Punctured: a plea for help.

Calling all punctuation experts!

Are you a stickler? Do you love nothing more than a properly-placed semi-colon? Can you help me with some speech marks in a book I want to love?

Because at the moment the punctuation marks in Hiromi Kawakami's THE NAKANO THRIFT SHOP are not making dips and dots in the text, as they should. (Don't you love that "puncture"and "punctuate" are cousins?) Instead, they're poking me in the eye and driving me out of a fictional world with more charm than I've found in months of reading (since The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend). They're prodding and nipping and kicking me back into my chair, back into my high school English lessons, back into edit-mode, where I spend at least half of my working life, grim-faced and  gimlet-eyed, searching and destroying.

I really want to know what I'm missing. I want to be missing something. I don't want to give up on this quirky and delightful little book. Did I say it was set in a thrift store, aka my spiritual home? And it was a Christmas present too. But ouch! My eye!

On the same page, in the same dialogue, there are:

"But how could you tell they were Takodoro's photographs?" I asked.

        AND

"That's pretty daring." Mr Nakano was the first to voice his opinion.

        AND

A place that had a hot spring meaning what? Takao asked, and Mr Nakano replied with a serious look on his face, She means a love hotel.

AAAAAAAAAARRRRGGHHHHHHH! I cannot for the life of me tell what's governing when there are speech marks and when there aren't. And it's driving me bonkers.

The only other time I've felt like this was with the pronouns in Hilary Mantel's WOLF HALL. I was close to giving up, because I couldn't work out who "he" was supposed to mean on any given page. But I was sure that Mantel wouldn't write an unclear book and her editors wouldn't pass an unclear book. So I concentrated for five minutes and cracked the code. Pronouns are used the same way as usual:

    The King . . . he 

    The Cardinal . . . he

    The huntsman . . . he

But when there's a "he" with no preceding noun to tie it to, that's Cromwell. Mantel never refers to him as Cromwell, although others address him that way. And she doesn't call him Thomas either. (It wouldn't help much, since there are eight other Thomases in the book.) He's "he" for all 647 pages. And it brings you very close to him, somehow; makes you pay attention to him, every time you rediscover him. I'd never have thought you could portray such intimacy with one tiny little pronoun.

The first time I worked something out for myself about someone's writing, I was eleven and I'd found an E.E.Cummings poem in an anthology. I can't remember which. But I remember being told that "e.e. cummings" didn't use capital letters and wondering why. And going to the library and finding more of his poems and seeing that he did use capital letters. He did! There were two right there in the first line of 'i thank You God for most this amazing day". It all made perfect sense.

I really want to believe Kawakami's speech marks are as logical as Cumming's capitalisation and Mantel's pronouns. I just need to crack the code. Can anyone help me? Or at least help me to mind less? Or even distract me with something?

Comments

[Dean James]

Could the code be simply poor editing? I really can't see a point to using quotation marks for dialogue only occasionally. Otherwise just write the thing in omniscient third person and tell everything instead of letting people talk.

[Ann Mason]

I'm with you on this, Catriona. If I feel the need to edit, I fail to enjoy the book. If I fail to enjoy, I return it for a refund.

Every Single Time

Punctuate THAT

I had no problem with WOLF HALL, however. My complaint about Hilary Mantel is that I'm getting impatient awaiting the third book.

It is much like my impatience with you and the next Dandy Gilver bewk. My green bananas are now all black and greasy.

Love,

Your stalker

[catriona]

It's not just one time though, Dean. I can't imagine that the author, translator, editor, copy editor and proofreader all missed so many.

[Catriona]

Ann, that's why, if I'm reading a book to blurb it on the jacket, I need to read an actual book. At worst a ring-bound print-out. A file or loose pages just makes me reach for my post-it notes.

[Mark]

Augh! Just those examples are driving me crazy.

[Kristopher]

Without more, this really looks like poor editing/translation.

Could it be perhaps that events in the past are not punctuated while present day action is? (Although, I'm confident that you would have broken such a code)

I wonder if it might have something to do with who/how many people are hearing the words?

[Hank Phillippi Ryan]

Yes, exactly, even those examples are hair-ripping..

Is our “problem “ assuming that there’s a logical reason?

[Storyteller Mary]

We used a book of short stories with so many errors that I finally instructed my students to edit their copies as we read. At a conference, I stopped at the publisher's booth and asked about it. Someone had pulled up the wrong file and printed from an early version. We had something similar happen with our students' literary magazine. Technology is so temperamental and perhaps is the culprit here.
There was once an NPR interview of an author who refused to use quotation marks, just didn't like them. His publisher put all dialogue in italics. African-American author, last name White . . . I did get one of his books, and found it distracting to read.

[Catriona]

See now I don't mind *consistent* idiosyncratic speech signalling. Is it Roddy Doyle who uses a dash? It's the lack of any discernible pattern that's bothering me here.