Often a single Chinese word or character could merely approximate the meaning of several spoken Japanese words. The Japanese reader sees two things at once: the kanji with the meaning of "a remote region"—normally pronounced hendo—and the katakana pronunciation of the foreign word "limbo" as furigana next to it. The Japanese language does have more accurate words for "limbo", words with a stronger link to the original catholic meaning of the word, but Murakami decided not to use them.