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jacolinemaes's review
The writing did not particularly grab me and the whole elaborations about for example Wittgenstein just didn't mean too much to me.
lucy_reading_books's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
jakeyjake's review
'I wish there was a way of avoiding descriptive language altogether. How I wish I could just pull it out and hold it out in my hands and say, here, look, it's this. I know that this isn't how our words work.'
I have read a few of Polly Barton's contemporary Japanese fiction translations. Spring Garden, Mikumari, Friendship for Grown-ups, Where the Wild Women Are. I've really loved these books and Barton's renderings have made the experience both possible and enjoyable.
There are more, but here are just three ways in which this book fascinated me.
The first is Barton's account of moving to Japan and learning Japanese, the moments of joy as well as the nauseating and overwhelming feeling that comes in waves. I had what felt like an experience of the same type as Barton (sans the love affair with an older coworker) when moving to Taiwan as a twenty year old and drowning as I tried to learn Chinese and assimilate in many ways into a different culture, but I also felt it when moving to Japan a couple years ago. I feel it still. And Barton captures the feeling well.
The second is Barton's voice and temperament and writing. Her observations and articulations of Japanese language, Japanese social tendencies, and the experience of feeling like an oaf of a foreigner on this archipelago resonated with many parts of my experience and also brought new awareness to how I move and act within this environment. I really like her writing and her way of articulating the complexities of life and friendships and love. She crisscrosses sentiments, loops back on herself, loves and despises in the same sentence, but in a way that is natural and recognizable. She is unsure of herself, wary of her tendencies and seems to be trying throughout to acknowledge her privilege and biases.
The third thing that fascinated me was the contrivance of a book of essays founded on Japanese mimetics with definitions that skewed towards the personal as opposed to the dictionary definition. This creative constraint to what was otherwise a memoir about a complex relationship with Japan - place, language, and people - enriched the reading experience. Many of the mimetics were Japanese words I had heard but didn't understand, or at least didn't know the dictionary meaning of, and now I am sure there are some of these words that I will never say or hear without thinking fondly of one of Barton's essays.
---notes and quotes---
'the Japan I wanted didn't want me.'
'I've made it a policy in my life, more or less, not to talk about philosophy unbidden'
'Caroline made the noise which most foreigners living in Japan develop: not a Japanese noise, but a particular variety of hmm that means, in the face of this total incomprehensibility, I am not going to cling to the necessity of understanding, or I will lose my mind.'
The study referenced on page 171 about Japanese women living in San Francisco that answer questions about professions, wishes, and friends very differently when answering in Japanese vs English....
'feel very ordinary, and have that be okay.'
'I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond... and that... this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in.'
'I wish there was a way of avoiding descriptive language altogether. How I wish I could just pull it out and hold it out in my hands and say, here, look, it's this. I know that this isn't how our words work.'
re Speaking about Japan with others... 'so for the most part I don't really tell people, until they ask, and this is a solution that works, except it makes me less talkative than some other version of me would be.'
re Being alone in your interests... 'the payoff is the richness of the inner world... I'm a geek because I feel that even if it alienates me in the circles in which I move, that seems like a fair price to pay for what I've gained in return.'
'Also you are too large... Even if you are not considerably larger than the majority of Japanese people, you will feel large and ungainly, and you will bump and crash your body into surfaces in a way that you're sure you didn't do back home.'
gu'tari - dead tired
sa'pari wakarani - I cleanly, perfectly do not understand
koro-koro kawaru - changing all the time (negative connotation)
noboru - moving to the city
shi'kuri konai - it doesn't sit right with me
aizuchi - the little interjections while someone is talking (taken from blacksmithing etymologically)
happou bijin - eight directions a beauty, someone who wants to present well to whoever they are with (kind of negative?)
kizukai - showing concern for other people (literally 'usage of one's spirit or energy')
tomodachi ga dekita - literally I was ABLE to make a friend
I have read a few of Polly Barton's contemporary Japanese fiction translations. Spring Garden, Mikumari, Friendship for Grown-ups, Where the Wild Women Are. I've really loved these books and Barton's renderings have made the experience both possible and enjoyable.
There are more, but here are just three ways in which this book fascinated me.
The first is Barton's account of moving to Japan and learning Japanese, the moments of joy as well as the nauseating and overwhelming feeling that comes in waves. I had what felt like an experience of the same type as Barton (sans the love affair with an older coworker) when moving to Taiwan as a twenty year old and drowning as I tried to learn Chinese and assimilate in many ways into a different culture, but I also felt it when moving to Japan a couple years ago. I feel it still. And Barton captures the feeling well.
The second is Barton's voice and temperament and writing. Her observations and articulations of Japanese language, Japanese social tendencies, and the experience of feeling like an oaf of a foreigner on this archipelago resonated with many parts of my experience and also brought new awareness to how I move and act within this environment. I really like her writing and her way of articulating the complexities of life and friendships and love. She crisscrosses sentiments, loops back on herself, loves and despises in the same sentence, but in a way that is natural and recognizable. She is unsure of herself, wary of her tendencies and seems to be trying throughout to acknowledge her privilege and biases.
The third thing that fascinated me was the contrivance of a book of essays founded on Japanese mimetics with definitions that skewed towards the personal as opposed to the dictionary definition. This creative constraint to what was otherwise a memoir about a complex relationship with Japan - place, language, and people - enriched the reading experience. Many of the mimetics were Japanese words I had heard but didn't understand, or at least didn't know the dictionary meaning of, and now I am sure there are some of these words that I will never say or hear without thinking fondly of one of Barton's essays.
---notes and quotes---
'the Japan I wanted didn't want me.'
'I've made it a policy in my life, more or less, not to talk about philosophy unbidden'
'Caroline made the noise which most foreigners living in Japan develop: not a Japanese noise, but a particular variety of hmm that means, in the face of this total incomprehensibility, I am not going to cling to the necessity of understanding, or I will lose my mind.'
The study referenced on page 171 about Japanese women living in San Francisco that answer questions about professions, wishes, and friends very differently when answering in Japanese vs English....
'feel very ordinary, and have that be okay.'
'I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond... and that... this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in.'
'I wish there was a way of avoiding descriptive language altogether. How I wish I could just pull it out and hold it out in my hands and say, here, look, it's this. I know that this isn't how our words work.'
re Speaking about Japan with others... 'so for the most part I don't really tell people, until they ask, and this is a solution that works, except it makes me less talkative than some other version of me would be.'
re Being alone in your interests... 'the payoff is the richness of the inner world... I'm a geek because I feel that even if it alienates me in the circles in which I move, that seems like a fair price to pay for what I've gained in return.'
'Also you are too large... Even if you are not considerably larger than the majority of Japanese people, you will feel large and ungainly, and you will bump and crash your body into surfaces in a way that you're sure you didn't do back home.'
gu'tari - dead tired
sa'pari wakarani - I cleanly, perfectly do not understand
koro-koro kawaru - changing all the time (negative connotation)
noboru - moving to the city
shi'kuri konai - it doesn't sit right with me
aizuchi - the little interjections while someone is talking (taken from blacksmithing etymologically)
happou bijin - eight directions a beauty, someone who wants to present well to whoever they are with (kind of negative?)
kizukai - showing concern for other people (literally 'usage of one's spirit or energy')
tomodachi ga dekita - literally I was ABLE to make a friend
frankie_s's review
4.0
Such an enjoyable book to savour in bite sized pieces on my phone. Loved its sometimes excruciating specificity.
bookly_reads's review
3.0
If a reader isn't interested in at least three of the following, I think this memoir will plod too much for them: Living in (not visiting) Japan; Japanese; translation; teaching English; the sordid, sleazy side of Japan. It is quite long for all that was not discussed: Very little at all about how Polly Barton actually learned Japanese or the timeline of her learning it; not much insight into how literary translation works or how she chooses or advocates for different texts; nor what translation means to her. What was opted for were largely vignettes about her sex life. Almost everything felt overcast, grayed out by a dull and ceaseless sense of cynicism.
Near the very end Barton writes, "For a long time...it has worried me that I don't love Japan...that all I really like is the language." She quickly says, "If I've loved Japanese, I've done so because I've loved the glimpses of people I've caught through it." Yet she's depicted no friendships or relationships that ended in anything other than sorrow. Not one person in this book came off looking good. I felt surprised by how much it motivated me to perhaps write a memoir of my own, or at least to speak more freely about my experiences in Japan. What I have found in this country is not the constant self-consciousness or suppressed boiling rage that Barton describes, but rather a sensation she says Japanese people frequently express upon returning to Japan after travel: "Ho ... was the sound of exhalation, and ho'to suru meant breathing a deep sigh of relief, the reassurance of having your concerns and worries taken away." That sigh of relief is exactly what I feel after coming back from international travel, sitting on the shinkansen heading home with a warm bento in front of me. Phew.
Despite the cynicism, I found this book worth reading for Barton's ideas on language learning. Especially I liked her expansion on the usual takes about how people have different personalities in different languages: "I started to feel that expecting consistency from people in terms of languages was essentially an unfair and contradictory demand. More specifically, it is a contradiction when this demand for what we could call intrapersonal consistency is amalgamated with another demand we make of people: interpersonal consistency, or fitting in. We expect a person to behave the same across different contexts, and we expect people to behave the same as those they are with, and we are mostly blind to the fact that this is a double bind, because different places often have wildly different codes of conduct."
I continue to look forward to Barton's excellent translations. For readers who want a book that really dives into what translation means and how it can be used for activism, I recommend Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters. For readers who want a Japan memoir by another literary translator, I recommend the much-esteemed Donald Keene's Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan.
Near the very end Barton writes, "For a long time...it has worried me that I don't love Japan...that all I really like is the language." She quickly says, "If I've loved Japanese, I've done so because I've loved the glimpses of people I've caught through it." Yet she's depicted no friendships or relationships that ended in anything other than sorrow. Not one person in this book came off looking good. I felt surprised by how much it motivated me to perhaps write a memoir of my own, or at least to speak more freely about my experiences in Japan. What I have found in this country is not the constant self-consciousness or suppressed boiling rage that Barton describes, but rather a sensation she says Japanese people frequently express upon returning to Japan after travel: "Ho ... was the sound of exhalation, and ho'to suru meant breathing a deep sigh of relief, the reassurance of having your concerns and worries taken away." That sigh of relief is exactly what I feel after coming back from international travel, sitting on the shinkansen heading home with a warm bento in front of me. Phew.
Despite the cynicism, I found this book worth reading for Barton's ideas on language learning. Especially I liked her expansion on the usual takes about how people have different personalities in different languages: "I started to feel that expecting consistency from people in terms of languages was essentially an unfair and contradictory demand. More specifically, it is a contradiction when this demand for what we could call intrapersonal consistency is amalgamated with another demand we make of people: interpersonal consistency, or fitting in. We expect a person to behave the same across different contexts, and we expect people to behave the same as those they are with, and we are mostly blind to the fact that this is a double bind, because different places often have wildly different codes of conduct."
I continue to look forward to Barton's excellent translations. For readers who want a book that really dives into what translation means and how it can be used for activism, I recommend Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters. For readers who want a Japan memoir by another literary translator, I recommend the much-esteemed Donald Keene's Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan.