Pigeons on the roof, aloof

9,000 words in 9 days, and it is time for a bath.

Well, actually. I wrote that scene too. Followed by the fancy dinner that gets served at a ryokan.  I'm going to have a lot of trouble backing Penny down to Budget Traveler again for the Paris novel (even if I didn't intend to send her to the Jules Verne Cafe).

Based on how things are moving, I'm going to come up short of my targets on the "Tourist in Old Kyoto" section, and the "Penny works out a bunch" section. Which means I really am going to need some complicated plotting when she actually crosses wits with the cult.

There's no real way to describe a wealth of detail. Take for instance this place:

A picture may be worth a thousand words but that isn't reversible. Not if you want words that aren't boring. In the current draft, I got 114 words out of them, and that included a brief comparison of Chinese and Japanese architectural styles. The entire shrine, complete with food stands and prayer bells and a bit of meditation, ran 1,200 words.

And then there's stuff like this:

Penny doesn't read Japanese, and she doesn't know Kabuki. So she can't give the names of anything she is looking at and that is entirely intentional. As I said in an earlier post, well, let me let Penny tell it:

“Minami-za,” she told me. “It is the Kabuki theatre in Kyoto. Stay on Shijo-dori and cross the Kamo-gawa on the Gion-bashi and it will be on your right.”

“Aki…” I said. It was starting to make sense. “Did you just say stay on Shijo Street and cross the Kamo River on the Gion Bridge to get to the Minami Theatre? Why not just say that?”

Which only underlines (ahem) why I'm not italicizing foreign language. In any part of the books. It would look really awkward, and then the lines get very blurry; do you italicize sushi? At what point does a word grow up to be a real boy?

So the latest problem I've been having is over English-speakers. The reality in Japan -- this was particularly my experience in Kyoto -- is that native fluency existed but many people I encountered were somewhat better in English than I was in Japanese. (Okay...make that a lot better). It really should be rendered that way in the book. 

Not necessarily spelling out the pronunciations (there's a whole discussion about that but basically modern thinking is that in the hands of almost all writers it detracts more than it adds flavor). But the grammatical errors and elisions should be there.

And I tried it. And immediately fell into a crazy wormhole because there are underlying ideas of Japanese grammar and Japanese language culture that would want to be expressed. Japanese is almost as dogmatic as German about word order, for instance. And I haven't even touched on the idea of politeness levels (largely because I'm saving it up for a later bit).

So you would expect confusion about the "particles" (as a Japanese would see it) like "The" and "And" and "Is" -- the desu-series doesn't quite translate the same. The usual answer to confusion over the nuances of connective words and verb endings is pidgin; to omit them all. But then add the obligatory politeness words on top...

And you end up with a sort of "We very sorry honorable Smith-san" that just grates. It makes it look like I am making fun of the culture. 

Well, there is the added layer to this linguistic turducken that is English as it is taught in Japanese schools. Which is rote-taught and bears about as much resemblance to English as she is spoke as phrasebook speech does to the actual language in question. (And, yes, native Japanese speakers have expressed their bemusement at certain usages that crop up in every tourist guide, comments along the line of, "Nobody actually says that!")

In a large way, phrasebook language and first lessons in language is more lies-to-children. Such as the advice you get starting out that Japanese words do not have accented syllables. Well, hell no. It actually does have tones, and if you get the tones really wrong the locals won't even be able to understand you (yes...personal experience this time).

Of course there's also the problem that I can't help but use any passing speaker as a mouthpiece to explain things to the reader. Even Hanae, who I had meant to be a woman of few English words (and too polite to speak up most of the time, at least until Penny began to understand her better), has been enlisted to explain things and, in an instant, morphed into the same Oxford Lecturer voice I always fall into.

Well, the chambara is next. I've been updating my online "examples of notes" page as I go, and the next scene to write is at Toei.

https://writingdownthesherds.wordpress.com/wedding-live-research/