Tangentially related: there's a good recent Japanese film, available with English subtitles, called The Great Passage. It includes two intertwined love stories

Tangentially related: there's a good recent Japanese film, available with English subtitles, called The Great Passage. It includes two intertwined love stories, one between a man and a woman and one between two men and their magnum opus, a new comprehensive Japanese dictionary, which takes decades to complete. Highly recommended if, for nothing else, a window into why at least some salarymen feel like their sacrifices are worth it. The film also explicitly asks and answers the question of why a publisher would fund a decades-long quest to produce a work with very limited commercial appeal (which this article might set you to wondering about): they're willing to subsidize certain prestige projects with rent from being in the elite fraternity of Japanese publishing houses, and capability of publishing new dictionaries is a status marker for that. There are limits to this largesse and they come a key subplot to the movie.