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

Pine? No. Plum? No. Cherry? No, no, much smaller. But all bonsai trees are small, aren’t they? Mmm, yes, but much smaller. As this exchange went on, the Mongolian poet volunteered to help by leaning in and saying something to the Lithuanian.

I gasped.

He was speaking in Russian. I could tell immediately because of all the Soviet films I had seen screened on campus when I was a student. In the same fluent Russian I’d heard in those films, he was asking something of the young Lithuanian poet. I knew that on the Eurasian continent there are people who look perfectly Japanese and speak fluent Russian, yet this was the first time that I had actually seen one. Had I known the first thing about the modern history of Mongolia, this would have come as no surprise. But at the time, I was surprised. Bonsai dropped from my mind.

“You speak Russian?”

“Yes, I studied in Moscow.”

The Lithuanian poet interjected, “His Russian is much better than mine.”

Hearing this, the Mongolian poet laughed heartily. I then understood: these two men did not just happen to be sitting across the aisle from each other. This unlikely pair had become friends through the medium of the Russian language. I see, I said to myself. One could be born in Mongolia, study in Moscow, learn Russian, and later in life be invited to an American university and use the Russian learned in Moscow to become friends with a young Lithuanian with a pierced ear. “The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ended the Cold War and handed the United States a single-handed victory”—similar words had been said over and over in the intervening years. It felt as if that history was laid before me, in front of my very eyes. Little did I imagine that barely six months later, the U.S. invasion of Iraq would usher in a new era of instability.

The two of them went on talking in Russian. Soon a white middle-aged woman sitting one row behind the Mongolian, in the window seat, joined in. I later learned that she was a novelist from Ukraine with the name of a princess in Greek mythology, Yevgeniya.

From farther back in the bus, I heard the Chinese and Korean languages being spoken.

The minibus kept driving through cornfields, carrying onboard the history of the vast Eurasian continent. After a lunch break, we crossed the Iowa — Minnesota border and kept on. By the time we got to the hotel in Minneapolis, it was close to evening and the air was beginning to feel chilly again.

Perhaps because I had been locked inside an enclosed space with other foreigners all day, when we got off the minibus and entered the hotel, I had the visceral sensation of being thrown back into mid-America. Americans grown tall and stout on too many hamburgers and French fries were talking loudly. American English emerged from the full movement of chins and lips, both consonants and vowels pronounced with force. The white columns and walls of the atrium lobby were made to resemble a Mediterranean villa — not as horrific as Japanese imitations, but still fake looking — and every corner smacked of America. In this very American lobby, we multinational writers gathered with our luggage of all shapes and sizes, our tired faces on full display.

From Asian countries, besides me, the lone Japanese, there were two Chinese, three Koreans, a Vietnamese, a Burmese, and a Mongolian. From Africa, there was a Botswanan. From the Middle East, an Israeli. From eastern Europe, two Poles, a Romanian, a Hungarian, a Ukrainian, a Lithuanian, and a Bosnian; from western Europe, an Englishman, an Irishman, and a German. From northern Europe, there was a Norwegian, and from South America, a Chilean and an Argentinean. In total, there were twenty-some writers. After a few days in Minneapolis, we drove back together through the cornfields, and then for a month, the duration of my stay, we all lived on the same hotel floor in Iowa City.

THE PALM READER’S PREDICTION

My invitation to participate in the International Writing Program hosted by the University of Iowa had come earlier that year, in the spring. The IWP is a fine program that brings together novelists and poets from around the world. Participants are free to keep on writing while getting a taste of life in an American university. Round-trip transportation, accommodation at the university-owned hotel, and a daily stipend are provided, as well as some extra money to buy books during the stay.

As is always the case when I am invited abroad, I felt conflicted. My upbringing was not typical for a Japanese. When I was twelve, my family moved to New York because of my father’s business, and I lived in the United States for the next twenty years. Even so, I never felt comfortable with either American life or the English language. As a teenager, I immersed myself in classic Japanese novels of the modern era, a set of books that my great uncle gave my mother for her daughters — my sister and me — to read lest we forget our own language. In college and then in graduate school, I even took the trouble of majoring in French literature as a way to continue avoiding English. I was the prisoner of an intense longing for home — a kind of longing perhaps unimaginable in the age of the Internet, which allows one never to leave home, wherever one’s body may be. A confluence of circumstances forced me to go on living this incomprehensible life. And the kind of life I lived so affects everything about me that I can scarcely write a word without addressing it.

After reaching thirty, I finally went back to Japan. One day, as I was about to walk down a bustling street in Tokyo’s Shibuya, I caught sight of a palm reader — an exotic sight for me at the time. He was wearing a Chinese-style hat and had auspiciously full cheeks. In my mind, he even ended up with a drooping mandarin moustache. When I held out my palms, he took one look and said, “I see you have a strong tie to foreign countries.”

I was shocked. I told him that I had been living abroad but now intended to stay put in Japan.

“Oh, no, your tie with foreign countries will last all your life.” He sounded oddly confident.

By then Japan was a rich country, and one did not have to be particularly privileged to travel abroad. It was thus unlikely that the palm reader had said this just to please me. Of course, he wouldn’t have said it just to upset me, either. But I had only recently returned to Japan, at long last, with dozens of cardboard boxes in tow. That I was finally back in my home country had apparently not quite sunk into my psyche, for I still had dreams in which I was dismayed to find myself living in the United States — What’s going on? When will I ever get back to Japan? — and I would let out a sigh of relief when I woke up and saw the low ceiling of my small Tokyo apartment. During those first months, when the voices of screaming children on their way to school came through the window, in my half sleep it would eventually register that the screams were not in English but in Japanese, and I would repeat to myself, “Yes, those are the screams of Japanese children. The same as I heard when I was a little girl going to elementary school myself. Those are Japanese children, and I am in Japan.” And as I went from being half awake to awake, the awareness that I had finally returned to my homeland would fill me to overflowing.

The palm reader’s words were carved into my memory, along with the accompanying shock.

Whether one’s palms can show a “tie to foreign countries” remains a mystery to me, although it’s true that sometime thereafter an unexpected development took me back to the United States. It’s also true that, contrary to what I had dreamed for years, I ended up writing my first novel there. Many flights across the sea then followed. Of course, there are people who constantly crisscross the globe on business or pleasure. I am certainly not in their league. Still, for someone who expected to stay in Japan for the remainder of her life, rooted like a tree, I was making more than my share of trips abroad, though seldom willingly. And now, having passed my prime, to put it mildly, I was finding transoceanic flights an increasing burden, one that took a toll not only on my nerves but also on my never-very-robust health.