Thank Ou

 Today was mostly re-reading what I've written so far. And I got hung up on the Japanese.

Specifically, the romanization.

So in the Hepburn Romanization, this would be written Arigatō. Notice the macron there. In the Revised Hepburn Romanization, the spelling is rationalized to be closer to the Japanese original; Arigatou.

If you look closely, you can see the hiragana above has five characters; A, Ri, Ga, To, U.

But this is a Japanese word (not, however, a loan-word) which is familiar to English speakers. Who have gotten used to seeing it spelled Arigato.

For this one, I feel okay diverging. But Kyoto, too, is more properly written Kyōto. And that can be a problem; taking words the reader is familiar with but making them unfamiliar by using spelling that looks unusual. I had the same problem in the Athens novel; many people outside of die-hard Classics folk are using a closer approximation of the Greek names rather than the Latin versions we've grown up with. Achilleus instead of Achilles, for instance. But that was, I felt, one thing too many to throw at my readers.

In any case, the older Hepburn is deprecated, plus too, many readers aren't used to the idea of the macron as a long vowel. And then there's the problem of a long ī, which is hard to read with a macron and works better as ii. The preferred Arigatou, however, to an English-speaking ear looks as if the final vowel sound should rhyme with "you." It is even harder for the average reader to understand that this is simply the same "o" sound drawn out to take twice as long to say.

***

Plus I'm fighting the usual struggle between natural variety and nuance and idiom versus simplifying the language so the reader has half a chance of figuring some of it out (or at least, not being completely flummoxed at Penny's ability to pick some of it up.)

That's been my intended goal since the first book, incidentally; that if it is plot-significant, the reader learns it at the same time Penny does. Sometimes I will have to break this, mostly by having someone (usually Penny) drop a lecture on the reader, but whenever possible I'm trying to let the reader learn more organically, by demonstration within the story.

The Japan book I have two strings to that bow; first is a running gag about a really thick "History of Japan" she picked up just before she got on the plane. Second is her friend Aki, a self-described otaku, on a bluetooth earpiece. Both of these allow me to dole out history and culture and language a little bit at a time. With lots of opportunities for gags.

And I am getting to be afraid that's going to be the nature of the series. As much as Penny is impersonating Athena Fox -- the experienced and polished world traveller, expert in history and speaker of multiple languages -- each story is going to drop her fish-out-of-water into yet another unfamiliar situation so the reader can as much as possible be shown and not told how the place works.