Who was that masked samurai?

I had a weird criticism about the last book. It was a request to put a Dramatis Personae in the back.

I've never liked those. I've only really seen them on epic fantasy and MilSF which seem to go out of their way to have oodles and oodles of characters. Especially the MilSF, where they are endless lists of people who are in exactly one scene, on a radio, but we need to know where they sit in the Org Chart by rank and official position.

Well, I'm not going back and editing the book this week, even if I thought it was a good idea. Some people haven't quite made the jump to the electronic life. When I read, it is usually with a computer or smart phone near at hand so if I start wondering (as I did during brunch) what language a scene set in Tel Aviv would be in, Wikipedia is only a few clicks away.

(In fact, from within Kindle it is one click away).

But that's not it.

It took a while to understand this wasn't even about my core cast. Apparently I wasn't supposed to list those (after I'd gone and done so on my Author Web Site). It was the historical characters that were a problem.

In a book set in Japan, and that's getting close to the meat of it. My argument is that when I bring up, say, Ishikawa Goemon in the book, it is almost always put in context with "Ishikawa Goemon, the legendary ninja and bodyguard for the Tokugawa Shogunate." And that's all that matters for the story. (It is also most of what we know in history, as with so many other people of the period the story-tellers got into it big time and there is more strange stuff coming out of the kabuki theater than is ever documented about his actual life.)

And that got me to the edge of this complaint, but it took me another day to finally get it. It's the problem of feeling left out. Like you the reader are expected to know certain things. It can be a barrier; something I've cautioned new readers to, say, Military SF about; these books are in a field that has been developed since at least Heinlein and Haldeman, and there are a lot of internal terms and slang and assumptions about how the world works that you as a reader are expected to bring with you to the book.

And this is already a problem with Japan. Japan attracts Japanophiles. You cross the line very quickly between some assumed "normal" person who has heard of samurai but their understanding stops there, to someone who can tell you the complete List of Battle from any random engagement of the Genpei War.

Same with language; there the line is between "that's hardly Japanese at all" like "sushi" or "tofu" to "oh my god, you are one of those people" for "katana" or "geta."

The problem is basically one of trust. And I understand, and I have grappled with it. The reader has to trust that they aren't being expected to know this entire backstory, all sorts of things that will be narratively important but aren't going to be told to them. The previous book concerned the London Blitz and at no point did I go out of my way to explain that England was at war with Germany -- I expected the reader would know that.

And that's why I find this insolvable. For my critic, it seems so obvious; "You have to explain the stuff most people won't know." So I've got a story taking place in Paris. Do I need to explain that it is in France? Do I need to explain what the Eiffel Tower is? What about the Louvre? And, yes, at some point between the Pompidou Center and la petite Palais and Musee d'Orsay the reader isn't expected to know what that is or what they should know about it.

That part isn't as hard. I am quite comfortable in assuming this imaginary average reader has heard of James Bond but hasn't heard of Lupin III. (I can't think of any actual historical characters name-dropped in the Kyoto book that I could safely assume the reader had heard of.)

The real problem is, how do you assure the reader that you've told them what they need to know? I mention the Emperor Meiji several times. He's the emperor of Japan, I told the reader, he was a force behind the modernization of Japan, his rule marked a return to Imperial power (whilst constitutional) and the last of the Shogunate.

But this is where trust comes in. How does the reader know I'm not glossing this for the sake of the reader who already knows the importance of the Meiji Restoration? That I'm not expecting them to already know some other important detail about the man or his rule which is going to be important in solving the mystery/the climax of the book?

That's the thing. If I show them an obviously made-up person (or place) they are comfortable with the idea of "Her name is Natsumi, she's a schoolgirl who works at a shop, she's shy" being everything that is going to matter about this character. But there is some dark magic when they recognize that Yukio Mishima is a real person, and they get this terrible fear that they are being left out, no, that they are about to be kicked out of the club of True Believers for not being enough of a Japan addict to know ALL about Mishima.

And this was the last problem I had with the argument I had. Which is, how does repeating, "He's the emperor, etc. etc." at the back of the book fix anything?  

(And, yes, this can exist for fictional characters too. I always make a point of giving a few extra details when I pick up a character that hasn't been on screen for a while. I try not to just name-drop "Sakai" and risk leaving the reader floundering. Instead it will be something like, "And there was Security Chief Sakai, glowering as usual, in his spiffy red athletic jacket.")

(Of course, if the reader does have this terrible impression they should have remembered some important detail about this character from the last time they appeared -- how is a one-sentence blurb in an index at the back of the book going to do damn-all?)

My latest thought came in two stages. First off, that it may be a mistake to have, "Ishikawa Goemon, the legendary ninja" in the narrative, because it looks like you are saying, "You know, that famous guy." Again, I'm not sure why "Dale Carnegie, the race car driver" gets a pass but "Tokugawa Yoshitsune, Shogun" does not. But anyhow! It would be better to set this up as a lecture; "Yoshi-who?" "He was one of the Shogun who ruled Japan." "Oh. Thank you."

The second part of this, though, is what the index at the back is doing. It isn't supposed to provide any more explanation than is in the text. But when you see "Ishikawa Goemon: Legendary ninja" in the index, it tells you that, in fact, this is all the author thought you should, would, or needed to know. And, sure, the reader might flip to it in the middle of reading* but it it just to assure themselves that they didn't miss "And a notorious cross-dresser" or something that they really, really should have either remembered from a previous scene, or known themselves because the guy is so damned famous.

(He isn't.)

* Another blind spot for me. I read in Kindle. I originally wrote for Kindle. Flipping to the index is not quite the same as doing it in a paper book. You are always afraid the Kindle will lose your place if you flip around too much. And also, since you are already on a computer, if you are worried there's something about Yoshitsune you were supposed to remember, you can just double-tap the name and the Wikipedia page will pop up for you right there in the ap!