Sometime in 2025: translating Beautiful Distance

I’m staying in a cottage in Saltaire, translating my first novel: Beautiful Distance. It’s not my novel, but I’m calling it that for now since technically, when I’m finished, each word of the original Japanese will have been taken out and each English word written by me. I’ve decided to keep this diary while I work: a place to put all the thoughts and questions that come up while translating.  

I always like to start a fresh book in the new year, and this year I chose Natsu Miyashita’s 静かな雨, or ‘A Quiet Rain’ – one of the many paperbacks I picked up on a recent trip to Tokyo. It’s a sweet novella about a man (Yuki) who falls for the owner of a taiyaki stand (Koyomi), and their budding relationship before Koyomi is involved in an accident which causes her to lose her short-term memory. I was reminded of 50 First Dates, and On the Calculation of Volume.

Before her accident, Koyomi tells Yuki about her childhood pet: a squirrel who she named Lisbon. She didn’t realise at the time, she explains, that Lisbon was the name of a Portuguese city. The connection here is clear in the original: in Japanese, squirrel is リス (risu), while Lisbon is リスボン (risubon) – it makes sense that a child could name a risu ‘risubon’ – adding the cute-sounding ‘bon’ to the word risu – without realising that there is a foreign city with the same name.

But how to convey that in English?