The Great Passage

About

Majime is awkward, earnest, and spectacularly bad at normal conversation — which makes him the perfect person to spend fifteen years compiling a new Japanese dictionary. Recruited by an aging lexicographer who sees in him the necessary obsession, Majime joins a small editorial team and discovers that building a dictionary is less about definitions than about catching the living language before it changes shape. Miura writes a love story to the unglamorous art of getting words right. The novel is warm, funny, and quietly moving about what it means to dedicate your life to a task that most people will never notice or appreciate. A book about the people who build the tools the rest of us use without thinking — and the particular passion of caring about things no one else does.