Galley Pages Arrive! But I’m Unsure About the Title.

The galley pages arrived today at our new house in Yokohama, where we moved a month ago.

It’s so exciting to see them! But it now brings up a twist on an issue I’ve been struggling with: the title. I was thinking that we should change the title to the book before it actually comes out and hits bookstores. The Good Shufu seems a little too obscure to me sometimes, like, who the hell knows what a shufu is unless they’ve lived in Japan? My editor at Putnam likes the existing title but isn’t opposed to changing it, either. My agent and I are thinking of The Japanese Housewife, because then, with my name (which is obviously not Japanese, since I didn’t take the shogun’s name when I married him) on the cover, there will still be some sense of mystery, like how does someone named Tracy Slater become a Japanese Housewife? (which in a sense is the subtext of the whole book, anyway). Then the shogun–with his Japanese sensibility of prizing literalness and exactness above all else–weighed in, pointing out that calling me a Japanese housewife is technically not correct, since I’m not Japanese. I countered with the fact that our house is Japanese, and that part of the significance of the term housewife is that it’s sort of like being married to the actual house. But then I had the idea of using The Japan Housewife, sort of like a twist on the book title The Paris Wife.

But now that I see the actual galley pages as Putnam has designed them, I’m back to kind of liking The Good Shufu again. Maybe because the galley pages actually make the book seem real after all this time, so I’m feeling attached to them exactly as they are.

Anyone have any thoughts, ideas, or title preferences?