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    The Great Passage
    The Great Passage
    The Great Passage
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Great Passage

    Written by Shion Miura

    Narrated by Brian Nishii

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An award-winning story of love, friendship, and the power of human connection.

    Kohei Araki believes that a dictionary is a boat to carry us across the sea of words. But after thirty-seven years of creating dictionaries, it's time for him to retire and find his replacement.

    He discovers a kindred spirit in Mitsuya Majime—a young, disheveled square peg with a penchant for collecting antiquarian books and a background in linguistics—whom he swipes from his company's sales department.

    Along with an energetic, if reluctant, new recruit and an elder linguistics scholar, Majime is tasked with a career-defining accomplishment: completing The Great Passage, a comprehensive 2,900-page tome of the Japanese language. On his journey, Majime discovers friendship, romance, and an incredible dedication to his work, inspired by the words that connect us all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    TranslatorJuliet Winters Carpenter
    Release dateJun 1, 2017
    ISBN9781536631876
    The Great Passage
    Author

    Shion Miura

    Shion Miura, the daughter of a well-known Japanese classics scholar, started an online book-review column before she graduated from Waseda University. In 2000, she made her fiction debut with Kakuto suru mono ni mar (A Passing Grade for Those Who Fight), a novel based in part on her own experiences during her job hunt. In 2006, she won the Naoki Prize for her linked-story collection Mahoro ekimae Tada Benriken (The Handymen in Mahoro Town). Her other prominent novels include Kaze ga tsuyoku fuiteiru (The Wind Blows Hard), Kogure-so monogatari (The Kogure Apartments), and Ano ie ni kurasu yonin no onna (The Four Women Living in That House). Fune o amu (The Great Passage) received the Booksellers Award in Japan in 2012 and was developed into a major motion picture. She has also published more than fifteen collections of essays and is a manga aficionado.

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    Reviews for The Great Passage

    4/5

    167 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The Great Passage is the name of a dictionary intended to be the most comprehensive of the Japanese language ever compiled. The process of compiling it forms the basis of the plot. This is also a story of friendship, dedication, teamwork, and interpersonal relationships. Many challenges must be surmounted by a sparse and underfunded staff. The title represents both the outcome of the project and the personal growth that occurs in the team members.

      It is set in Japan and infused with cultural elements – foods, customs, and business practices. The characters are eccentric and colorful. The author adds a good bit of humor into the conversations among them. It will appeal to those who love quirky characters, language, or vocabulary. It also contains an educational element of the many aspects that go into the creation of a dictionary (quite a few of which I had never thought of before).
    • 3/5
      It is a very sweet and insightful novel. I liked the vision it gave me into Japanese idioms ans short glimpses of its culture.
      I found hard to follow the intense amount of wording issues, but I appreciate that it highlights the importance of words.
    • 4/5
      Sweet and original story. Makes you really think about the power and meaning of words.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book about love, about love of your calling and creating a thing you love with the people who share your passion. It’s a story about making a Japanese dictionary which took fifteen years of making and it’s for sure one of the best things I’ve read. Excellent narration by Brian Nishii!
    • 4/5
      Language has fascinated Kohei Araki since he was a child, but now he's ready to retire and let others take a helm of the project for a new dictionary, to be titled The Great Passage. What follows is the story of various people who have a hand in its creation: Majime, an awkward but hardworking young man; Nishioka, in some ways Majime's opposite but one who comes to appreciate the dictionary work; Kishibe, a young woman who comes to work on the dictionary and has to figure out how to work with Majime. Over the course of fourteen years, each of them will have their impact on the dictionary, and it will have its impact on them.I really can't pass up a book, fictional or nonfictional, about dictionaries. I found it interesting to see the details of Japanese dictionary creation (here fictionalized, but the author includes a bibliography and clearly did her research), and could only imagine the amount of work that must have gone in to translating something like this that depends so much on features of language and writing. A fun, warm story that I would recommend to fans of The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Liar's Dictionary.
    • 5/5
      “A dictionary is a ship that crosses the sea of words, (...) People travel on it and gather the small points of light floating on the dark surface of the waves. They do this in order to tell someone their thoughts accurately, using the best possible words. Without dictionaries, all any of us could do is linger before the vastness of the deep.” A wonderful book
    • 5/5
      This is an excellent, sweeping love story. Love of friends, love of a romantic partner, love of words, love of a team...how do you define love? The erstwhile story of the journey to publish a dictionary, this book teachings about life, values and love in a myriad of forms.

      It left me with a wonderful book hangover the desire to share it with those I love.
    • 4/5
      A real unexpected treat where generations, and couples, and coworkers, and the work of words all touch and change one another's lives.
    • 4/5
      Kohei Araki falls in love with words and dictionaries as a boy. When a university education makes it clear to him that he's a good but not academic-level lexicographer, he goes to work for Gembu Books, and makes dictionaries.

      More than thirty years later, he's nearing retirement. His greatest work, The Great Passage, a top-level dictionary of the Japanese language, is well under way, but not yet complete, and he needs to recruit a successor.

      He finds Mitsuya Majimi, a disheveled, seemingly unpromising, young man, who nevertheless proves to share his love of words and their power.

      They each find other people along the way, wildly different from each other, and each bringing something different to the dictionary project, and to the other, lesser, dictionaries they make along the way. Those lesser dictionaries, including dictionaries for fictional worlds, help make the dictionary department pay, to keep the company happy while they work on their other, great project.

      The plot here is overcoming the challenges of publishing--getting the contributions they need from scholars who don't necessarily share their priorities, getting the specialized paper they need, and other seemingly mundane concerns. The real story is the people--Araki, Majimi, their coworkers, friends, and wives, all centering around the love of words, and what they learn from the words, past dictionaries, and each other.

      This doesn't sound like much to describe, but I truly enjoyed this book and the people that populate it. Recommended.

      I bought this audiobook.
    • 4/5
      Translated from Japanese, this is a charming tale of the lives of obsessive lexicographers struggling to put together an epic dictionary over a 12 year period. The book has the charm of a pilgrimage novel (Howard Frye) but the journey is all in the assemblage of words, their meaning, and usage in contemporary language. There is a love of words, and there are words of love. And if they are not struggling with notations on an index card, then they are sitting down to thoroughly described Japanese cuisine. This a charming story and enjoyable light reading.
    • 5/5
      The love of words and words of love. This tale of the making of the dictionary to be called The Great Passage, a guide to the sea of words tells of the great love of 3 men for words and the art pf capturing them to share and also 3 different, very human love stories. Well translated from Japanese, there must be some enormous loss in only in the context of the word play, but what's left is quite substantial for the length.
    • 5/5
      A love letter to a process that is slowly disappearing - the process of putting together a dictionary. With the decision to switch to online/e-book only formats for newer versions of some popular dictionaries, chances are that the last new dictionaries will be printed this century. Because the dictionary is not just the words - these will continue to live in the e-dictionaries. But once away from paper, an editor does not need to agonize over which words to include and which ones to remove; how to rewrite a sentence so that it fits a given space, leaving almost no white space on a page. I love dictionaries - I owe a lot of them and I tend to buy new ones when they catch my eye for one reason or another - multilingual and monolingual, generic and thematic. And yet, I had not thought about the process of creation, the editing job that goes into it. I knew it is not easy but somehow I never wondered just how much. And this novel did. "The Great Passage" is the name of a new Japanese dictionary and the novel spans the 15 years it takes for the dictionary to be completed. In these 15 years not everything is about the dictionary - making one is expensive, dictionaries in Japan are not subsidized with public funds and the team that works on it needs to find other means to make money. So the process lags behind and slowly crawls - never stopping but moving very slow. The novel can be split into two parts - the arrival of Mitsuya Majime and his introduction to the fascinating life of lexicography and dictionaries and then, 13 years later, the arrival of Midori Kishibe and her transition from someone that does not care about it to someone that lives for it. The first part is closed with the departure of one of the members of the team (and his understanding just when he is losing it how much he loved the process); the second open opens with the outsider looking in.And of course, noone can put life on hold so within the 15 or so years it takes to get the dictionary to the market so there are clumsylove stories (symmetrical between the parts again), a couple of cats, food, secondary characters and a lot of word play. The translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter, had done an awesome job translation a novel that was written in Japanese, for Japanese readers and full of the oddities of the language. There are places where I wish she had added some notes and explanations - I know how kanji and kana are used or what a particle is but if one does not know, some passages would not make sense (including the introduction of Majime) but these are small gripes. And it looks like her choices when to leave the word in Japanese and when to translate it from the start worked very well. And then there is the actual love letter - the one from Majime to the woman he marries - written in an old style and flowery style, full of Chinese poetry and wordplay. The translation of that is also exquisite but that is the part where you can see what you are missing not reading it in Japanese. When I started writing this review I wondered if I want to call it a love letter or a farewell letter. And somehow could not make myself calling it the latter - even when death strikes, there is nothing final or foreboding in this novel; reading it you would think that this process will continue for decades and centuries to come. And maybe my thoughts that it will not will turn out to be too pessimistic. It takes a few pages to get used to the style but once it starts working, it just does. Highly recommended - even if you do not like dictionaries - if you like language, reading or words, the book will probably resonate with you.