2. FROM PAR AVION TO VIA AIR MAIL
The language that gained dominance in the modern era, from the eighteenth century onward, is of course English. However, during much of this time, English was not the world’s most revered language. Mais non! It was French.
Let us begin by taking a look at A Little Princess, a children’s story written by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1905. Now a classic, it has continued to be read all over the world as well as adapted into films, television programs, musicals, and, naturally, anime. Its heroine, Sara Crewe, is an English girl born in India whose father is a very rich man, mining diamonds in the distant colony and contributing to the resplendence of the British Empire. The story starts when she is sent to live in a boarding school in London. Sara is not only a wealthy heiress but also someone with an exceptional mind, both intelligent and noble. Yet her unquestioned superiority over others becomes established on her first day of school, before anyone knows anything about her except that she is rich.
The title of the first chapter is “A French Lesson.” Miss Minchin, the school’s owner and headmistress, introduces Sara to the other pupils and, as if to demonstrate her authority, imperiously orders the new girl to begin studying the textbook before the French master Monsieur Dufarge appears. Mean, narrow-minded, and domineering, Miss Minchin epitomizes the nasty adult. She is convinced that Sara knows no French. Sara tries to explain to her that, though she “never really learned” the language, she knows it because she always used it at home, her deceased mother being French and her father loving the language. Miss Minchin has a secret: to her shame, she herself does not know the language. Not wishing to discuss the matter any further, she cuts the new pupil short: “If you have not learned, you must begin at once.” Too polite to retort, Sara waits until Monsieur Dufarge enters the classroom, whereupon she rises from her seat and begins to explain to him in French how she came to know the language.
It is as if Sara has been enthroned that instant. Monsieur Dufarge exclaims to Miss Minchin, “Ah, Madame . . . She has not learned French; she is French.” The rest of the class is in awe of her, or deathly jealous. Miss Minchin is mortified. The first French lesson has determined Sara’s fate. Several years later, when the unexpected death of her father leaves Sara penniless, Miss Minchin, who despite her profound dislike of the girl had been treating her as the school’s prize pupil, instantly turns against her. Sara, the “little princess,” is quickly shoved up to a maid’s room in the attic with only her doll and a dress that’s already too short for her, and she becomes the target of repeated abuse.
Reading A Little Princess in translation while munching rice crackers in our Tokyo home was when I first vaguely understood the magical power of the French language. My own French lessons began in junior high school in the United States. Everyone was required to study a foreign language (though for me English was already foreign enough). We had three options: French, Spanish, or Russian. French was my natural choice, for I could not picture what it would be like to become a Japanese woman with a command of Spanish or Russian, never having read a novel with such a heroine. But I could easily imagine a Japanese woman speaking French. She would be elegant; she would have class. The lovely nobleman’s daughter in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short story “The Ball” (Butōkai, 1920) waltzes with a handsome French officer while fluently conversing with him in his language, which seemed a bit fanciful even to a young girl but still quite wonderful. The French teacher in our junior high school had black, curly hair and was not exactly handsome; he was not even French but Belgian. But he was kind to me, the only Asian in the class, and soon, though I made no active effort to learn English, I would hole up in my room listening over and over to a record exclaim, “Voilà Monsieur Thibault. Voilà Madame Thibault. Ils habitent à Paris, à la place d’Italie.”
My ties with the French language lasted long beyond what I ever imagined at the time. After graduating from high school, I first entered art school but soon quit, and then, as I mentioned before, I ended up studying French literature not only in college but also in graduate school. I did not choose this path with a specific goal, aside from that of avoiding English. As a Japanese middle-class girl of the time, I took up French basically in the same spirit as one studied other things Western like piano and ballet. Circumstances led me to endlessly continue in this path almost by default—or that is how I understood the whole course of events until much later.
Only when I went back to Japan, was freed at last from having to deal with English, and even forgot most of the French I had learned did I finally begin to see another motive, a less innocent one. I had lived in the United States as an Asian girl without an adequate command of English. French was the perfect language with which a girl like me could gain an advantage over the monolingual Americans.
When people found out that I was a student, they would invariably ask, often out of courtesy, “What do you major in?”
I would proudly answer, “French literature!”
In the United States at the time, it was unusual for Asians to study French literature. Hearing my answer, Americans would often open their eyes wide with amazement and look at me with sudden new respect. I would return their gaze, cool as you please.
The journey of French toward becoming the most revered language in Europe perhaps started in the seventeenth century with the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, which lasted seventy-two years (1643–1715) and made France, with its cultural, political, and military eminence, the grandest nation in Europe. The refinement of the French court became the model for other monarchs. The venerable Académie française had already been established earlier under the Sun King’s father, Louis XIII, with a mission to vigorously regulate the French language, to “render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating arts and sciences” (founding document of 1637). French went on to become the lingua franca of the European ruling class. What later came to be known as the Age of Enlightenment followed in the eighteenth century with France and the French language at its center, thanks to philosophes like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Alembert, Voltaire, and Diderot, among others. In the nineteenth century, while the British ran the most powerful empire and Great Britain enjoyed military, political, and economic dominance, French continued to be revered as the language that embodied the essence of European civilization. Not only was French recognized as the official language of diplomatic affairs among European nations, but command of the language was considered integral to life as a cultivated person in Europe.
To most Europeans, having a command of English did not matter unless you aspired to be an intellectual, which required familiarity with more than one language. Yet all Europeans of a certain social class and above were expected to know French, just as European women of a certain class and above were expected to know how to do embroidery. This was true of the British as well, and it continued to be true even up to the early twentieth century, when the British Empire was at its zenith. Enough familiarity with French trickled down so that most people were on at least nodding terms with the language. Agatha Christie, writing in that period, created her famous detective Hercule Poirot, who is Belgian (and thus not at all dashy, as a Frenchman would be) and who—aside from throwing in French ejaculations such as “Parbleu!” and “Au nom de dieu!”—often speaks strange English that’s a direct translation of French. Instead of “Do you understand?” he says, “You comprehend?” Instead of “Allow me to tell you,” he says, “Permit me to say to you.” Scattered throughout the novel, these peculiar English forms produce comedic effect, humorously highlighting the detective’s foreignness. And it was because Christie knew her readers, representing a broad spectrum of ordinary people, would appreciate the humor that she invented a hero like Poirot in the first place.
With the spread of colonialism and European influence worldwide, French became a language revered even by non-Westerners. La gloire of the French language naturally reached all the way to Japan, which had, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, finally opened its doors to the West. Until then, during more than 250 years of isolation, the Edo government allowed trade only with the Dutch, with the consequence that Dutch was the only Western language that any Japanese—and just a tiny segment of the population—knew. As the initial chaos brought on by the Restoration subsided, people turned their eyes to the outside world. While eagerly acquiring new knowledge, they also became sensitive to the relative cachet of different Western languages. And since those on the periphery embrace snobbery with greater earnestness than those closer to the center—a phenomenon well attested to by the fact that East Asia is now the biggest global market for European-brand products—the Japanese cultural elite espoused veneration for the French language with even greater enthusiasm than did Europeans themselves. Along with British military, political, and economic supremacy, British cultural prowess was already becoming evident. And yet, in Japan, the cultural elites regarded English as the language for practical affairs and French as the language that symbolized the soul of Western civilization. This was especially true of the new generation of writers who tried to embrace that soul by devouring Western arts and letters.
I should like to go to France,
But France is far too far.
So I shall don a new suit
And roam where fancy leads.1
These simple lines (the full impact of which is untranslatable [see chapter 7]) by poet Hagiwara Sakutarō eloquently express the longings of Japanese writers of the Taishō period (1912–1926), which came on the heels of the Meiji. Successful writers squandered their earnings to realize their dream of spending time in France just breathing the air of Paris. Yet for most, France was a country “far too far,” which intensified their yearning all the more. Another poem by Hagiwara begins, “Like the scent of a French cigarette / One whiff and I’m transported.” The yearning for France spread from writers to readers, and translations of poems by the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud came to be as familiar to the Japanese middle class as waka poems from more than a thousand years ago that girls were often required to learn by heart. And then there were the French films that reached the country during the first half of the Shōwa period (1926–1989): Sous les toits de Paris, A nous la liberté, Quatorze Juillet, Le grand jeu, Pension Mimosas, Un carnet de bal, Pépé le Moko. Rendered into Japanese, these titles became embedded in the Japanese psyche, reflecting the widespread infatuation with France around that time. Songs like “Quand refleuriront les lilas blancs” and “Mon Paris,” routinely performed on the all-female stage of the Takarazuka Revue—whose audience was also nearly all female—became so popular that even men who usually had no interest in such trifles could hum the tunes. Moreover, after Japan’s defeat in World War II, Shiga Naoya, a novelist often referred to—for reasons I personally cannot fathom—as shōsetsu no kamisama (patron saint of novels), made an astounding comment. After arguing that the Japanese people started the disastrous war in large part because they were using the Japanese language, he suggested that they abandon their language altogether and adopt French: “Perhaps Japan should take the leap and adopt the world’s best, most beautiful language as its national language. I think French would best serve the purpose.”2 If only the French had known, he might have been awarded the Legion of Honor.
It was after the end of World War II that the decline of France finally became evident to everyone, including the Japanese. The end of the war marked the decline not just of France but of Europe as well. The United States, already the world’s richest nation before the war, did not suffer from air raids; with its factories and infrastructures intact, its economic superiority became even more prominent. During the immediate postwar years, the country’s GDP amounted to approximately half that of the world (today it is a little less than one-third). At the same time, war-weary people around the world hungrily consumed American culture through the media of music, film, and television, and the world’s cultural center shifted from Europe to the United States. Japan, occupied by the United States, became virtually an American colony.
Still, French culture managed to bloom one more time. If American culture was for the masses, French culture still held sway over educated and semi-educated Japanese. In the 1950s, existentialism was the craze, and every college student was familiar with the names Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, along with that of the chanteuse Juliette Greco. Then in the 1970s, when structuralism and then poststructuralism became trendy, works by the next generation of French philosophers and writers were widely and reverently read by the Japanese, who joined in the critique of Western metaphysics quite as if forgetting that they themselves were not Westerners. French cultural influence remained strong until the mid-1980s, and at its core proudly stood, as it had always stood, la gloire of the French language.
When frequenting Paris as a student in the 1970s, I was struck by the difference between Japanese students who came to the United States and those who came to France. Those who came to America did so with the purpose of mastering a particular subject, be it journalism or nuclear science; English was merely a means to achieve that goal. Conversely, most of those who came to France did so with the sole purpose of learning French and just being there. Their highest goal in life seemed to be sitting in an outdoor café smoking Gauloises and speaking French like a native. In retrospect, that the French language no longer functioned as a means to learn something else portended its dark future.
Consider what has happened to the French language since then. Today a Japanese person who “should like to go to France” can board a direct flight from Tokyo and arrive the same day, for the kind of money a college student earns on the side. At the same time, the decline in the prestige of French as the language of high culture has become all too apparent. Books written in French will certainly continue to exert influence, but it is now difficult to imagine a whole intellectual movement originating in France that would gain the momentum it once did. (The decline of the humanities in general only adds to the decline of the power of the French language.) Woe to those around the world who have devoted years of their lives to learning French. Woe to the girl I used to be, holed up in her room listening to “Voilà Monsieur Thibault” while letting go to waste the privilege of growing up in the United States. But woe most of all to the French themselves.
The illustrious history of the French language is carved into the French mind since childhood; there is no way the French would stand back and allow their language to fall without a fight. Politicians travel to former French colonies around the world—Quebec, Haiti, Martinique, Vietnam, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Madagascar—to deliver speeches in beautiful incantatory French and mesmerize audiences in an effort to preserve these regions as Francophone. Yet that is no longer the real issue. Now the urgent priority is preventing the French language from falling in France itself.
France made the decision to protect its language and turned doing so into a national project. The Toubon Law, named after a minister of culture, was mandated in 1994 and enforces the use of French in government documents, public announcements, commercials, state-funded schools, workplaces, and so on. French television stations are under obligation to allocate at least 40 percent of airtime to programs produced in France. French films receive hefty state subsidies to counterbalance the onslaught of Hollywood films. The Académie française—whose honorable members are known as les immortels because they are to ensure the excellence of the language in perpetuity—is valiantly trying to stem the invasion of English loanwords by recommending French alternatives: logiciel for “software,” courriel for “e-mail.” But no amount of effort can stem the flood of English at this point. Today it is both a sign of distinction and a pastime among French intellectuals to lament the fall of the French language.
Yet I am certain of one thing. However much French intellectuals bemoan the fall of their language, it would never occur to them to compare French with a language like Japanese, much less to think of the two as being on a par. After all, French is French. How could anyone dare compare it with a language spoken in the Far East by people whose culture is marginal, a language that has no global resonance whatsoever, a language written with the strangest set of signs—in a word, a language that appears thoroughly incapable of embodying l’esprit cartésien. And yet, with the emergence of English as the most powerful lingua franca, French and Japanese are no different in one critical point: neither language is English.
Was this one of those instances that fulfilled the palm reader’s prediction that I am fated to have ties with foreign countries? Several years before my stay in Iowa, I was given a chance to urge French intellectuals to face this rather humiliating reality when an invitation came to give a talk at a symposium in Paris. I had not been there in over a decade. Well pleased to be summoned back as a novelist to that magical city where I had previously stayed only as a student or a tourist, I snapped up the chance. I decided moreover to speak in French: for once in my life, I would actually put to use the language that I had spent precious time learning. I retrieved one French word after another from my rusted memory, checked my spelling in a dictionary, and had my draft reviewed by a French teacher at Berlitz before my departure. As always, I traveled economy class, which, as always, felt like being transported in a prison van or a cattle truck; but once I set foot in Paris, I was greeted with boulevards shimmering with new leaves and skies gloriously liberated from the dark of winter. It was in the month of May, just when the city so beautiful to begin with becomes more beautiful still.
“Time” being the theme of the symposium, I organized my discussion around the notion of time—temporality—and gave it a title: “La littérature moderne japonaise: Deux temps” (Modern Japanese literature: Dual temporalities). Here is what I said.3
THE TALK IN PARIS
I am not a courageous woman. But I have decided to be one just once in my life. So here I am, having decided to speak to you in French—in my rudimentary French. I will read slowly, trying to pronounce each word as clearly as I can. This is the first time that I have ever spoken French in front of an audience. This is the first time that I have ever spoken French in front of a French audience. To mark what is for me a very special occasion, I would like to begin by recalling my first encounter with the French language.
What was the first French expression that I learned?
It was Par Avion, which I wrote on a postcard to my father who was on a business trip to the United States. I was still a child. I still lived in Tokyo. “Why do I have to write in French?” I asked. “There is an agreement between countries to use French in international mail” was the response I got. Maybe it was my mother, or maybe it was the clerk at the post office; I no longer remember. At the time, even English was an unfamiliar language for me, let alone French. From then on, every time I wrote the words Par Avion my heart fluttered with excitement. A few years later, just after I entered secondary school, my father was transferred to New York, and I moved there with my family. Too proud and too cowardly to restart life as an Asian girl in America—for we were not immigrants—I stubbornly resisted getting along either with the United States or with the English language. I kept writing Par Avion on the envelopes that I now was sending to Japan. And every time I did so, I felt as if I were battling against the English language, which surrounded me and invaded me from every corner. The battle lasted for a long time—for a very long time. Even after I finally returned to Japan, I kept writing Par Avion.
But one day it all came to an end. I was no longer writing Par Avion. I was writing “Air Mail.” This transition must have occurred sometime in the mid-1980s, without my being quite aware of it. I stopped writing Par Avion one day. I simply stopped, just like that. Perhaps French was still the official language of international mail, but such a fine point seemed superfluous. No use resisting English. Needless to say, this transition from Par Avion to “Air Mail” corresponded with a larger transition that was taking place in the world. I would venture so far as to claim that it was a radical transition that would not leave any writers unaffected, regardless of the language they wrote in, be it French, Japanese, or even English.
Let me try to explain myself by going back a little in time.
In 1868, the isolationist Edo shogunate, which reigned over Japan for more than 250 years, finally came to an end. The Meiji Emperor took over power in what is called the Meiji Restoration, and Japan officially opened its doors to the West. Innumerable changes proceeded to take place in the country. One of them was the change in Japanese awareness of time—of temporality—which is directly related to the subject of this symposium. This awareness also concerns modern Japanese literature.
For Japanese people before 1868, Europeans were little more than curious beasts, strange and incomprehensible. Then, after the Meiji Restoration, everything changed. Along with European science and technology, European art flooded into Japan, all forms of it representing themselves as the universal—and most advanced—model. The same was true of novels. The Japanese, with characteristic diligence, began to read masterpieces of European literature, first in the original and then in translation. And such is the power of literature that through the act of reading, little by little the Japanese came to live the lives of Europeans as if they were their own. They began to live the ambitions of Julien Sorel, the happiness of Jane Eyre, the sufferings of young Werther, and the despair of Anna Karenina as if they were their own. They thus began living a new temporality—that which flows in the West, dictated by the Gregorian calendar, marked by major historical events in the West. And by so doing, they eventually joined what the Europeans called “humanity.”
Bravo to my ancestors!
And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital “T,” which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small “t,” which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it’s not because Japanese people now had to live in two temporalities. It’s rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world—the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular.
Whereas the Japanese who joined humanity began also to live in universal, Western temporality, people in the West did not live in Japanese temporality. Japanese temporality was merely particular. In fact, since modernity, all educated people in the world have come to live in Western temporality in one way or another. Yet only the Japanese lived in Japanese temporality (with the exception of those colonized by the former Japanese Empire who had no choice but to live in even more complicated temporalities). Japan’s entry into humanity meant living in this asymmetrical relationship.
Let’s take my mother as an example.
Everyone is young once. Even my mother, who now walks with a cane, was a young woman before World War II. Like other modern city girls of the day, she passionately loved everything Western—music, fashion, food. It didn’t matter what it was, she just loved it all. And this was because she loved reading foreign novels (in translation) and watching foreign films. Gérard Philippe and Gary Cooper were her Prince Charmings. My mother no doubt identified with the heroines on the silver screen and whispered softly to herself: “I am just as beautiful, just as elegant, just as passionate as them. Someday someone will fall head over heels in love with me, too; I will be loved, just like them.” Yes, my mother was a bit vain when it came to her looks (and she still is).
Yet how different her life was from the lives of those heroines! She lived in a small row house made of wood and paper. She slept on the floor, on a thin futon, and not on the bed that she kept pleading for. But above all, her daily humiliation and frustration revolved around the presence of her mother—my grandmother—who was old, shamelessly shabby looking, and virtually illiterate. A former geisha, my grandmother could play the shamisen, a traditional three-stringed musical instrument; she could also perform traditional Japanese dance. But, alas! She couldn’t even make an omelette! Naturally, she’d never read a single European novel. When she had to accompany my mother to movie theaters playing foreign films—girls’ schools often required an adult chaperone—she wouldn’t understand a thing and would immediately fall asleep. She would even snore. My mother’s eyes would fill with tears. But this was the life my mother had to live. What a wretched life! The novels and films that gave her so much joy also inflicted on her no small amount of pain.
You will tell me that there always exists a chasm between the world depicted in novels and films and the world that people actually live in. It is the chasm between the world mediated by art and the world unmediated by art, formless and drab. You are absolutely right. The gap that my mother felt was not necessarily any deeper than the gap felt by a European girl who loved books and films. Yet there is one critical difference. For in my mother’s case, the chasm between the world of art and real life also symbolized something more: the asymmetrical relationship I mentioned earlier—the asymmetrical relationship between those who live in only a universal temporality and those who live in both a universal and a particular one.
To make this discussion a little more concrete, let me introduce a character named Françoise. Françoise is a young Parisienne living before World War II. Like my mother, she loves reading books and watching films. Also like my mother, she lives in a small apartment with her mother, who is old, shabby looking, and illiterate. One day Françoise, full of artistic aspirations, writes an autobiographical novel. It is the tale of her life torn between the world of art and the world of reality. (Not an original tale, I must say.) The novel is well received in France. Several hundred Japanese living in Japan read this novel in French, and one of them decides to translate it into Japanese. My mother reads the novel. She identifies with the heroine and says to herself, “This girl is just like me!” Moved, my mother, also full of artistic aspirations, writes her own autobiography. That novel is well received in Japan but is not translated into French—or any other European language, for that matter. The number of Europeans who read Japanese is just too small. Therefore, only Japanese readers can share the plight of my mother’s life. For other readers in the world, it’s as if her novel never existed. It’s as if she herself never existed. Even if my mother had written her novel first, Françoise would never have read it and been moved by it.
The difference between Françoise and my mother demonstrates the fundamental difference created by the asymmetrical relationship. Those who live only in the universal temporality can make their voices heard by the world. Those who simultaneously live in the universal and particular temporalities may hear voices from the other side, but they cannot make their own voices heard. They can only participate passively in the universal temporality, however much they may wish otherwise. This asymmetry can ultimately be reduced to the asymmetry between the two languages. French, and not Japanese, was the common language between the two. And this linguistic asymmetry itself can ultimately be reduced to a numerical asymmetry. In my mother’s lifetime, for every French person who read Japanese there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who read French and could translate it. The fact that far more Japanese read both languages formed the very condition and base of the asymmetrical relationship between the universal and the particular.
Did all this asymmetry discourage Japanese writers from writing in Japanese, in a language so devoid of universality? The answer is no. On the contrary, Europe inspired them with a concept they had not known before: that of national literature. Europe, needless to say, is far from being a monolithic entity. Through the course of history, European people gradually came to live in the common temporality, but Europe itself has long been a region characterized by cultural and, more important, linguistic diversity. Naturally, that diversity was not lost on the Japanese when they joined humanity. Writers read a variety of European languages; translators translated from an even greater variety. This linguistic diversity in Europe reinforced in the minds of the Japanese the newly imported concept of national language, a language inseparably linked to a nation-state, founded—supposedly—on common ethnic blood and history. This concept of national language, in turn, reinforced in the Japanese mind the newly imported concept of national literature, particular to each nation-state. Japanese writers—who had no choice but to live in the two temporalities, to live in the asymmetrical relationship, and to remain silent in universal temporality—could at least identify with European writers, for like them they too were writing for their national literature. They wrote with great passion, leading to the flowering of Japanese literature, and a handful of those works became known in the West through translation.
Then everything changed, as the rise of English gradually called into question the significance of writing for a national literature.
When did the change start?
Back when Columbus discovered America in 1492, Portugal and Spain controlled the seas. Even when England defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, nothing was yet determined. When Puritans from England arrived on the American shore in the Mayflower in 1620, Spanish, French, and Dutch colonists were also settling on the shores of the same continent, and the Dutch, by then the dominant sea power, were engaged in the world’s first global commerce through the Dutch East India Company. England became the dominant sea power only in the eighteenth century; but the eventual triumph of the English language was still by no means assured. Ironically for you French ladies and gentlemen, the fate of your language may have been sealed by your having been ahead of your time and leading the rest of Europe with your revolution of 1789. The French Revolution gave rise to the formation of coalitions among European monarchs to attack the newly created republic, leading to the Napoleonic Wars. And it might well have been the consequences of these Napoleonic Wars, themselves the consequences of the French Revolution, that destined the English language to replace French eventually as the most powerful universal language.
For what happened because of the wars Napoleon waged and lost? First, Britain, with its strong rival France finally out of the way, emerged as the world’s leading power for the next hundred-odd years—years that coincided with the age of imperialism. At its height, the British Empire covered nearly one-quarter of the planet, whereas the French Empire, the second largest, covered only one-tenth. English naturally became the lingua franca of the British Empire. Second, the United States as we know it emerged through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when Napoleon sold off the vast French territories in the heart of North America to secure funds to wage war against Britain. The sale was made at the astonishingly low price of three cents per acre (under fifty cents per acre in today’s currency). The Louisiana Purchase meant that the United States, which until then had been clustered on the Atlantic shore, at once doubled in size and could then sweep farther on, acquiring fertile territories westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean without having to fight the mighty French army. When Britain’s supremacy finally declined in the twentieth century after World War II, who should inherit the title of the world’s leading power but the United States, another English-speaking country, ultimately making the English language circulate beyond the boundaries of former British colonies.
Today, a Japanese person speaking to a French person would use English as a matter of course. And the French have no choice but to answer in kind. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today. No language has ever been as completely and absolutely dominant. Moreover, once the spread of a language gains momentum, it follows its own logic of propagation, independent of the economic, political, or military power that first propelled it onto the stage. Regardless of the future that awaits the United States, the hegemony of the English language can only expand in the years to come. The number of bilinguals—those who communicate with the outside world by using English—can only expand as well.
Now, where do novelists come into all this? A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist’s mother tongue. A novel not written in the novelist’s mother tongue tends to be taken less seriously as a work of literature. This inevitably puts novelists today, even those writing in major languages, in a sorry position—except for those whose mother tongue is English. A great chasm divides the two. The asymmetry is stark.
To be sure, novelists writing in English have their own lament. They will argue that most of the English language now circulating globally—in academia, journalism, commerce, Hollywood, the Internet—is impoverished, degenerate, and uprooted. They have to wage war from day to day against facile English. Yes, I will reply, but you see, waging war against inane language that circulates almost automatically is a writer’s eternal mission, and the day will never come when those battles are unnecessary. As a novelist who writes in Japanese, I have no sympathy for their complaints; they would certainly not dream of trading places with me.
Just think. Just think of all the readers who could go ahead and read your work in the original if you wrote in English. Aside from all those whose mother tongue is English, there are even more potential readers throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, those who truly make the English language circulate as the universal language. For literature, they are the readers that truly count, being almost invariably the best-educated and best-read members of society. As bilinguals, they also translate what they read into their other language. Both in the original and in translation, whether recent works or classics, novels written in English are increasingly dominating the world and can only continue to do so.
The act of writing is not mere masturbation. It is the writer’s delivery of words somewhere far beyond the world right before her, beyond the world that surrounds her—beyond the immediate world of here and now. By delivering our words to an unknown future and space, we writers share them with our true readers—our spiritual comrades—people that we never have met and never will. The written word can overcome barriers in ways no spoken words can, and English written words are doing precisely that on a scale heretofore unimaginable. Take the case of Jane Austen, my favorite writer in English. If she found out how many spiritual comrades she has in the world today, she’d be embarrassed, even shocked. For while she was an ironist with a sharp tongue, she was also a perfect lady with a strong sense of modesty.
And that is not all. English no longer belongs to this or that group of people but to everyone who wishes to use it. At a certain point in history, the language became disconnected from its past. When those in the former British colonies first began to write in English, English must have felt like someone else’s language. When the descendants of slaves, refugees, or immigrants first began to write in English, the same must have been true. Yet as those people swelled in number, English evolved into a language that everyone could claim as their own. English is no longer a national language, and texts written in English are no longer national literature. Today novelists using English, whether they be Canadian, Indian, or Nigerian, are novelists in a universal language. Inevitably, little by little, more will defy the notion of there being a special tie binding novels and one’s mother tongue and choose to start writing novels in English if, by chance or effort, they acquire sufficient mastery of the language.
Which brings me to make this pronouncement.
My heart goes out to novelists who are writing in French today. No, I ought to be more honest. My heart is filled with discreet joy when I think about their new predicament. For I now have the pleasure of having such fine people join my company. I will cry out to them with my arms wide open:
Welcome! Welcome to my side of the asymmetrical relationship! You used to be on the other side, on the dominant side. No, you used to be more than that. Because of your past splendor, you were often the very symbol of that dominant side. Yet, alas, you are now sadly in the same sorry camp as me. You too are now made to live in two temporalities: the universal temporality that flows in texts written in English, and the particular temporality that flows in texts written in your own language. Like much of the world’s population, you too can easily hear the voices of those who speak in the universal temporality, but you can no longer easily make your own voices heard. Moreover, this asymmetry does not end there. It even robs you of your past splendor. That’s right. Until just a while ago, Racine was a figure on a par with Shakespeare. But look where he is now. Most high school students in the world—which has now come to include the whole non-West as well—are probably familiar with the name of Shakespeare. But what about Racine? Who is he? Probably only a very few high school students anywhere have heard his name. I am afraid their number may eventually dwindle to the number of those who have heard the name of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji. What a shocking demise!
Yes, this is the pronouncement I would humbly make to novelists who write in French today. The asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West will continue to exist. That is inevitable. However, now, on top of it is added a new and in some ways equally fundamental layer of asymmetrical relationship: the asymmetrical relationship between the world of English and the world of non-English.
Now, please forgive my impudence and allow me to use the word “we” when talking about French novelists and myself. What could we do? What on earth could we do as novelists? The answer is, clearly, nothing. Even if we know that our voices will not reach the wider world, that doesn’t stop any of us from writing in our own language. There’s the desire—the psychological necessity—to do so. There’s also the pleasure. Desire and pleasure combined are more than enough reason for any undertaking. And yet I would like to ask if there may not be some special gift endowed only to those of us who do not write in English. I dare say that there is.
If we were to compare ourselves with novelists who write in English, we might find our minds infused with countless unsavory sentiments such as jealousy, ill-will, anger, despair, and apathy, as if we had opened Pandora’s box. Yet, just as “hope” was left inside the box, there is one thing left for us. On this one point, we have absolute superiority over novelists who write in English. For those of us who know we are living in this asymmetry are the only ones condemned to perpetually reflect upon language, the only ones forced to know that the English language cannot dictate “truths” and that there are other “truths” in this world that cannot be perceived through the English language. Of course, I am sure that many novelists writing in English also reflect upon language just like we do. Yet they are not condemned to do so in the way that we are.
They are not condemned to know, for instance, that the works that are usually translated into English are those that are both thematically and linguistically the easiest to translate, that often only reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language, and preferably that entertain readers with just the right kind of exoticism. They are not condemned to know that there is thus a perpetual hermeneutic circle—that in interpreting the world, only “truths” that can be perceived in English exist as “truths.” They are not condemned to know that this hermeneutic circle is further consolidated by the honorable Nobel Prize in Literature, which inevitably suppresses all the problems inherent in the act of translation. Only we are condemned. Only we are forced to constantly reflect that when Proust’s maman is replaced by “mom” or “mother,” the very “time” that Proust retrieved is not the same. Similarly, replace my mother’s kaasan with “mom” or “mother,” and her story is not the same. Fortunately, I am not here today to represent contemporary Japanese writers. I do not know what they think about the things I have been talking about. I don’t even know if they ever think about them. Yet everything I write is in one way or another haunted by the thought that I am writing in Japanese, that I am living in the asymmetrical relationship I have described. And this has much to do with my own personal history.
To use my remaining time effectively, let me briefly talk about my novel Shishōsetsu from left to right (An I-novel from left to right), published in 1995. In both its content and its form, this novel most directly addresses the question: What does it mean to write in Japanese in this day and age? The Japanese word shishōsetsu refers to a fictionalized autobiographical work, and my novel is just that. It’s a story about a Japanese woman who left her native country as a girl and moved to the United States with her family. Instead of making the United States her new home, she turns her back on it, shuts herself up in her room, and spends every day reading Japanese novels. After twenty years of living in the United States—twenty years during which she absurdly rejects her new country while hesitating to return home—she finally decides one day to go back to Japan and become a writer.
Ever since Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, what can be called “how-I-became-a-writer” stories have flourished in the world. Shishōsetsu from left to right is no doubt a variant. You may even detect in my novel that self-complacent, self-congratulatory tone that is characteristic of such stories. Yet my novel is also something else. For it is not just a how-I-became-a-writer story; it is also a how-I-became-a-Japanese-writer story. And this story is inseparably connected to another story that runs parallel to it and yet is a far more sober tale, full of regret: a how-I-failed-to-become-a-writer-in-the-English-language story. The female protagonist of Shishōsetsu from left to right went to the United States at a privileged age, a time when she was still young enough to adopt a new language and make it her own. Why was she so fixated on the Japanese language—a language that does not even belong to a major linguistic family, one that’s used only in an island country in the Far East, one that’s singularly isolated? In other words, why didn’t she choose to adopt English? Why didn’t she choose “correctly,” like many others who moved to the United States at an age similar to hers—those who are now writing how-I-became-an-English-writer stories? How did she end up making such a terribly wrong choice? Why did it never even occur to her that she had such a choice until the choice was forever lost?
Why? It is true that as an Asian living in the United States, she felt she was an outsider. It is perhaps also true that she was too proud or too cowardly, afraid of the humiliation that necessarily accompanies the experience of learning a new language. Yet these sociological or psychological reasons are not sufficient to explain what in the last analysis represents a profoundly literary phenomenon. For what made the protagonist persevere in her resistance to English was the act of reading Japanese. The more she immersed herself in Japanese novels, the more irrevocably she turned her back on English. It was in reading that she encountered the irreducible material difference of the Japanese language from English, making it acutely uncomfortable for her to live in two worlds, to live with two subjectivities.
Hence the peculiar form of Shishōsetsu from left to right. As the awkward bilingual title indicates, the novel has some English phrases and sentences scattered here and there; to a limited extent, it is a bilingual novel. To realize the coexistence of the two languages—to allow the novel to be read without having to turn the book around—the novel is written horizontally, from left to right, unlike a typical Japanese novel that is written vertically, from top to bottom. It even begins with an overdramatic sentence in English: “Alas! Twenty years since the Exodus!”
I hoped, through this bilingual form, to attest to the linguistic asymmetry that I have been talking about. Any writer writing in English, even if she herself knew some Japanese, could not possibly expect her readers to understand Japanese phrases and sentences scattered in her novel. In contrast, any writer writing in a language other than English can reasonably expect her readers to understand some, if not most, of the English words she might happen to throw in. It would therefore be possible to replicate the bilingual form of Shishōsetsu from left to right in any language in the world—be it Korean, Bengali, or French—by translating the Japanese and leaving the English parts as they are. The only language in which this wouldn’t work would be English. If we leave the English sentences as they are, how are we to replicate the bilingual form in the translation? Yet into what language are we to translate the English words and sentences? Indeed, the very impossibility of maintaining the bilingual form while translating the work into English, and the singularity of that impossibility, are clear testimony to the linguistic asymmetry we now face in this world.
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.
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.