with the translator, Molly, mostly only when I need clarification. As I mentioned last time, her writing is quite good, and similar to mine. She has the skills to do this herself. The reason we have this arrangement is the same reason people don’t (or shouldn’t, on a professional level) do their own proofreading. When you’re the one who wrote something, you know it so well that your brain will tend to skim over it without recognizing mistakes or possible improvements.

The example I used before was ridiculous, but here’s something a little more real from early in this volume.

Molly sends me the text with this line:

“(At one point Fujishima made the following statement regarding Nagase: “Relax. I have a new calling now. Nagase is no longer my top priority.” She didn’t elect to clarify where Nagase was positioned on her to-do list.)”

And I rearranged things a bit to change it to this:

“(At one point Fujishima made the following statement regarding Nagase: “Relax. I have a new calling now. Nagase is no longer my top priority.” She didn’t elect to clarify what position Nagase had on her to-do list.)”

Which might seem a little odd, maybe even less clear. Why make that change? Because if you know the subtext of Nagase and Fujishima’s relationship, it adds a subtle little double entendre, along the lines of “A position on my staff.” A little gross, but fittingly so given the context, as I see it. That’s the kind of opportunity I’m usually looking for.

If you’ve read Molly’s translator’s notes, you might remember that she mentioned idioms. Man, what a headache. Though not as bad as kanji puns. Anyone who works on bringing media over from Japanese to English has woken up in a cold sweat at least once over those things. But I digress.

This time around, we encountered the expression “Zen wa isoge” (善は急げ), which has the meaning of “You should move with haste (when you have no doubts).” The translation provided to me used the idiom “Strike while the iron is hot,” which is a common way that it is translated. However, the English idiom has the exact meaning of “Act quickly while favorable conditions exist.” You may notice that though they are similar, the meaning is not exactly the same. Using that exact idiom in English would not have made the most sense in context either. That’s the danger of expressions. They’re pretty and interesting, so it’s enticing to want to use them, but even more so than other parts of language, they rarely match up one-to-one. I ended up editing that to “With their doubts cleared away, Taichi and Aoki decided that there was no time like the present.” This wording keeps the full meaning of the original, while also using a simpler expression. If you can manage that, you’re doing pretty well.

As it happens, while the characters are not too terribly difficult to edit, the source of a lot of these problems happens to be the narration. It’s that literary tone that “takes the time,” so to speak, to use those expressions, and more grand and sweeping language to describe the big picture. I made sure to punch that up a little bit higher than might be normal. After all, this is a teenage drama. I wanted to embiggen the language a bit, to tonally match how as a teenager with relatively less life experience everything seems big and new and unique to yourself. Of course, in this case their experiences are pretty close to unique. But even without that, just in general, it’s fitting because with less life experience, through no fault of their own, one is less equipped to handle life’s difficulties, so there’s a good reason for everything to seem harder. It’s not an invalid point of view, and that’s something a lot of adults forget.

And about the narrator, it’s not entirely neutral in perspective. I feel like it sometimes goes out of its way to throw shade on people, more so than the characters would, with a nice, dry wit.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you that matter-of-fact comments hurt the most?!”

Yes, Aoki, they’re my favorites too.

Anyway, everyone learned an important moral this time. It’s not enough to want to help someone solve their problems just so the problem goes away. You have to want what’s best for them, and have a real idea of what it’ll take to get them there. Simply applying pressure isn’t going to help anyone. By the way, I was on the lookout this whole time for a good chance to use the term “virtue signalling,” but it never really came up. To his credit, Taichi never did anything just to make himself look better, only to make himself feel better.

Thank you once again to Molly Lee for making this such a smooth process, and to everyone at J-Novel Club who made this possible. And thanks to Sadanatsu Anda for bringing such an enjoyable story into the world.

Looking forward to next time. I’ll be talking about Heartseed, and someone else.