Native knowledge

I need a native Japanese speaker. No problem, right? I live in a whole country full of them. Shall I approach a total stranger and ask them to give me a context-dependent answer to a very specific question that will take significant time to explain? I am sure I would do better asking a friend, but how many times can I go to a friend with my writing questions? They pop up on an almost daily basis. Friends wear out faster than that, and I don’t want to take such advantage of their friendship.

Some of my questions are simple. I asked a friend two weeks ago about a prospective title for my fourth novel. Nothing in English seemed to fit it, and I wondered if the Japanese word I was considering would sound too “non-fiction.” She told me it did not sound strange at all in Japanese, so my novel now has a title. (I will reveal it here when I have further revised and edited the novel.) The same day, I imposed on another friend to help with the proper titles of police detectives in Japan. That turned out to be much more complicated, and I opted to just call them “detective” rather than specify a rank or division. In doing so, I might have simplified too much, but a more detailed answer might have required my friend to read large swaths of the novel, and I felt that would be asking too much.

Even more than novel titles or police detectives, though, I need to understand the Japanese phrasing to which I am lending an English (American) voice. That knowledge would make the writing so much more genuine. But for that, the native Japanese speaker must read the English with great care and judge what fits Japanese speech and attitudes and what needs to be changed. That is more than a casual friend might do. What I need is not quite a writing partner, but at least a colleague, and possibly more than one. Yet I cannot afford to pay them for their time. I could make a trade in terms of English help, but I suspect I would come out ahead in any such exchange.

So what is a nonnative writer to do? Shall I approach the strangers pressed against me in the train? In the near term, I will continue to go to friends with specific questions. It may also be time, though, to find someone who wants to improve their English skills. Working with me would be great English training. I have to figure out how to find that person from among the hundreds of thousands in Tokyo who want to improve their English. It should be simple. So why do I feel so overwhelmed?