ねぇ - The Sound Of Relatable Memories And Shared Nostalgia
A book review of Polly Barton’s “Fifty Sounds” by Mike Sunda, published in Issue 1 of Nothing Personal magazine, August, 2021Fifty Sounds can best be described as a memoir of author and literary translator Polly Barton’s five-year span in Japan, in which she breaks down some of her most memorable, emotionally resonant experiences into vignette-like chapters. Each of those chapters doubles up as a linguistic lesson about the onomatopoeic landscape of the Japanese language: nuru-nuru, the sound of slipperiness, for instance; or don, the sound of a hand slamming against a wall.
Barton prefaces the book with an explanation of why she is so drawn to such mimetics — their dichotomous nature of being both infantile and profound; their sheer sense of affect, and a physicality that ties them to individual experience, where they come to life, rather than lying dormant in the pages of a textbook This appetite for the undefinable lies at the heart of Fifty Sounds, which feels, first and foremost, like a celebration of cultural immersion and all the identity-forming messiness that comes with it. Her selected mimetics double up as a literary device, whereby in each chapter, the onomatopoeic word is anchored to a moment of symbolic awakening in which the author hears, or uses, the term in a context that clarifies one or more of its extra-linguistic cultural meanings, resulting in a pointed emotional response.
This is the first dimension in which Fifty Sounds can be enjoyed: as an ode to language learning, honing in on the liminal planes of linguistics that can never be found in academic curricula, or in the database of Duolingo, but which emerge, surreptitiously, between lovers in the bedroom, or — as in one of the book’s most shocking anecdotes — in a paraphrased police report following the abject horror of stumbling upon a corpse in plain daylight. In this sense, I feel inclined to draw parallels with semiotician Roland Barthes, who Barton references sporadically, and his 1970’s Empire of Signs, where the main function of Japan is simply to provide a setting that frees the author from the intrinsic heaviness of meaning, allowing him to riff on the oppositional signifier-signified binary in various contexts. In much the same way, Barton’s writing is at its most compelling when she elucidates the linguistic gap between dictionary-definition and culturally appropriate usage, existing — as a fluent, Japanese-speaking ‘foreigner’ — in the very space between the two.
Although it is through this mimetic lens that we navigate Barton’s years in Japan, the second dimension of Fifty Sounds is that of a more conventional bildungsroman, where onomatopoeia soundtracks the author’s recollections of relationships, friendships, and all the most poignant moments in-between. There is a remarkable absence of artifice in Barton’s prose.She is a Cambridge-educated philosophy graduate, schooled in the analytic rigour of Ludwig Wittgenstein (“nothing ‘continental’ permitted”, she recalls her teacher saying), and it is with this detached eye that she deconstructs this foundational time in her life. You develop boundless sympathy for the narrator, precisely because she affords herself so little. Much as the linguistic dimension of Fifty Sounds can be enjoyed by both Japanese-speakers and non-speakers alike, Barton’s anecdotes revolve around universal themes — love, heartbreak, alienation and belonging — but are elevated, sparingly, by flourishes of detail that situate the stories in this distinctly Japanese setting: kitschy love hotels and net cafés; cicadas singing, and the sticky summer’s heat.
And then there is a third dimension, which I feel almost uniquely qualified to comment on. Polly Barton moved to Sado Island as a twenty-one year old in 2005, two years before I moved to the suburban climes of Nerima, Tokyo, as an eighteen year old, in 2007. She taught English as an Assistant Language Teacher on the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) programme; I worked in a similar position at a Japanese private school, while on a homestay with a local family.
This was a Japan that was by no means inaccessible to non-residents, but was nonetheless distant and remote, in a way that it no longer is. English teaching was the default mode of employment, and it was the norm to find yourself living in a guest house, having paid cash-in-hand for keys to a room somewhere you knew little about, to share with people you knew even less, but would quickly get to know. You could purchase a futuristic-looking flip phone that could play TV channels and charge itself with miniature solar panels, but smartphones were not available, and any new journey across town would require detailed directions from a trusted resident, or physical print-outs of a map. In this respect, little had changed from Barthes scrawling out a hand-drawn map on his travels in the late 1960s, referencing shops and local landmarks to compensate for Japan’s bewildering lack of street names.
Fifty Sounds is melancholy, sure, but nostalgic it is not. One gets the impression that Wittgenstein would not have approved of nostalgia. But for anyone who passed through Japan at this stage in its life, at this stage in their life, this book acts as such a succinct snapshot of a moment-in-time that it’s impossible not to feel pangs of nostalgia. So much of the Japan that Barton alludes to, both spoken and unspoken, already feels like a relic of a bygone era, whether that’s middle-schoolers crushing on her younger brother (mote-mote, the weird adulation akin to “being a small-town movie star”), or even just textural detail, like vending machines selling cigarettes, and porno mags on display in convenience stores.
One of the most unexpectedly affecting moments in any of the chapters came when Barton is being gently reprimanded by her partner at the time, Y, for not following a proper skincare regime. “It’s because you don’t take care”, he says, applying cream to a patch of dry skin on her arm (kasa-kasa, “the sound of the desert heat in the heart”), while she protests, petulantly, “I do take care! I do”! Later, she realises that he was referring to the name of a specific product, “kea”. It is moments like these, that most succinctly define what it means to immerse yourself in a foreign language and culture. Japanese, with its plethora of katakana loan words, deceptive mimicry of Western languages, and myriad homonyms, has a way of eliciting these moments of vulnerability in a flash. Sadly, in an age of translation apps and instant information, the opportunity to dwell on, or even completely miss these moments of misunderstanding in the heat of conversation is becoming rarer. Fifty Sounds, to me, is a meditation on these misunderstandings, parsed by the author years after the fact, and it is both a testament to Barton’s work, as well as a recognition of inevitable change since, that I don’t think this book could ever be written again.
I arrived in Tokyo the same week that Kanye West released Graduation, an album for which the hip-hop star, in typically prescient curatorial fashion, had asked Takashi Murakami to design the artwork. The album soundtracked many of my most visceral memories of that first year, not dissimilarly to Barton’s onomatopoeic discoveries, but it was another rapper that provided a more potent lesson in my development. I was in conversation with an older university student, who under whatever immature impulse I was keen to impress with my cultural cachet, when he asked me what I thought of Nas. For what felt like an eternity, in what little Japanese I could muster, I fumbled an opinion on Illmatic and ‘90s New York hip-hop, to which he politely nodded along until the conversation moved onto another topic. Months later, I was walking down the street, when I had a sudden, shattering realisation that he’d simply asked me whether I liked nasu (aubergine). These moments, although utterly trivial, speak to the bittersweet rewards and unexpected hurdles of cultural immersion. In Fifty Sounds, Barton has written a book that is overflowing with them. No doubt there’s an onomatopoeia for that, too.
