Suspension of disbelief

[owlectomy]

Fudoki is a very good book set in 12th century Japan; it's fairly meticulously researched, as far as I can tell, not that my own knowledge of the area is voluminous--it consists of 1/3 of Genji, read in a train, and everything that my crackhead moonbat of a Classical Japanese professor made me read. But I still don't read too much about Japan by Western writers; so often the flavour is subtly wrong. (And the thing is, I never trust my intuitions that it's wrong, so I dislike whatever it is I'm reading and then feel guilty for disliking it, because I don't know enough to be sure that I should dislike it).

In Fudoki, there is a grey cat by the name of Shisutäko (not an umlaut, but I can't access the character map from my work computer; you know what I mean). Her name is said to mean "little nun." "Hmm," I thought, because I didn't know that word, but I dismissed it a second later; after all, none of what I learned in Classical Japanese stuck, so of course I wouldn't know it. And then, just a second ago, it smacked me on the head: shisutä, the word derived from the English "sister," which wouldn't have entered the Japanese language until the 19th century at the earliest (and which wouldn't refer to Buddhist nuns at all, in any case, I believe).

It's the kind of mistake that makes me wince, even though it's so tiny, and so inconsequential. How often do I read fantasy novels that use desperately anachronistic words, words tied to a specific place and time, without even noticing it? It's not as if I can really expect the author to learn Japanese. I shouldn't be half so pedantic, and it's still a very good book.

Perhaps the wince comes from knowing that silly mistakes are part of the territory, and I'm making a thousand of them in my own writing.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine anyone who knows anything about Japan thinking that shisutaa meaning nun, let alone ane or imouto, was or could have been current in Heian. My bet is on the Cute. In fact, it strikes me as an almost shoujo manga kind of cute: she's a *nun*, see, even if she's a Buddhist nun, so we'll call her 'shisutaa' sporfle giggle.

Unless it's a kind of Tolkienism: 'his name in my invented language is Blahblah meaning stay-at-home which I've rendered by the middle English hámfoest and so, Hamfast.' "Her name in Japanese means little nun which I've rendered as the English word sister pronounced as it would be written in katakana."

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I've had too many high school language classes. It looks to me like textbook Dictionary Idiocy. Like the guy in my (supposedly advanced) French class who wrote "Les gens que je pends dehors avec" for "the people I hang out with," or others who look up "fly" and use "mouche" for "fly" as in airplanes, or use "confiture" for "jam" as in traffic, because it's what their dictionaries tell them and they don't think about it too hard.

It's also a book that takes itself a little bit too seriously for shoujo manga Cute. I could be entirely wrong there, though. The author admits that she knows nothing at all about Japanese as a language--perhaps not even enough to link "shisutaa" with "sister," it doesn't stand out so much as a non-Japanese word if you can't read the katakana...

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not really set in Japan, anyway--it's pretty obviously a fantasy world. You could always ask her about it: kijjohnson.