Second Edition: The Japan Lights

Thanks to many of you lovely people buying it, The Japan Lights has gone into a second edition. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that there is a different quote on the cover, and there are a few tweaks inside too. Nothing major, it doesn’t suddenly have a twist ending or a chapter that brings it up to 2024. Instead, it now has fewer typos of the through/though variety.

No matter how many times something is edited and proofread, mistakes will remain. We are all only human after all (no AI was used in the making of this book) and therefore fallible. Besides, you try reading the same book a dozen times in a row after spending years writing it without occasionally zoning out and missing an errant comma. A second edition is a chance to put right the things I noticed were wrong the moment the file was sent to the printer or when I stood up in front of people and began reading it aloud.

The two most egregious errors were, in ascending order:

From Niigata I went west to Aizu-Wakamatsu, camping by a lake near the city…

Nobody—and I’m looking at you, Japan-based readers and Japan experts—nobody noticed that if you go west from Niigata you don’t get to Aizu-Wakamatsu unless you circumnavigate the entire globe. Obviously, I meant east. I do know the cardinal points, it was just a glitch in my brain that once on paper slipped by every single time. Incidentally, I’m confident in saying that no one noticed because no one brought it to my attention and if the internet has one purpose, it’s to direct people’s attention to their mistakes.

Now, embarrassingly, that was on page one. Page one! You open the book while standing in the book store, glance down the first page and straight off, the author doesn’t know where Fukushima is! Well, it gets worse.

On the cover—the cover!—the original quote was misattributed. I still don’t know how this happened, nor how no one involved in the production noticed, myself in particular, but the line

A rollicking road trip around Japan

was attributed to Suzanne Kamata when in fact it was written by Amy Chavez. Both writers very kindly provided me with blurbs, both of which are reproduced inside the book, and correctly attributed. Somewhere in the process of putting the book together there was a cut and paste error and Amy’s line was attributed to Suzanne. It was actually Suzanne who drew the mistake to my attention in a presentation on the art of blurbing at the Japan Writers’ Conference. I suppose a bit of public humiliation is fair enough in this instance. I have apologised personally to both writers for the error already and now that it has been corrected perhaps I can stop cringing every time I see the cover. The first edition with the misquote may one day even be seen as a collectors’ item, much like the Australian edition of The Only Gaijin in the Village which uses the wrong kanji for Minori’s family name in the dedication. Oops. Fallible, as I said.

Now there is a lovely line from Kris Kosaka’s Japan Times review, and Fukushima is once more in its correct place, east of Niigata. Much thanks to Tippermuir for allowing me to make things right. I’m taking bets on how long it will take me to find another mistake.

If you want a copy of the second edition, it’s probably best to buy direct from the publisher as it will take time for the first editions in stock at Amazon et al to sell out completely.

PS, all bets are off. It took me about fifteen seconds after finishing this post. No biggie though, just an unnecessary full stop. Ho hum.