One additional challenge of reading Japanese books is that characters will have names and those might be hard to read.
You see, Japanese names, perhaps not unexpectedly, are written using the same Chinese characters as the rest of the language.
Fun and Names
Unfortunately though, it’s not uncommon for characters to be read differently when used in names compared to regular words!
For instance, 本 (book, origin) and 天 (heaven) are usually read “hon” and “ten”, respectively, but when used in names they are read “moto” and “ama”.
Actually, doing a bit of research those seem to be the original Japanese kun’yomi readings of the words, but those are words that pretty much always use the Chinese-origin on’yomi reading outside of names. (I wrote a bunch about on’yomi and kun’yomi here)
As an example of this, a common Japanese surname is 山本. 山 means “mountain” and is read “yama”, so together this becomes “Yamamoto”.
Reading Books
So, one thing you run into when reading Japanese books is that unless it’s set in a foreign country or a fantasy world or something, people are probably going to have Japanese names.
If you’re reading a book intended for kids or teenagers, then you’re probably in luck, because then the names will probably have reading instructions in hiragana (so-called furigana, it looks like this: 山本).
That’s only going to be the first time the name appears though! After that you’re expected to either learn it or just check back every time it appears!
If the book’s intended for adults though, you’re probably just out of luck because if the name is common, or if the author just don’t feel like it, they won’t have furigana at all! If you really want to know how the names are read you’ll have to google it!
Only many names can be read multiple ways, so you still won’t be sure!
Unexpected Allies
This was the case in Kafka on the Shore. One of the characters are named 佐伯, and looking this name up in a dictionary, I thought it might be pronounced Saiki.
As those who have read the book will know, however, there’s a character called Nakata who can’t read or write.
In the Japanese version this is illustrated by him using very few kanji in his speech, names and difficult words being written in kana instead!
This is pretty neat in and of itself, and a way that’s pretty much unique to Japanese. It’s very often used when kids are speaking, since they haven’t learned to write the characters yet.
This meant that when Nakata mentions 佐伯, he says it in katakana: サエキ (Saeki). Thus thanks to his illiteracy I was able to learn that I’d been reading that name wrong!
And I thought that was pretty cool.
Adventures in Language Self-Study 