Alright, so I've been plugging away at my novel, but I've run into a reoccurring snag. This story takes place in 1585 Japan. For the life of me, I can't figure out if I should include honorifics. If I don't use them, I feel like I lose some of the verbal nuances between characters, but if I do, it might be too steep for new readers. I've seen it done both ways in published works. I'm just not sure which is the most popular and immersive for the general audience?
In addition to this, I'm hoping to release this as an e-book, but I'm uncertain of how glossaries or footnotes work with them since I'm more of a paperback person. Are either of these tools easily accessible in the e-book format?
(Preface: My favorite book in the world is
Dune, which completely makes up most of it's titles and honorifics and forces the reader to go to the back-of-the-book index every third page or so.)
I'd like to throw up a solid
"It depends on the type of book you've been writing so far." What audience are you writing for, and what's the content of your book like? You're choosing 16th century Japan, so your book probably has a crapton of historical details and triviality; since your source material already has a lot of things you'll have to explain, you can probably add in honorifics without asking too much of your audience.
Secondly, as someone who's had experience translating between a language that
does have honorifics and a language that doesn't, I'd like to give the opposing viewpoint for Jorick's (valid) points on nuance.
Honorifics add an extra layer of depth that the english language simply can't convey. For an example that I think runs parallel,
"¿Está bien?" and
"Estás bien?" both mean
"Are you well?" However,
está is used extremely formally, and
estás would be used with a friend. To someone with knowledge of spanish (and, in your case, for people who have knowledge of Japanese honorifics), this adds a layer of depth you wouldn't normally get. Since you'll be feasibly introducing honorifics somewhere in the book, either in the index or the glossary of the e-book, ain't no reason not to go for extra depth in your book.
As another example, since I can finally use my useless trivia and it's awesome you're doing this, is through how the english audience believes that
JJBA: Vento Aureo is the weakest of a series of a larger manga character-wise, while people who read the Italian, French and Japanese translations all really liked it. It's all 'cause'a the importance of the thing you stated before: verbal nuances. A huge part of the manga was how the characters slowly grew closer and used less and less formal language to address each other, and this interpersonal nuance was lost upon the english audiences. In your novel, honorifics will be able to deepen audience understanding for how characters feel about each other; of course, there's always gonna be people that this sort of depth completely glosses over, but I'd doubt that kinda person would be around more for the story than the characters anyways.