Jan 2-3 2026: A Squirrel Named Lisbon

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?