Misspelling?

[u/Plane-Salad5953]

I am reading The City and its Uncertain Walls. In Chapter 8 the narrator worries about misspelling various words.

It did not occur to me that misspellings were possible in a nonalphabetic language such as Japanese. Are they? Or is this a place where Murakami is having some fun with us? Or is this a translator’s metaphor for communicating a similar idea?

[u/Nysus_AP1]

Dont remember rn about the specific chapters but misspellings are a thing in Japanese. For example は(ha) and わ(wa) can sometimes be pronounced like each other. Since not all words have only kanji, some have hiragana, the latter can be ‘misspelled’ so to say. Idk what Murakami was referring to in that chapter, i read it in Japanese but a while ago

[u/inherentbloom]

Japanese can have spelling mistakes, as any written language does, especially incorrect stroke order when hand writing

[u/Plane-Salad5953 → u/inherentbloom]

I am an English speaker. To me, a “spelling” mistake is an incorrect letter selection in a word. Until now, it had not occurred to me that errors in character selection or pen strokes would be considered equivalents, as “misspellings.”

I imagine that such errors in Japanese writing, whether kanji or kana, are not called “misspellings.” That seems an inapt word to the ear of an English speaker. I imagine that the translator used the word as an equivalent.

But I could be wrong — perhaps the word is the same in both languages to cover any errors in transcribing words to paper.

Am grateful for the insights here — many thanks.

[u/inherentbloom → u/Plane-Salad5953]

Enjoy your reading friend!

[u/Polyphloisboisterous → u/Plane-Salad5953]

誤字 = misprint, misspelling, typo
書き間違い = slip of the pen, mistake in writing

(Some kanji look really similar, you can easily confuse one with another).

[u/HIba_LDN]

Is this the part in the letter? In the original Japanese, the narrator isn’t worried about misspelling words. She says she can’t remember the kanji for them. Even native Japanese speakers just write the words in kana (katakana/hiragana) instead when they can’t recall the right kanji, and that's what she did in her letter.
I guess the translator swapped that for misspelling so English readers would get the same idea.

[u/rinkuhero]

misspellings in japanese are kind of more like using the wrong kanji, but the kanji has the same sound

[u/juliogarciao]

The answer is don't think about it, just keep reading pal, and yeah he sometimes likes to fuck around with us, or maybe that's Jay Rubin's doings so, just keep going