The editing of The Great Passage went on seemingly without end.
Summer vacation came and went, and the student workers continued to haunt the office. Kishibe and the rest of the staff almost always took the last train home. Day after day they kept on checking entry words, making final calls regarding usage samples, adding phonetic readings of characters, and otherwise marking the proofs with red-pencil corrections. There was so much to do that Kishibe often felt like shouting out. Sometimes she would actually go into the annex restroom, shut the door, and let out a little scream.
Seeing her frustration, Mrs. Sasaki would point to the schedule and the work checklist and say comfortingly, “It’s all right. We’re doing fine. I know what has to be done, and if anything gets left out, I’ll speak up right away. Just relax and do the work in front of you.”
There was way too much work in front of her; that was the whole problem. She had to carry out various tasks simultaneously and wound up confused.
As she was tearing her hair out, Araki came around to give her warm encouragement. “For someone working on her first dictionary, you’re doing fine, Miss Kishibe. Look at our Majime. All the time we worked on the Sokéboo Encyclopedia, he was in his element—he knew more about that world than we ever would. Now look at him.”
Majime was sitting facing the galley proofs, head in hands. Once in a while he would raise his head and mime moving a box or something in midair. Had overwork finally driven him to playing with invisible blocks?
As Kishibe was flinching at this thought, Araki explained, “He’s mentally figuring how much space the entries will take. How he can fit them all into a fixed number of pages by cutting a word here and a line there. It’s like a complicated puzzle. Even he appears to be struggling.”
There was more work not only in the office, but outside it as well. As head of the Dictionary Editorial Department, Majime was often called to meetings with the sales and advertising departments. He also had to consult with a designer and production editor to decide on the binding for The Great Passage. Kishibe fully expected him to cave under pressure from others and come back looking dejected, but he proved a surprisingly tenacious negotiator. When it came to his precious dictionary, he could apparently hold his own. He delayed the release date and worked up to the last minute to perfect the contents, and he didn’t agree readily to everything suggested by outsiders, either, refusing to be pushed around and admirably sticking to his guns.
Kishibe also would have liked to attend the meetings with advertising, but the editorial department was shorthanded to begin with and couldn’t spare two people at once. A major publication like The Great Passage called for a major ad campaign. Rumor had it they were going to plaster train stations with posters featuring a popular celebrity. The idea made Kishibe a bit nervous. Did Majime have any idea who was who in today’s entertainment world?
Despite her anxiety, he would return from such meetings in high spirits.
“Did they come up with the name of a celebrity you particularly like?” she asked.
“No,” he said, laughing shamefacedly, “I never heard of any of them. But that’s all right. Nishioka’s gung-ho and full of ideas.”
That name again. Remembering his goofy e-mail, she sighed. Still, it was nice to think there was somebody in advertising who used to work here.
The Dictionary Editorial Department and The Great Passage both had long been the butt of jokes at Gembu, derided as “money pits,” but now thanks to Nishioka’s exertions the dictionary was set to make a smashing debut.
It was spring—Kishibe’s second spring in the Dictionary Editorial Department. Since leaving the staff of Belle two years ago in July, she had toiled with the others for the past year and eight months, checking proofs for The Great Passage. Now the first part of the dictionary was on its fourth set of proofs, the last part on its third set. The end was not yet in sight. And yet the release date was set for early March of the following year. Spring vacation was when dictionary sales heated up, in advance of the new school year in April. People bought them to prepare for their own studies or as gifts. Would The Great Passage be ready in time? Its slow progress made Kishibe antsy.
Majime was sitting at his desk gazing at something, seemingly as insouciant as ever. Kishibe, checking the words beginning with a, was bothered by something and went to ask his opinion.
“Could I ask you something?” Standing next to him, she glanced down at his desktop. He was staring at a picture of a kappa, a traditional Japanese river imp. They had commissioned the illustration to accompany the entry word. It was drawn in narrow lines using a realistic style (not that she had ever seen an actual kappa), depicting a creature with a turtle shell and a fringe of hair, carrying a sake flask. True to folklore, the top of its head was bald.
“First let me ask you a question,” he said, motioning for her to sit down in a nearby chair. “What do you think of this illustration?”
Difficult question. She was no judge of kappa. She studied the picture and said, “It’s good, isn’t it?”
Majime scratched his head. “Does a kappa carry a bottle of sake? I have a feeling it’s Shigaraki-ware raccoon dogs who do that.”
“Now that you mention it . . . The TV commercials for sake that show kappa with a sake bottle and cup may have imprinted that image on people’s minds.” Lately, Kishibe had come to appreciate the department’s dictum to try to get to the bottom of anything that wasn’t crystal clear in its meaning, rather than leave things vague or depend on mistaken assumptions. Leaving aside her own question, she went to the bookshelves and looked up kappa in another company’s dictionary.
“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.”