When I saw the title and description of this book, I was extremely excited to be able to think about translation and gender in a Japanese context. While I translate from Japanese to English nearly exclusively, there's still a lot to learn from translators and linguists who specialize in English to Japanese translation.

The author actually brings up a lot of important points about how translation can introduce new words permanently into a language and how translation choices can impact the understanding readers may have of a character's gender. Well this second part isn't exactly new news since translation obviously impacts how information is presented due to varying language and cultural restraints, it was interesting to see it from an exclusively gender-based perspective. It was also extremely shocking to see just how feminized female characters are in books translated into Japanese.

The problem with the book though is that after that really interesting chapter, half the book was dedicated to talking about a very specific feminist book from English. It's a famous book and it's really important, but the book kind of became an analysis of that book exclusively after that, which was a bit of a let down for me personally.

Either way I'm glad I read the book, and I learned a lot about perceptions of gendered language in Japanese and have a new list of books to look up to learn more about it as a result. So I would say it's overall a win!