The Great Passage
Shion Miura
CHAPTER 1
Kohei Araki had devoted his entire life—his entire working life—to dictionaries.
Words fascinated him, always had.
He had learned early on that dog contained other meanings besides the four-legged animal. Once when his father had taken him to the movies, a blood-spattered gangster, betrayed and dying on screen, spat out the words “Damn that dog!” So an enemy spy was a dog. The gang boss, upon receiving word of the gangster’s demise, jumped up and shouted, “What are you all standing around here for? Polish your daggers! Don’t let him die a dog’s death!” So the word could also mean “pointless.”
Dogs were faithful partners—trustworthy, intelligent, endearing—yet dog could also refer to a traitor or a condition of meaninglessness. How strange! In his child’s mind he tried to work out how this could be. Faithfulness to the point of servility, devotion going pathetically unrewarded—all the more pathetic as it increased in intensity. Perhaps such canine traits were responsible for the negative associations attached to the word.
Despite his precocious interest in words, Kohei Araki’s first real encounter with a dictionary came later. His working-class parents, busy stocking their hardware store and waiting on customers, had been little inclined to buy him a dictionary or urge him to study. Their educational philosophy was “If a boy is healthy and stays out of trouble, that’s good enough.” Araki, for his part, had been less interested in studying than in playing outdoors with his friends. The lone dictionary in his elementary school classroom had failed to impress him. It was simply there, an object whose spine occasionally entered his field of vision.
Everything changed with his first dictionary, the Iwanami Japanese Dictionary, a present from his uncle to celebrate the start of junior high. From the moment he took the book in his hands, he was hooked. The pleasure of opening up a dictionary of his own and leafing through it was indescribable. The entrancing shiny cover, the closely printed lines on every page, the feel of the thin paper. Most of all, he liked the concise definitions.
One night, as he and his younger brother were romping in the living room, their father had scolded them: “Keep your voices down!” As an experiment Araki had looked up the word koe (voice). This was the definition:
koe (noun) 1. sounds people and animals make using a special organ in the throat. 2. a sound resembling vocal utterance. 3. the approach of a season or a time of life.
Examples of the word’s usage were also listed. Some were familiar, like koe o ageru (to raise one’s voice) or mushi no koe (the cry of an insect). Others would never have occurred to him: to sense the approach of autumn was to “hear the voice of autumn,” to be nearing one’s forties was to “hear the voice of forty.” The idea was novel to him, but he realized it was true: koe could definitely convey “the approach of a season or a time of life.” Just like dog, the word contained a range of meanings. Reading the dictionary could awaken you to new meanings of commonly used words, meanings of surprising breadth and depth.
Still, that bit about “a special organ in the throat” was cryptic. Forgetting his father’s scolding, forgetting even his kid brother clamoring for attention, Araki looked up tokushu and kikan, the words for “special” and “organ.”
tokushu (adj.) 1. qualitatively different from the ordinary; having a particular nature. 2. (philosophy) that which is individual, as opposed to universal.
kikan (noun) a constituent part of an organism that has a fixed morphology and carries out a certain physiological function.
It wasn’t all that helpful; it was rather confusing, actually. Since he knew that the “special organ in the throat” could only be the vocal cords, Araki dropped the matter. But anyone ignorant of vocal cords would be left in the dark as to what the “special organ in the throat” might be.
Far from dampening Araki’s interest, the discovery that his dictionary wasn’t perfect only fanned his ardor. If some definitions weren’t quite successful, he liked the way they at least made a good effort. The dictionary’s very flaws made the exertions and enthusiasm of its compilers real to his imagination. The vast array of words—entry words, definitions, examples—was cold and impersonal at a glance, yet the book as a whole was the result of people puzzling over their choices. What patience they must have, what deep attachment to words!
Araki began saving up his allowance for trips to the used bookstore. When a new edition of a dictionary came out, a copy of the earlier edition could usually be purchased on the cheap. Little by little he collected a variety of dictionaries from different publishers and compared them. Some were tattered and worn. Others had annotations and underlining in red. Old dictionaries bore signs of the linguistic struggles of compiler and user alike.
Araki dreamed of becoming a philologist or a scholar of the Japanese language and getting his name on a dictionary. The summer before his senior year in high school he asked his father to send him to college.
“Huh? You want to study Japanese? What are you talking about? You already speak Japanese. What do you need to go to college for?”
“No, that’s not the point.”
“Never mind. How about helping out around the store? Your mother’s back pain is getting worse.”
He couldn’t get through to his father, but his uncle, the one who’d given him the Iwanami Japanese Dictionary, pled his case for him. A crewman on a whaling boat, this uncle had learned to appreciate dictionaries on long sea voyages. Within the family he was known as an eccentric. On a rare visit with Araki’s parents, he had interceded on the young man’s behalf: “He’s a pretty smart kid. Why not go ahead and send him to college?” Araki’s father had listened and ultimately agreed.
Araki studied furiously and managed to pass the difficult college entrance examination. Over the next four years it became clear to him that he lacked the makings of a scholar, but his desire to compile a dictionary stayed strong.