We’ve all seen sporadically employed heroes go home to expensive digs. Jessica Jones lives in Manhattan and, like any noir PI, struggles to get paid. Yet somehow she has an apartment that would cost several thousand a month all to herself. Angel does his unpaid rescue work in Los Angeles and gets an entire hotel for his operation. In the recent Picard show, Raffi complains about being poor but lives in an appealing future rustic home in a scenic park.

Sometimes popular stories come with explanations for how the hero can afford to live where they do. For instance, in the Daredevil Netflix show, supposedly Matt Murdock got his gorgeous apartment at a discount because of glowing billboards right outside the windows. But even when these explanations are realistic, storytellers are still choosing to carve out an exception that lets characters live beyond the means of real people in their income bracket.

These unrealistic depictions encourage inequality from two different angles. First, they deny the reality of high housing prices and insufficient wages in many cities. It’s easier to ignore how unaffordable housing is when the lower-income people in our stories all have plenty of space and privacy. Second, they deny meaningful representation to lower-income people. People who share a small apartment with several roommates or, gasp, live in their parent’s basement deserve to see that lifestyle in their stories.

— Five signs your story is classist, Chris Winkle in Mythcreants

What I was seeking by writing first in English and then “translating” into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned “neutral” style that would allow me freer movement. My interest was not in creating a watered-down form of Japanese. I wanted to deploy a type of Japanese as far removed as possible from so-called literary language in order to write in my own natural voice.

— On Translationese, Masatsugu Ono in The Paris Review

Vowels are separated into low, rising, and high categories, which are presumably the only tonal delineations in Igbo. The notable absence of a corresponding “falling” tone, I first thought, creates problems for adapting the script to a language like Yorùbá, where, for example, the ọ̀ in Báyọ̀ carries a “falling” rather than a “low” tone when the sound is properly rendered. But on a second look, I find that what is meant as “rising” here is actually the same as a “mid” tone in Yorùbá. Still, linguists interested in adapting Ńdébé for languages with different tonal patterns than Igbo’s, or with no tone at all, like Fulfulde, have plenty to work with. Igwe-Odunze, who has been working on this writing system for over ten years, has been clear that her original intention was to provide an Igbo script, calling Ńdébé her “gift to every Igbo person.”

— Writing Africa’s Future in New Characters, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sú in Popula

MK: That brings me to another question about the women in your novels. Something that comes up rather often when talking about your work. I’m thinking of the way that women are depicted, the roles they’re assigned.

It’s common for my female friends to say to me, ‘If you love Haruki Murakami’s work so much, how do you justify his portrayal of women?’ The notion being that there’s something disconcerting about the depiction of women in your stories. It irks some people, men and women alike. A common reading is that your male characters are fighting their battles unconsciously, on the inside, leaving the women to do the fighting in the real world.

HM: Really? How so?

MK: It goes beyond whether they’re realistic, or come across as ‘real-life women.’ It has more to do with the roles they play. For example, as we were saying earlier, the woman functions as a kind oracle, in that she’s made to act as a medium of fate.

HM: She takes you by the hand and leads you off somewhere.

— A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself, Mieko Kawakami in LitHub

Du Coudray knew many of her students were illiterate, so she created her book in a way that could be understood whether or not you could read. The colorful images depict the mother’s pelvis and some associated soft tissues and the descending infant, presented as if you were looking through the skin and fat and seeing only the necessary bones and reproductive parts. Also illustrated are the midwife’s hands and how they should be positioned. After being trained by du Coudray and practicing on her machine, the illiterate midwife could consult the book’s illustrations as a reminder of what to do in a particular case. As Schiebinger noted:

— How a French Midwife Solved a Public Health Crisis