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

I remained in the dark as I returned to Japan and then was called back to the United States to teach modern Japanese literature at Princeton — the first fulfillment of the palm reader’s prediction. Japanese women of my generation grew up assuming that a job like university teaching had nothing to do with them. And so as I went back to the United States, I found the turn of events quite surreal. Then when I started teaching, another surprise awaited me: my students were a mixed bag, with ethnic groups I hadn’t really been expecting represented in large numbers — Korean, Chinese, Singaporean, Indian, African American. Students at that relatively conservative East Coast university were mostly white at the time, yet there in front of me was an impressive range of skin tones, from ivory to dark coffee. Students looking for their identity in the non-West wanted to find out what on earth modern literature written in a non-Western language might be like, and thus they enrolled in the only such course Princeton then offered: my course on modern Japanese literature. Reading some of the masterpieces of modern Japanese literature with the students, I felt a not unreasonable pride. But still, I remained in the dark.

Many more years passed until I heard the woman in Paris utter the expression “a major literature.” Still more years passed until, finally, everything fit. As the leaves turned yellow while I lingered under the blue sky of Iowa with other writers possibly on their way to a downfall, I began to think historically. And as I began to think historically, I became aware of something I had not realized when I gave the talk in Paris: the fact that Japanese literature is considered a major literature was the very condition that had allowed me to give such a talk in front of a French audience. For how could I even begin to talk about the asymmetrical relationship between the universal and the particular unless Japanese literature was important enough to represent the particular?

Not every national literature is a major literature, just as not every nation’s cuisine is a major cuisine. When one uses the term “Mongolian literature” or “Lithuanian literature,” the word “Mongolian” or “Lithuanian” basically functions as a simple adjective modifying the word “literature.” That is not the case with the term “Japanese literature.” The term circulates in the world as a recognized national literature — at least among readers who read literature in translation, who may be quite limited in number but whose presence is indispensable when thinking about world literature. Moreover, Japanese literature came to be recognized as such thanks not only to The Tale of Genji but also, and more crucially, to the wealth of the country’s modern literature.

There is only so much fairness in the world. Good people are not rewarded, and fine works of literature — entire bodies of literature, even — are buried in oblivion without attaining the recognition they are due. That modern Japanese literature attained some recognition relatively early on is not necessarily a sign that it is superior to other, less recognized bodies of literature. As a matter of fact, the attack on Pearl Harbor, of all things, is what gave modern Japanese literature an edge. After the attack, the United States rushed to recruit brilliant young minds from all over the country to train them to decipher the Japanese language. Those people later became scholars and translators of Japanese literature: Edward Seidensticker, Donald Keene, and Ivan Morris worked for the navy; Howard Hibbett was in the army; Edwin McClellan, a half-Japanese Scotsman who grew up in prewar Japan, worked for Allied intelligence in Washington.

It was first and foremost thanks to the English translations by these men that the world came to know that there was such a thing as modern Japanese literature, which eventually led to Kawabata Yasunari’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. Whatever reservations one may — I think should — have about the prize, the event marks a significant historical step in pushing the boundary of what Westerners consider the “world.” The first non-Western Nobel Prize in Literature went to Rabindranath Tagore of India in 1913, yet it was through his own English translation of his Bengali poems that he was awarded the honor. More than a full half century had to pass before a novelist writing in a non-Western language first received the prize in 1966. The recipient, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, was an Israeli who wrote in Hebrew, but he grew up speaking Yiddish — a variant of High German — at home in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It might be difficult to categorize him as a non-Westerner. Two years later came Kawabata Yasunari, who was as far removed from the West as a modern writer could be. Moreover, given that no author writing in a non-Western language would receive the award for the next twenty years, it is likely that no other non-Western literature was being translated to the extent that Japanese literature was. In time, a new generation of translators emerged, and, in addition to the classics of modern Japanese literature, contemporary works by young Japanese writers began to appear in English and in other Western languages, ultimately leading to Ōe Kenzaburō becoming the second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize, in 1994. The translation of Japanese literature into foreign languages continues to thrive.

As of November 8, 2013, the Encyclopedia Britannica has an entry on “Japanese Literature” that consists of almost 13,400 words. (By comparison, Mongolian and Lithuanian literatures have entries of some 2,300 words and 600 words, respectively.) The entry begins as follows:

Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature ranks as one of the major literatures of the world , comparable in age, richness, and volume to English literature, though its course of development has been quite dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a literary tradition extending from the 7th century AD to the present; during all this time there was never a “dark age” devoid of literary production. (Emphasis added)

The entry’s author is Donald Keene, one of the American scholars and translators mentioned earlier, first recruited to study the enemy’s language during World War II. (Keene became a Japanese citizen in 2012.) It is uncertain if Japanese literature would have come to be recognized as “one of the major literatures of the world” if it were not for the arbitrary forces of history. Yet what is clear is that those recruited to decipher the language became intrigued enough by what the Japanese people were writing that they eventually wanted to translate it. And there is something more certain — and even more important. Even if Japanese literature remained totally unknown to the rest of the world , those Japanese who were well versed in literary gems of the world through reading them in the original and in translation could know with confidence that their own literature was filled with works in no way inferior.

By the time I was about to leave Iowa and its strikingly blue sky, I was ready to call the phenomenon of modern Japanese literature a miracle. Admittedly, “miracle” is a strong word, yet the more I thought about Japanese literature, the more I was convinced of its appropriateness — and of the necessity for me and my compatriots to understand and appreciate our country’s literature in that exalted sense. For only then could we find a way to stop our present folly of doing all in our power to bring on our language’s fall.

How people understand the history of their language varies greatly. Some populations are less naïve than others. Whether through foreign domination or ethnic conflicts, their history has taught them to be less naïve. Others are relatively more naïve — including the Japanese, islanders whose language has never been threatened from either within or without. Ask them how they as a nation came to read and write, and they will most likely give a short and simple answer like this: “Since time immemorial, we Japanese have always spoken Japanese. One day, some people from the nearby Korean Peninsula brought over Chinese characters, which our ancestors adopted for their own use. They added some phonetic signs they themselves invented and so created their own system of writing. This is how Japanese people came to read and write Japanese.”