Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

That said, I would like to move on a little further, because throwing light on this asymmetry was not the only objective of the novel. Inextricably linked to that objective was another objective, an even more critical one. By juxtaposing the two languages, what I hoped to convey above all was the irreducible materiality of the Japanese language. What a bizarre and amusing language Japanese is, mixing Chinese characters with two sets of phonetic signs that look like the very opposite of each other: angular and masculine katakana and curvilinear and feminine hiragana! What a rough and yet refined language! Fast and loose in its logic, courtly in its honorifics. Through this bilingual form, I wanted to directly appeal to Japanese readers, to impress upon them that their language is different from English, different from any Western language, different indeed from any other language in the world. Not that I tried to make a case for the uniqueness of the Japanese language. I tried rather, through the bilingual form, to make a case for the irreducible materiality of all languages, the reason for which writing even in the most local of all of local languages becomes a worthwhile activity in itself.

Just imagine. Imagine a world one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now, a world in which not only the best-educated people but also the brightest minds and the deepest souls express themselves only in English. Imagine a world in which all other languages have been reduced to silliness. Imagine the world subjected to the tyranny of a singular “Logos.” What a narrow, pitiful, and horrid world that would be! To live in such a world would be infinitely sadder, I am sure, than to be confined to the asymmetry we have now.

You must all be aware that novelists are rather megalomaniacal people. I must admit that I am no exception. Even as I write in Japanese, in a language that has never played a major role in the history of humankind, I am doing so in hope of saving humanity from succumbing to that awful fate we, as humans, do not deserve.

MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE: A “MAJOR LITERATURE”

When I finished this talk in Paris, a circle of people quickly gathered to say gracious things about it and shake hands with the novelist from afar. Since at that point Merci! was about the only French I could spontaneously come up with, I put on a big smile and repeated, “ Merci! Merci! ” Just as that circle began to wane, a middle-aged woman who had been standing at some distance approached me. I recognized her. She, too, had given a presentation a couple of days before; amid all the other presentations that were comically very French, bewilderingly philosophical with sentences lasting more than a minute each, hers was a notably clear talk in plain language. Framed by light brown hair mixed with some gray, her face revealed a well-cultivated mind, one nurtured by life and polished by education. French seemed to be her mother tongue, though she was teaching at a university in Israel.

Looking straight at me, she began telling me about her own parents, who were both novelists in Yiddish, a language used by ten million Jewish people in central and eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Then, apologizing for what she considered her impudence in comparing her parents to me, she mentioned how writing in languages like Japanese and Yiddish offers a kind of intimacy that is impossible when writing in more dominant languages. What struck me was the expression she used to describe Japanese literature: “I know I can’t compare my parents with someone like you who’s a writer in a major literature [ une littérature majeure ] like Japanese literature, but…” Even after she left my side, the words “major literature” rang in my ears. Even during the appropriately French posttalk reception with abundant offerings of wine and cheese arranged elegantly on tables, they stayed in my ears. Even when I left the crowd to go up to the rooftop to feel the May wind and stared blankly down at the Paris rooftops, even on my return flight, and even for a while after I arrived home, the expression stayed in my ears. In time, I came to recall it only intermittently. I never imagined that it would come back to me one day with such persistency and with far greater meaning than the speaker had intended.

Awareness often comes to us terribly late. It finally knocks on our mind’s door months, years, sometimes decades after the scene, incident, or conversation that prompted it. Preconceptions we have unknowingly acquired keep us from seeing things for what they are. Blocked by preconceptions, we cease to think. Nonetheless, as time matures, we are sometimes graced with an occasion when truth reveals its simple, unforced, and also brutal self. At that point, we realize that we had somehow known the truth all along.

My generation was raised and educated by those who felt ashamed of the way the Japanese Empire once looked down on all other non-Western countries as backward and underdeveloped. If it never occurred to me to compare Japanese literature with other non-Western literatures, it was because the whole country, awash in a sea of guilt about its imperial past, never dared to make any such comparison. It also never occurred to me to consider whether other non-Western nations had as many works of modern literature written in their own language as Japan did.

The novels I immersed myself in as soon as I started living in a colonial-style house in a New York suburb in the 1960s were from a collection of modern Japanese literature published by Kaizōsha in 1926. Sixty-three volumes in all, this collection had great significance in the history of modern Japan. At the remarkably affordable price of one yen per copy, the first volume to be released sold 250,000 copies immediately after the advertisement came out. The collection ignited a boom for similar literary collections to follow. Of course, as a twelve-year-old girl I was unaware of any of this. I simply read whatever I could and kept yearning for a Japan that no longer existed anywhere but in literature. That such a collection had been published long before I was born never struck me as in any way remarkable. I must have taken it for granted that if I were a Mongolian girl, I would be immersed in a collection of modern Mongolian literature. It was only in Iowa when the expression “major literature” came back to haunt me that I began to realize how impossible it would have been at the time for any Asian girl outside Japan to read a collection of the modern literature of her own country published in 1926.

Suppose there was a bookish English girl who was brought to the United States at age twelve around the same time and did not feel at home there. She may have spent her days immersed in the Penguin Classics. Suppose she was French. She may have spent her days immersed in la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Yet what girl outside of Japan, what girl other than a Western girl, could have spent her days immersed in a collection of modern literature written in her own language, especially one published in 1926? Even for a Western girl, this luxury was not available for just anybody. Yet it never occurred to me as a teenager to think in those terms.

My blindness persisted even as I went on to college. I encountered many Americans who had read not only The Tale of Genji ( Genji monogatari ), written more than a thousand years ago, but also the works of postwar writers like Abe Kōbō, Mishima Yukio, and Ōe Kenzaburō, and even, to my pleasure, the lengthy Makioka Sisters ( Sasameyuki ) by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. An aspiring writer that I once met — universally praised for his talent yet forever unable to finish his novel — expressed shock and dismay over the way Tanizaki ended the saga of the beautiful sisters. Raising his fists as if to curse God, he cried out, “It ends with, of all things, Yukiko having an attack of diarrhea! I can’t believe it!” Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages. Still, while they may have read medieval works like One Thousand and One Nights and The Rubaiyat , never did I come across anyone who had read works of modern literature written in a non-Western language aside from Japanese. I, of course, made nothing of this.