I’ve talked about writing historical fiction — about trying to make it as exciting as fantasy, while keeping it as accurate as possible.

I also try to make my writing accessible, while giving a sense of how Japan in the late sixteenth century looked through the eyes of Risuko and her friends.

One of the choices that I made was to translate all of the place names. So T��t��mi no kuni becomes Serenity Province, Hamamatsu becomes Pineshore, Edo become Estuary, and so on.

Why did I do that?

Well, the first reason was to make the world of the books as clear as possible for non-Japanese readers.

Since many of the characters in the books were historical figures, I didn’t want to mess with their names, though many of them have meanings in Japanese. Calling Takeda-sama ���Lord Warfield��� would have been more confusing than helpful, it seemed to me, whether the reader had heard of the famous warlord or not. And if I was going to keep some of the personal names untranslated, I needed to keep all of them.

Also, having everyone who used my main character���s proper name Murasaki refer to her as ���Purple��� would have been weird. (I do sometimes translate her nickname Risuko when someone���s making a joke about her squirrel-like habits.)

That left the Japanese names of towns, provinces, and such. Since all but the second book, Bright Eyes, involve Risuko and her friends traveling across central Japan, there were already plenty of those. I decided that translating the place names made a lot of sense.

To someone not familiar with Japanese geography, language, or culture, it seems to me Worth Province is much more evocative than Kai no kuni.

The other major reason I translated the place names: they wouldn���t have seemed exotic to Risuko and the other characters.

And I wanted to save the exotic for the true foreigners in the books like the Portuguese boy Jolalo (Jo��o) and his Irish friend Eyogoshei (Aidh Og O���Shea).

The name Ky��to, the city from which the emperor ruled, means simply Main Capital. When the Tokugawa moved the government northeast to Edo (Estuary), they changed that city���s name to T��ky�� (Eastern Capital).

Mochizuki, the name of the place where I set Lady Chiyome���s school for kunoichi, translates as Full Moon. Mochizuki is a real village in the Japanese Alps ��� though Mochizuki Chiyome���s estate comes completely from my imagination. You���ll notice that I left her clan name untranslated.

Many of the place names were fairly straightforward descriptions. Mikawa no kuni��� Three Rivers Province ��� had three major rivers coursing through it. Hamamatsu (Pineshore) lies on the coast of Japan, and was surrounded by pine woods.

It���s easy, writing a story set in a country foreign to most of your readers, to indulge in the seeming strangeness of the names and customs, but to the people in the story, none of those things are strange.

I wasn���t always able to find a direct translation that worked.

T��t��mi translates directly as Eastern (T��) Serenity (T��mi). When I called it that in early drafts of Risuko, one of my beta readers looked at the map and asked in confusion, ���Then where���s Western Serenity?���

So for simplicity���s sake, plain Serenity it became.

In some cases, I couldn���t find a clear translation of the place name. It didn���t refer to a geographic feature (Pineshore, Estuary, etc). And the name didn���t translate directly from spoken Japanese ��� the translation was simply the name. The translation for Shinano no kuni, for example, is Shinano Province. And if I was going translate some place names, I needed to translate them all.

I was reduced to looking at the written form of the name.

Japanese proper nouns ��� personal and place names ��� are generally written not in phonetic hiragana or katakana characters, but in kanji ideograms, Chinese characters that may be pronounced in multiple ways and may carry multiple meanings.

Shinano, for example, was written with two kanji characters: ������

Well, translate that from Japanese and you get��� Shinano.

But translate the characters separately and you get Trust (���) Body (���).

Huh.

That didn���t say much to me.

So I went back to the ideograms��� original meanings in Chinese and found Dark (���) Letter (���). I thought that was a wonderfully evocative name for the war-torn province that was home to Lady Chiyome���s mysterious school for spies, bodyguards, and assassins.

Translating (loosely) from the kanji gave me names like Rising Tail, Old Wood, Picnic Lake, Mount Wisdom, and so forth.

I do my best as a writer to portray the world through which Risuko and her friends move as they would have seen it.

They live in a turbulent Japan nearly half a millennium in the past.

I don���t. Neither do my readers.

By making the everyday settings as ordinary as possible, I hope I���ve allowed the extraordinary events Risuko lives through ��� and makes happen ��� to shine out.

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