7,19 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Why Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hi'sori, the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to mote-mote, the sound of becoming a small-town movie star, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, recounting her life as an outsider in Japan. Irreverent, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is an exceptional debut about the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
‘Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence – Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let’s call it a slant adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes.’
— Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
‘This book: a portrait of a young woman as language-learner, as becoming-translator, as becoming-writer, in restless search of her life. It is about non-understanding, not-knowing, vulnerability, harming and hurt; it is also about reaching for others, transformative encounters, unexpected intimacies, and testing forms of love. It is a whole education. It is extraordinary. I was completely bowled over by it.’
— Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art
‘Fifty Sounds explodes the redundancy of the phrase “I’m learning a language,” showing us that the experience is more akin to relearning reality and who we are in it. Barton writes of being “souped” in the sounds of speech and a new place, but also in what is not said or written. She beautifully recreates the monumental intuition and exposure required to immerse oneself in a new mode of living, and the quantum levels of attention required to translate literature. It chimes and charms, a resounding wonder about identity, communication and love.’
— Jen Calleja, author of I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For
‘Polly Barton is a brilliant, learned and daring writer and Fifty Sounds is a magnificent book. Through her eddying philosophical vignettes, Barton creates a unified work of extraordinary wisdom and vitality.’
— Joanna Kavenna, author of Zed
‘It seems fitting, somehow, that this marvelous study of the expansiveness and precarity of human communication is so woefully ill-served by a literal description of its contents. As in all great works of genreless nonfiction, all of the subjects Fifty Sounds is putatively “about” – Japan, translation, the philosophy of language – are inspired pretexts for the broad-spectrum exercise of an associatively vital and thrillingly companionable mind. This is a gracious, surprising, and very funny debut from a writer of alarming talent.’
— Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
‘I loved this book and learned a lot from it, especially about subjects I thought I knew about – place, displacement, language-doubles and the double-selves we have when we move between our languages. It’s not just just that it’s winningly-written, insightful and formally exciting, though that would be enough. It’s that it’s genuinely gripping: forthright, inventive, personal, and fizzing with ideas.’
— Patrick McGuinness, author of Other People’s Countries
‘This must be the first time I’ve been certain I was going to love a book before I’d even finished reading the contents pages, and Fifty Sounds totally sustains that early promise. I’ve never read a more revealing or thrilling exposition of the ways encountering and befriending a new language aren’t simply a mechanical process, but an unlikely experience of circumstance and relationships, a learning experience that is not just rationally developed, but viscerally lived.’
— Daniel Hahn, translator of José Eduardo Agualusa and winner of the IMPAC in 2017
FIFTY SOUNDS
POLLY BARTON
‘Well, how do I know? — If that means “Have I reasons?” the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe
‘The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).’ — Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
‘(language experiences orgasm upon touching itself )’ — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, tr. Richard Howard
Contents
Preface
It’s my lunch break and I’m being serenaded by a lime-green owl. ‘Did you know!’ the owl calls as it swaggers jauntily across my line of sight, ‘There are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than there are people learning foreign languages in the entire US public school system!’
The year is 2019, and I will soon be travelling to Italy for the summer, which is why I have found myself being taught Italian vocabulary and grammar, along with a variety of trivia, by this digital apparition, the mascot of the language-learning app Duolingo. I learned of Duolingo’s existence only recently, but it transpires to be phenomenally popular, offering courses in 23 languages to 300 million users worldwide. Initially, there seems to me something faintly Japanese about the wing-gestures made by the mascot, Duo, but I check and discover that the company originated in the States, as I suppose I should have guessed from the trivia-nugget above; it’s the brainchild of Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, born out of the idea that ‘free education will really change the world’.
Duo’s screech is unvoiced but it sticks in my head nonetheless, whooping and half-demented, Disney-villainesque: Did you know! Did you know! Did you know! And no, as it happens, I didn’t know. At least the first time big-eyed big-eyelashed Duo addressed me, I didn’t know. By the tenth time it pops up on my screen I’ve begun to feel very familiar with this particular bit of trivia, and I also know something else: each run-in with it leaves me feeling a little unclean, in a way I can’t really account for.
As the fact I am spending my lunchtimes with Duo reveals, I am not entirely sceptical of its methods, and I don’t find the comparison drawn between public-school language education and the Duolingo model outrageous, at least prima facie. Unlike a lot of language-focused applications, Duolingo is not devoid of audio content; it has clips of real people talking, and invites its users to speak phrases into the microphone, so they are at least interacting with how the language actually sounds, and feels in the mouth. While its level-unlocking structure drawn from the world of gaming means that users might be focusing on strategies to pass rather than to truly master, the same accusation could be levelled at language education in schools: there is, in short, a lot of hoop-jumping. You learn the language the way that the exam boards or the green owl want you to, but it is, at least, a start. If it makes language education accessible and enjoyable to those who might not otherwise have access to it, then that is surely a good thing.
So why, then, does Duo’s factoid bring me such a sense of unease, and why do I begrudge his hooting pride? It dawns on me that the source of my discomfort resides, utterly unreasonably, with his use of the word ‘learning’. I say unreasonably, because I recognize that this word is used legitimately to cover a whole range of activities undertaken with varying degrees of intensity. The generous, rational part of me can see there is no cause to bar people from calling their five or twenty minutes a day on Duolingo ‘learning a language’. But even as I have this thought, another part of me stamps its foot resentfully, the kind of foot-stamp that ends up hurting the stamper, and declares that the world has turned its eyes from what is real and true. This part wants to say its piece. It wants wider recognition that there is another, far less stable form of learning – a radium to Duolingo’s lurid neon.
The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover; it is streams of sounds pouring in and striking off scattershot associations in a manner so chaotic and out of control that you are taken by the desire to block your ears – except that even when you do block your ears, your head remains an echo chamber. The language learning that fascinates me is not livening your commute and scoring a dopamine hit with another ‘5 in a row! Way to go!’ Rather, it is never getting it right, hating yourself for never getting it right, staking your self-worth on getting it right next time. It is getting it right and feeling as if your entire existence has been validated. It is the kind of learning that makes you think: this is what I must have experienced in infancy except I have forgotten it, and at times it occurs to you that you have forgotten it not just because you were too young when it happened but because there is something so utterly destabilizing about the experience that we as dignified, shame-fearing humans are destined to repress it. It is a learning that doesn’t know goals or boundaries, and which is commonly known as ‘immersive’. The image that springs to mind is a lone figure wading gallantly into the sea, naked, without a single swimming lesson behind them.
As you’ll have inferred from my self-righteous tone, I speak from experience. ‘Immersion’ is exactly what I did when I went to Japan, although probably it’s more correct to say that immersion is what happened to me. If I’d known what I was getting myself into before I went out there I may well not have had the nerve to go, and knowing this, I don’t go around patting myself on the back for having done it. At least, I don’t believe that I do, until I’m confronted with the pride of a green owl, and then I realize that there is some part of me that wants for this experience of mine to be recognized. Not only is this part not rational – it’s furious with all the goal-driven rationality of the commute-friendly app.
In particular, what I’m burning to tell Duo is the following: Did you know! When you immerse yourself in a very different language as a total beginner, not only do you not have goals! You also have no system within which to conceptualize what those objectives could be – discounting, that is, overarching goals like ‘learning to read’, or ‘becoming fluent’, which themselves start to seem less and less meaningful the more you poke around beneath their smooth surfaces!
Immersion in a foreign language is a bombardment of sounds, until you decide that you are going to actually do this thing and learn, and then it becomes a bombardment of imperatives: learn this, learn this, learn this. Just start from the basics, sings a voice in your head as you are tossed around in the waves of incomprehensibility. Yet as you continue to live in a language you don’t know, it becomes increasingly obvious to you how much this category of ‘basics’ could theoretically encompass. Greetings and everyday interactions are of course basic, and there is always something embarrassing about not knowing basic forms of verbs. Everyone knows numbers are incredibly basic, as are colours, clothes, the subjects you study at school, animals, anything to do with weather, and adjectives for describing people. In fact, we could go ahead and say that every object is also basic, and there is something particularly alarming when you don’t know how to say the first words you would have learned in your language(s) as a child: teddy, buggy, shoelace. And then there is the most fundamental-seeming vocabulary of all: abstract nouns, like justice, friendship, pleasure, evil, and vanity.
If the language in question has a writing system different from that you know, then even mastering ‘the basics’ of the spoken language isn’t enough, because a whole new category of basics awaits you in the form of the written one. In particular, Japanese is the gift that keeps on giving in this regard, having as it does three different scripts: two phonetic ones, katakana and hiragana (collectively known as kana), with forty-six characters apiece; and then the kanji, or characters of Chinese origin, 2,136 of which have been officially deemed ‘in common usage’. Which means, there is never any shortage of basics to trip you up and convince you of how little you know.
Last week (this is true), I had to look up a kanji that turned out to mean ‘owl’. It wasn’t entirely new to me; I’d learned it somewhere down the line and then forgotten it, but the experience still brought me to my knees with shame. Yes, it’s not a commonly used character, but then I’m supposed to be a translator. I should know something as basic as ‘owl’.
As I sat staring down in despair at the owl kanji, wishing my self from two minutes ago had only managed to remember it, wondering how I could have failed to recognize a legless bird on a tree, I recalled without warning an incident from long ago, back when I’d been learning Japanese for a little over two years and had just found a job at a small Japanese publishing company in London. One day I glanced up to see O, a senior employee, approaching my desk. In his hand were two of the slips that employees had to submit when requesting or reporting time off, and as he moved closer, I saw they were the ones I had recently filled in.
‘Polly-chan,’ he said, pulling up a chair beside me, looking at me in a way that managed to be both conspiratorial and didactic, ‘Let’s talk. Your kanji usage is all over the place.’
‘Oh,’ was all I had the wherewithal to reply. I felt simultaneously apprehensive about what was to come, and flattered that he was taking the time to school me individually.
‘Sometimes you write them perfectly, and sometimes they’re totally off.’
As he spoke, O’s eyes drifted to my computer monitor, around whose edge I’d stuck up a number of kanji written out on small post-it notes. I remember that one of them was ‘crow’: the same as ‘bird’, but with the stroke symbolizing the eye missing. This had cropped up during one of the translations I’d been asked to do the previous week, and I hadn’t known it.
‘You don’t need that,’ O said, pointing at the crow. He began to hover his finger around the other post-its, informing me which I did and didn’t need. Then, with hawk-like focus, his attention moved back to the offending slip.
‘Look,’ he said, his finger thumping the desk. ‘Look what you’ve written here. This is missing a radical. You can’t just miss parts of kanji like that, because then they mean something else entirely. You’re trying to write “problem” and this says “mon”.’
Maybe sensing that I was struggling a bit to keep up, he looked me right in the eye, and enunciated in English of a crispness that bordered on hostility, ‘“Mon” means “gate”. You’ve written “gate”.’
I looked down to see that he was, of course, right. My slip read something that might be rendered in English: ‘Unforeseen absence due to health gate.’
Even ten years on, this episode feels as real and close as it ever did, and I can’t resist the idea that, in some way, it still encapsulates my status in relation to Japan. To wit, I am always writing the gate. It’s a huge, lofty gate of the kind found in temples; I stand by its posts, passing in and out momentarily, variously welcomed, frowned at, and ousted by its keepers. Even when I’m inside, I’m perpetually aware how quickly I could again be pushed out, that I could find some basic item inexplicably missing from my knowledge. Sometimes I ask myself if things would be different if I’d done my undergraduate degree in Japanese, or a proper language course, or a PhD – if I’d entrusted the responsibility for accumulating the basics to a system larger than myself in some way. The answer, I think, is slightly. I imagine I would feel at least slightly less liable to have the rug pulled from underneath me, to realize suddenly that I’m on the wrong side of the gate.
For when learning takes a primarily autodidactic form, mastering something is dependent on noticing it, or having it pointed out to you. To the extent that you’re not consulting other sources, obtaining an accurate view of the inventory of items to be learned is all down to exposure, and your ability to perceive that exposure, which is particularly relevant when we’re speaking about aspects of language and culture radically different from anything we’ve experienced before. We can notice them, be outraged or intrigued by them, exoticize them, and therefore hoover them up, bump them to the top of our rota – or, else, we can fail to see them really, fail to appreciate them in their fullness. We are too busy thrashing around in the waves, gulping, spitting, and trying to stay afloat.
When it comes to Japanese, another possible candidate for inclusion in a list of ‘basics’ is its vast range of onomatopoeia – or mimetics, as this area of the language is often referred to. I say possible because the question of whether or not onomatopoeia should rightfully be seen as ‘basic’ could be debated endlessly, but suffice for the moment to say that, as someone approaching the language with a profoundly English mindset, I didn’t register it as such. Indeed, in a way I now find pretty embarrassing, it took an encounter with a dictionary to convince me of the prominent, and in some way fundamental role it plays in the language.
The dictionary, lying on the desk of a very stylish colleague, and one of the most attractively designed books I’d ever seen, was three fingers thick. At my colleague’s encouragement, I opened it up to find it full of illustrations and, bizarrely enough, a lot of photographs of Western-looking children. These accounted for maybe a finger’s worth of pages, but that still left two fingers’ worth. Two fingers’ worth, so maybe 250 pages, of Japanese mimetic language and its various usages for native speakers, laid out dictionary-style in the order of the Japanese syllabary.
I would like to pause for a moment here and spell out briefly for the unacquainted what this order consists in, because although culturally its function is analogous to that of the alphabet, the detailed picture is somewhat different – inevitably so, when we consider that its component parts, the kana, represent not individual consonants or vowels like the letters of the Greek or Roman alphabets, but longer, rhythmic units of speech called morae. The closest equivalent to morae we have in English are syllables – and indeed the kana are often referred to as syllabaries – but there is an important discrepancy, namely that a long Japanese syllable – tō or kyō – can be composed of two or three morae, so a two-syllable word such as ‘Tōkyō’ or ‘happi’ may be made up of three or four kana [to-u-kyo-u, ha-p-pi].
The system by which the kana are ordered – modelled on the phonology of another moraic language, Sanskrit – is known as the gojūon. This translates literally as ‘fifty sounds’, and is a reference to the 5 x 10 grid used to display the characters that each symbolize a particular sound. The five vowel sounds found in the top row – a, i, u, e, o – are then transposed in the second ‘K’ row to become ka, ki, ku, ke, ko; in the third ‘S’ row to become sa, shi, su, se, so; and so on, for a total of ten rows. There is also an anomalous addition: the character ‘n’, added significantly after the origin of the table, is the only kana that doesn’t end in a vowel sound, and cannot be used to begin words. To complicate things even further, this late addition which floats freely at the bottom of the table is not the only deviation from the mathematical accuracy that a name like ‘fifty sounds’ might suggest. In fact, the fifty sounds have never actually numbered fifty: the sounds ‘yi’ or ‘wu’ never existed; ‘ye’ disappeared in the tenth century; and ‘wi’ and ‘we’ were made obsolete in the 1946 script reform, substituted by the sounds ‘i’ and ‘e’ from which they had become phonetically indistinguishable. In its current incarnation, the gojūon comprises forty-six elements, as follows:
To return, then, to the dictionary, the first page listed words in the order of the fifty sounds: aan, atafuta, a’kerakan, a’sari, anguri, a’pua’pu, ahaha… These days, I could tell you what most of these words mean; back then, I recognized one. What mattered, though, was not how much I did or didn’t understand, but rather the realization this encounter brought about. I’m not delusional after all, it ran, all those individual instances of onomatopoeia which have intrigued and niggled at me are part of some recognized holistic phenomenon.
I have no intention of implying that sound-symbolism is in and of itself a unique feature of Japanese, or somehow incomprehensible to us as Anglophones; on the contrary, English has a healthy array of sound-symbolic vocabulary, ranging from words like ‘oink’, ‘splash’, and ‘boom’, which conform to the dictionary definition of onomatopoeia as those words emulating the noise of sound-producing phenomena, to more indirect or borderline examples like ‘zig-zag’, ‘trudge’, and ‘dilly-dally’, which emulate the qualities of things they represent, as opposed to their sounds. In the case of ‘dilly-dally’, for example, the ‘d’ sounds connote lethargy and heaviness, while the reduplicated structure suggests a drawn-out quality, both of which in some way prop up the word’s meaning of dawdling. When we begin to tune into this aspect of our language, we find that even verbs which would not commonly be registered as mimetic, like ‘trudge’ and ‘slip’, do in fact transpire to have sound-symbolic properties.
Nevertheless, the onomatopoeic landscape within Japanese differs from that of English in two main ways. Firstly, there is a discrepancy when it comes to numbers. Although exact quantities of mimetic vocabulary are hard to calculate and compare across languages, it is generally acknowledged that the size of the Japanese onomatopoeic vocabulary surpasses that of Indo-European languages by three to five times, and is by some reckonings the largest in the world after Korean. Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, is the difference in the way that mimetics are categorized; like many other languages, Japanese differs from English in acknowledging a specialized class of onomatopoeic words, and its mimetics take one of a number of several specific patterns, which for the most part make them immediately recognizable as such. As a result, in Japanese there is a far clearer sense of which words are and aren’t onomatopoeic, and much more of a social precedent for verbally naming and acknowledging the use of mimetic language, which forms a marked contrast to the blurred and mostly undiscussed boundary lines of English onomatopoeia. There is also a clear and well-understood distinction between giongo, where words mimic sounds, and gitaigo, where words are mimicking non-auditory properties.
These factors go some way to explaining why it took me a while to focus in on Japanese onomatopoeia, and why I was predisposed to underestimate the importance of its place in the language. Yet the more I read about Japanese mimetics, the more I came to understand that I wasn’t alone in this. Japanese mimetics have been largely overlooked in the field of linguistics and related scholarship, part of a pattern of marginalization that can be traced as far back as a declaration by Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics and semiology, that onomatopoeic elements of language are ‘marginal phenomena’ which are ‘never organic elements of a linguistic system’, and ‘far fewer than is generally believed’. Uncomfortably enough, my assumptions made me an unwitting part of a whole movement of Westerners, striding boldly forth with their unchallenged assumptions that the unknown will conform to the pattern of what they are used to, and riding roughshod over any evidence to the contrary.
Indeed, it is really only in the last few decades that linguistics scholars have begun to kick back against this marginalization, mounting the case that, unfortunately, one cannot magic away the thornier elements of language simply because they do not conform to the neat rules upon which one has decided for one’s system. Japanese linguistics scholars of recent years have provided an eloquent and impassioned argument for the affective, somatic aspects of Japanese mimetics, which mean they cannot be analysed purely in terms of their semantic dimension. For those who have grown up with them, argues Sotarō Kita, one such linguist, the ability of mimetics to evoke vivid, affect-rich ‘images’ of an experience, to place listener and speaker alike immediately ‘at the scene’, is beyond doubt. ‘The question,’ he adds, ‘is how to characterize this feeling.’
Although admittedly not of a kind which would satisfy any linguistics scholar, we could hazard one characterization of this feeling by turning to the very mimetics whose effect we’re trying to account for. Maza-maza, we might say in an attempt to describe the impressions they leave – the sound of something seeming very vivid. I could translate what my dictionary says about the word: ‘The state of a certain occurrence being distinctly perceived in the mind’, or else give some examples of the English translations of sentences containing maza-maza which I find online: ‘a vivid reminder of the fact that’, ‘clearly brought home to someone that’, ‘graphic statement’, etc. I could try and explain why it is that I hear the word in my best friend’s voice, the voice of various characters in novels I have read and translated, the voices of a hundred different people, and why I can hear where the emphasis falls when it is to be especially emphasized. I could attempt to describe why it now feels to me that this sort of onomatopoeic language is where the beating heart of Japanese lies. Why, from a certain point in time, I ditched my previous ambition to master the bewilderingly complex web of honorifics that even native speakers routinely get wrong, and which always seemed to distinguish hardcore Japanophiles from those whom Japanese society merely humoured, and set my sights instead on being able to use mimetic language properly, naturally. Why, to the extent that I still have a linguistic ambition, it is to speak the kind of Japanese which takes mimetics as its beacon: a Japanese of gesturing and storytelling, of searing description, of embodied reality.
Leafing through my first dictionary of onomatopoeia, identical to that of my colleague, I felt with a vivid certainty that my whole project of learning Japanese was doomed. I’ve misused mimetics and felt burning embarrassment; I’ve used them correctly and felt great satisfaction, and then later, a delayed sort of burning embarrassment, for being a smart-arse. I have found them ridiculous, adorable, intuitive, counterintuitive, enlightening, profound. Now when I look back at the course of my language learning, they lie there studding my path like waymarkers, tracing the course of my evolution. My relationship with the Japanese language has, in general, been an affect-driven one, but there is something about my journey with Japanese mimetics that feels unique.
Throughout what follows, Japanese mimetics will serve not only as a specific linguistic phenomenon, but also the symbol of a particular view of language. In this understanding, language is something we learn with our bodies, and through our body of experiences; where semantics are umbilically tied to somatics, where our experiences and our feelings form a memory palace; where words are linked to particular occasions, particular senses, which gradually fade the more practised we become but remain there nonetheless in memory, forming a personal genealogy of the tongues we speak. In some way, it represents the opposite of the textbooks, memorized lists of verbs, and smartphone apps that come to many people’s minds at the mention of the words ‘language learning’.
Since it is inseparable from the bodies that speak it and the feelings that drive it, this form of language does not permit of a reductive semantic analysis. At the very least, such an analysis is bound to miss something, and it is to exactly this something that this book would like to attend. What follows, then, holds no aspirations to serve as a balanced or academically rigorous investigation, vowing instead to concern itself with felt experience; it positions itself less as interpretation, and more as erotics – as unscientific and unashamedly subjective celebration of the interpersonal dimension to taking up a language. Over time, I have come to believe that if language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling. These pages offer themselves as a paean to this act of devotion.
[A note: in what follows, I will be deviating from the strict dictionary definition of the English word ‘onomatopoeia’ as that which refers exclusively to words imitating auditory phenomena, and rather using the words ‘onomatopoeia’ and ‘mimetics’ broadly and interchangeably to refer to any sound-symbolic vocabulary.]
¶ giro’: the sound of eyes riveting deep into holes in your self-belief, or vicariously visiting the Nocturama, or every party where you have to introduce yourself
Sometimes I think that if I could telescope the last fifteen years into a single scene it would go like this. We begin with a wide shot, the camera skimming the lofty ceiling of a large, open-plan room. Sunset seeps in through the tall windows, picking out bright parallelograms of light on the walls, and we hear the gentle burble that marks out the early stages of a party. It’s hard to pin down where this party is, because in truth it isn’t one party but all of them, so for the sake of argument let’s have it somewhere in Britain. The Japanese version plays out quite differently, anyway. So the odd snatch of recognizable English, then, as the camera begins to float its way down from the high ceiling, homing in on a corner where a woman is standing with a group, holding a glass of wine, introductions, let’s say it’s some kind of opening and they all have nice semi-creative careers: graphic designers, journalists, event coordinators. Everyone is politely fascinated and fascinating, but when the woman is asked what her job is and tells them she’s a translator, is asked what languages and says, Japanese, you can feel even on screen a crevice opening up in the air. It’s not incredulity or aggression, not awe or surprise or defensiveness, but it’s not unlike any of these things, and there is some exhaling, some eyebrows raised in a way that they weren’t for the graphic designer. Some alert glances and follow-up questions. And then the conversation moves on, shifts away from the woman because her body-language seems to indicate that she doesn’t want to hold forth on what it is that she does. The moment passes, conversation limps along for a while and then the cluster starts to disintegrate. The woman makes to move off, and a man who had been standing opposite her reads her movements and breaks off with her, two fish flitting away from the shoal. He says her name, which he has remembered, and appends to it a question mark. They come to a standstill facing each other, a little way off from where the group was before. He reintroduces himself, maybe they shake hands, and then he leans in slightly, his palm coming to rest against a partitioning wall, a lopsided smile floating on his face, and he says, ‘So…’
We wonder, with the woman, what’s coming, although something in the woman’s expression suggests to us that she knows in her heart of hearts exactly what’s coming.
‘Why Japan?’
The camera freezes for a moment to take this in, catch the incline of his torso, catch the look in his eye which, despite the smile still suspended across his face, is strangely urgent. Probing is a word you could use to describe this look, and it feels more marked coming from someone you wouldn’t expect to show unveiled interest in another person – who you might expect to view such behaviour as a form of weakness. And then we pan to the woman, and we’re expecting this conversation to proceed in the intense yet witty way that conversations are supposed to go at these parties, particularly in films of these parties, but what comes over her face is instead a look of discomfort. Surely by now, we think, this woman will have formulated an answer to come out with in these situations, something pat, light, flirtatious, even if it isn’t strictly accurate – but it seems that she hasn’t. Instead, she visibly melts from the question, face scrunching up unphotogenically.
‘I don’t really know.’ She flashes him the hopeful smile of someone trying their pet once again with a food they know all too well it dislikes. ‘It just sort of happened.’
The camera pans back to the man’s face and we recognize the glint in his eyes from before, undiminished – in fact if anything augmented – and now, if we were not feeling it before, we start to feel uncomfortable. We confirm to ourselves that there was something about his previous expression that was oddly intent, that we hadn’t just been imagining it. It dawns on us that this man is not going to accept this non-answer, and the first note of panic sounds in our chests. We’re unclear why the woman is being so reticent, but what is clear is that the man will do everything in his power not to let her disappoint him. We don’t know why, either – if it’s some specific query he has, or some commonality he’s felt between them: a darkness, a difference. Is he a Japanophile? Or has her uncalled-for coyness piqued something in him? In any case, the look is unmistakeable, and it grows more so every micro-second the camera lingers on the glint in his eyes. The glint speaks.
Prove yourself, it says. I’m serious, now. Don’t let me down. You owe me this.
Needless to say, of course, this woman is me. I am the woman who has been asked at a conservative estimate a thousand times over the last fifteen years why and how she found herself in Japan in the first place yet still doesn’t have a decent answer to offer, and I am the woman who is naive enough to go on hoping that the next time she’s put on the spot the response may miraculously come to her as it never has before, fully formed and universally accepted, as edifying to her as it is to her interlocutor. Or at least, I have been, in the past. As the years go by and no succinct answer surfaces, my belief that some new fact will reveal itself as the driving force behind the direction my life has taken inevitably diminishes. In fact, as time passes, something else happens; I’ve become more and more sure that what’s brought me all this way is something verging on a feeling, or a darkness, or a cluster of interrelated feelings and darknesses – something which feels to me quite specific, but is almost impossible to pin down. Except right now, I feel like I might be able to do it. In this moment, the answer I feel to be the most truthful would be to point to that final shot of the man’s glare, poised on a knife-edge between thinking the woman important and thinking her a waste of time, and say, this. This in the eyes right here, this is why I was in Japan.
It’s hard to know what to name a look like that, so as to account for its force. Were this not a film but a manga, then the close-up of the man’s eyes would be appended with a sound-effect in written form. Giro’ it would say, in dark blocky strokes. Giro’, where you drop sharply off the end of the ‘o’ and leave a taut pause. This pause is known in Japanese as a sokuon. Preceding a consonant, as it usually does, a sokuon indicates the lengthening or gemination of that consonant, which is why in standard systems of romanization, it is symbolized by duplicating the subsequent consonant: girotto, for example, where ‘to’ is the quotative particle frequently needed to integrate the mimetic into the sentence, enabling its transition to adverb and so on. Here, though, I’ve opted to symbolize the sokuon with an apostrophe, partly because there are some sounds, like this one, which end in a free-hanging pause, which I want to talk about without presupposing what comes next, and partly because I feel the apostrophe draws closer to summoning the spirit of what the Japanese symbol does, in opening up a hole, a gap, a pause. Shut up, the sokuon says, and allow the drama to play out.
Which is apposite here, because giro’ is a sound very much concerned with drama. Giro’ is a sound of utter attention on the part of the giro’ter, so you can almost hear the heart of the giro’tee skipping a mini-beat. A google image search for giro’ yields an array of animals – dogs, cats, bears, owls – glaring; this is the sound of not softening the ferocity of one’s look for the sake of social nicety. Giro’ is about letting your eyes fulfil their natural, most aquiline potential. It is about using the assets biology and society have granted you to make immodest demands of people.
To explain that I feel this giro’ting has been happening to me all my life, that it seems to me in some sense an archetype of social experience, seems both too much and not enough. I feel that I need to speak more about my response to it, although in a sense the fact that I’m perceiving it as a giro’ already says all you need to know, namely: it works on me. It predated the reel of conscious memory, then it continued to work through childhood and take various guises, where it was feared and loathed and occasionally triumphantly overcome, and then it brought elation. And so it has become the site that is returned to again and again, becomes that which is chosen, even as it is still feared and loathed and uncomfortable.
I suspect, for example, that it was a similar kind of giro’ting that convinced me to do a philosophy degree, all because, at the age of seventeen, I went to visit an acquaintance of my mother’s who tutored teenagers attempting to get into specific universities. I wasn’t in need of tutoring, but I’d been encouraged to apply to Cambridge, and my mother had arranged for me to go and speak to this woman to help me make up my mind whether I should. Which was how I found myself in her front room, eyes roving her bookshelves and the wings of her armchair as she stood in front of me and asked me questions about the Cambridge philosophy course.
‘What do you know about it?’ she asked, as her eyes bit into me, full of a strange light. ‘I mean, presumably you know that it’s the birthplace of analytic philosophy? Wittgenstein was there, of course, and the course very much still reflects his legacy. Nothing “continental” permitted, it’s all Germans.’ Unlike teachers at my school, unlike almost any other woman I’d encountered, this woman didn’t smile when she spoke, or otherwise soften herself. She held her tall body perfectly erect. ‘I suppose the question is, does that sort of analytic rigour appeal to you? Because it’s not for everyone.’
In honesty, I didn’t know what analytic rigour really meant. I wanted to study existentialism more than I did any Germans, I was still wondering whether I wouldn’t be better suited to English literature than philosophy, and just standing in a room with this woman was enough to make me feel wholly inadequate, a grinning, blushing, placating, childish mess. And yet there was something in the way she leaned in and frowned slightly when I spoke, as though she were trying to locate something she’d dropped in a clouded stream, the way her light eyes latched onto me as if trying to see through to whether or not I was worth bothering with, which sent a shimmer of metallic excitement through my veins.
As it happened, this meeting proved a more or less accurate taster of everything that was to come, everything I would feel on a daily basis at Cambridge. I was giro’ted by my philosophy professors, by my supervisors, by other students in my discussion class, and I felt constantly and thoroughly inarticulate and girlish and inadequate. Then, in my third year I stumbled upon the ultimate pair of eyes to giro’te me like I’d never been giro’ted before: those of Ludwig Wittgenstein. They had saved him up – at least that was my understanding of it. You worked through the history of philosophy in your first and second years, tackled the major ideas and then finally, in your third year, when you were allowed to select your modules, you could, if you played your cards right, encounter him. You were ready to. Certainly I was ready to, and the draw felt immediate. Soon enough, my bilingual edition of the Philosophical Investigations became a permanent fixture on the desk in my student room, and often I would return to myself from a trance to find myself staring at the photograph on the cover, incapable of peeling myself away from the pull of Wittgenstein’s gaze. There was something about it, even in a black-and-white photograph, that contained depths I couldn’t begin to put in to words.
In time, I would find out that it wasn’t just me, that many have fixated on the wonder of Wittgenstein’s eyes. Years later, to my great surprise, I would open up W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to find a photograph of them, extracted from the rest of his face but unmistakeable nonetheless, staring out at me alongside those of an owl and a bush baby clipped into identically sized rectangles; the comparison illustrates the narrator’s point that the inhabitants of the Antwerp Nocturama share a quality with ‘certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking’. But it was the words of Colin McGinn, who devotes several lines’ worth of description to Wittgenstein’s eyes, that I found the most resonant: ‘Imploring,’ McGinn writes,
yet with an intense rage flaring just behind the iris, sending off an unnerving blend of supplication and admonition…. The look is simultaneously delicate and military, tender and ferocious. If you stare hard at the face, it seems to shift aspect from one of these poles to the other…. You feel the excitement and peril of an encounter with the man.
Thanks to McGinn, I felt I could fully formulate what it was that drew me: as I stared down at the picture of Wittgenstein on the front of the Investigations, not a full-frontal photograph of the kind featured in Austerlitz but a side-angle shot with Wittgenstein looking pensively off into the mid-distance, I would feel not only a pull, but a familiarity that seemed to bubble up from somewhere deep; it was like he was requiring something of me. Come over to my side, those eyes seemed to be saying, as ridiculous as it was to admit. Be in this with me. Don’t let me down.
I did go over to his side, or at least I tried. I saturated myself in his philosophy, and allowed it to rearrange the apparatus of my thinking. The whole of my degree, I’d been waiting for my chosen subject to affect me in this way, and now it was actually happening. I believed in what he was doing. My feelings of inadequacy didn’t go away when I studied him, but at least I was sure he was worth feeling inadequate for. And meanwhile, I was preparing for an inadequacy of a different order of magnitude: I was applying to go teach in Japan, where my mind would be rearranged in a different yet similarly irreversible way.
Framing it like this, even I want to reach for the question: why Japan? How did I know that this country I knew nothing about would have the power to do it, that it would look unsmilingly at me, ‘simultaneously delicate and military, tender and ferocious’, so that I craved to become the sort of person that might satisfy? That it would giro’te me, again and again? Maybe it was just self-evident: going somewhere so different, there was never any chance it wouldn’t be that way. To my twenty-one-year-old self, who had a radar for such things, it was clear that there I would sit forever poised on the knife-edge, impaled by an ever-renewing need to prove myself. That there I would live, every day, ‘the excitement and peril of the encounter with the man’.
¶ giza-giza: the sound of seeing what you thought was yours through the lens of an alternative system, or of having your cock incomprehensibly sucked
Cherry-blossom pink is how you could describe the colour of the book that I used to cram for my interview at the Japanese Embassy. Now I wonder if that connotation was intentional, although unlike almost every other book about Japan, the cover didn’t actually feature any pictures of cherry blossoms. It featured instead the bewildering instruction: Teach Yourself Japanese Language, Life and Culture. I had plucked it off the bookshop shelf because that was precisely what I was trying to do, and I suppose that subconsciously I embraced the title’s ambitious promise, even as a more discerning self informed me how inadequate a single volume could ever be in facilitating that kind of knowledge. I say that, and yet as I let my eyes fall down the index page now, it strikes me as surprisingly detailed and wide-reaching in scope, and not overly dominated by the standard clichés. If I had actually consumed its contents in their entirety, I might have been able to bluff a working knowledge of the country. As it was, I don’t think I ingested twenty per cent.
