The Great Passage
An award-winning story of love, friendship, and the power of human connection.
Kohei Araki believes that a dictionary is a boat to carry us across the sea of words. But after thirty-seven years of creating dictionaries, it's time for him to retire and find his replacement.
He discovers a kindred spirit in Mitsuya Majime--a young, disheveled square peg with a penchant for collecting antiquarian books and a background in linguistics--whom he swipes from his company's sales department.
Along with an energetic, if reluctant, new recruit and an elder linguistics scholar, Majime is tasked with a career-defining accomplishment: completing The Great Passage, a comprehensive 2,900-page tome of the Japanese language. On his journey, Majime discovers friendship, romance, and an incredible dedication to his work, inspired by the words that connect us all.
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Juliet Winters Carpenter is a professor emerita of Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts. Her first translated novel, Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe, received the 1980 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In 2014, her translation of A True Novel by Minae Mizumura received the same award. Besides Shion Miura's The Great Passage and two-volume Forest series, Carpenter's recent translations include Mizumura's An I-Novel, Keiichiro Hirano's At the End of the Matinee, and Tōru Haga's Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853. Her forthcoming translations include Masatsugu Ono's At the Edge of the Wood and Kiyoko Murata's A Woman of Pleasure. Carpenter lives on Whidbey Island in Washington State.
