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elenajohansen 's review for:
The Great Passage
by Shion Miura
Though I've owned this for two years, I read it at just the right time.
I took a year of Japanese in college, basically for fun. I had previously been studying French, but that was mostly because my high school only offered French and Spanish. My older brother had taken French, so I chose that as well. I had some fantasy that we'd be able to practice together when he called home from college, which of course never happened.
By my senior year of college, I was in the school's anime club and seriously dating someone who had studied Japanese for years. I liked learning languages; it was something my brain was apparently good at. A lot of friends said my sanity was questionable for taking a daily language course as a senior for fun; I did it anyway, and enjoyed the heck out of it.
After I graduated, I stopped studying for a number of reasons. I started again this summer. Fifty-seven days ago, in fact. (Thank you, DuoLingo owl.)
Imagine my delight when I actually knew the meaning of about half the words discussed in the course of this story! A story about word nerds from another country I've never been to! In many ways this book reminds me (positively) of The Professor and the Madman, also the story of the creation of an ambitious dictionary. I think the process is fascinating, and I probably would have happily read nonfiction about Japanese dictionary creation. Dressing it up with fun characters who occasionally find love in the process was a fun bonus.
My only criticism is a systemic one that touches lightly on everything. I found the plot a bit flat and the narrative prone to telling vs. showing. That doesn't diminish how much I love its ideas or even the characters, who were idiosyncratic to a fault, no stereotypes here. There was always a sense of restraint, though, between me and the text, a distance I would have rather bridged with more naturalistic storytelling. I can't know yet if this is a cultural divide in style or innate to this author--I haven't read enough contemporary Japanese fiction to make any comparison. (I did read Murakami for the first time a few weeks ago, and his style was wordier and far more descriptive, though there was still a definite distance between me and the characters. But then, I'm used to romance, a genre that is all about being up close and personal. I may be overthinking this.) In the end, it may only be a matter of personal taste--I would have liked this book to be a little longer and examine the character's emotions with a little more subtlety.
I took a year of Japanese in college, basically for fun. I had previously been studying French, but that was mostly because my high school only offered French and Spanish. My older brother had taken French, so I chose that as well. I had some fantasy that we'd be able to practice together when he called home from college, which of course never happened.
By my senior year of college, I was in the school's anime club and seriously dating someone who had studied Japanese for years. I liked learning languages; it was something my brain was apparently good at. A lot of friends said my sanity was questionable for taking a daily language course as a senior for fun; I did it anyway, and enjoyed the heck out of it.
After I graduated, I stopped studying for a number of reasons. I started again this summer. Fifty-seven days ago, in fact. (Thank you, DuoLingo owl.)
Imagine my delight when I actually knew the meaning of about half the words discussed in the course of this story! A story about word nerds from another country I've never been to! In many ways this book reminds me (positively) of The Professor and the Madman, also the story of the creation of an ambitious dictionary. I think the process is fascinating, and I probably would have happily read nonfiction about Japanese dictionary creation. Dressing it up with fun characters who occasionally find love in the process was a fun bonus.
My only criticism is a systemic one that touches lightly on everything. I found the plot a bit flat and the narrative prone to telling vs. showing. That doesn't diminish how much I love its ideas or even the characters, who were idiosyncratic to a fault, no stereotypes here. There was always a sense of restraint, though, between me and the text, a distance I would have rather bridged with more naturalistic storytelling. I can't know yet if this is a cultural divide in style or innate to this author--I haven't read enough contemporary Japanese fiction to make any comparison. (I did read Murakami for the first time a few weeks ago, and his style was wordier and far more descriptive, though there was still a definite distance between me and the characters. But then, I'm used to romance, a genre that is all about being up close and personal. I may be overthinking this.) In the end, it may only be a matter of personal taste--I would have liked this book to be a little longer and examine the character's emotions with a little more subtlety.