Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing

by Polly Barton

In this dazzling debut, Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator. Written in fifty semi-discrete entries, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language that draws together a variety of cultural reflections – from conformity and being an outsider, to the gendering of Japanese society, and attitudes towards food and the cult of ‘deliciousness’ – alongside probing insights into the transformative powers of language-learning. Candid, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is remarkable work that takes a transparent look at language itself, lifting the lid on the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language.

Genres: Nonfiction, Japan, Memoir, Language, Essays, Travel, Linguistics

384 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 2021

About the author

Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her debut book Fifty Sounds , a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021. In 2022, Fifty Sounds was shortlisted for the 2022 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury).

Her new book, Porn: An Oral History , will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in March 2023 and La Nave di Teseo (Italy).

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5* rounded up.

Another winner from Fitzcarraldo Essay collection.

I’ve been fascinated by the Japanese since childhood, ever since I read Shogun. In time, I explored also the less positive aspects of their culture but, overall, I still admire them. I’ve read a healthy number of novels written by Japanese authors or about the country but never tried a non-fiction book.

Polly Barton is a translator from Japanese and Fifty Sounds is the memoir of her years spent in the country and how she came to go there. After finishing her degree in Philosophy with a thesis on Wittgenstein (told you I will revisit this guy), she does not know what her next steps should be. She applies to become an English teacher in Japan without any experience in the field and minimal knowledge of Japanese. She gets admitted and her life is changed forever. Her time in Japan is happy but mostly frustrating. She slowly falls in love with Japan and his people, even though she is constantly hits the wall of cultural differences. The memoir contains quite a bit of philosophy, most of it coming from Wittgenstein’s work. I unexpectedly welcomed that part and I know a bit more about the philosopher. It is also book about language and its deep meanings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author and it went very well in this case. Usually I prefer professionals whispering in my ear, but it was nice to hear Polly, especially while pronouncing the Japanese sounds.

[Jola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yum-yum: the sound of Jola devouring Polly Barton's book, often feeling euphoric, albeit not liking it as much as she wished.

Too much Polly Barton and Ludwig Wittgenstein, too little Japan. This is my general impression after having read Fifty Sounds (2021). The issue I had with this book was the distance between me and Polly Barton. Sometimes she was either...
⟹ Too far, hiding behind Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language, which is enthralling, but I found her fascination overwhelming, especially in the first part of the book.
⇒ Too close. I would prefer more observations on Japan to the snippets of Polly Barton's love life. I was looking forward to basking in the sounds of the Land of the Rising Sun, not necessarily eavesdropping behind the author's bedroom door.

I was not thrilled by Polly Barton's self-indulgence and her tendency to feel victimized, nonetheless there were things in Fifty Sounds which I absolutely adored. Most importantly, the creative idea behind the book which gave it a unique, poetic structure: it consists of fifty vignettes, each devoted to a different Japanese onomatopoeia. I also admire the author's erudition and her linguistic skills. Frankly speaking, I fell in love with Fifty Sounds at the stage of reading the blurb for the first time and bought the book immediately after it had been released which goes to prove how infatuated I got.

I think Fifty Sounds will appeal more to the readers who are into the philosophy of language, teaching and learning foreign languages and translation than to those keen on Japan. The hunger of the latter might not be fully satisfied. As for Japan, Polly Barton is in a love-and-hate relationship with this intriguing country which attracts and repels her at the same time. The story of her affair with Y, a Japanese teacher, encapsulates that. It constantly feels as if she were enamoured of someone distant, cold and demanding but concurrently bewitching: I am in a pseudo-romantic relationship with Japan, which is jealous, intense and full of burning, flailing ego. Her fixation is not blind though. For instance, she wonders why Japan, being such a well-off country, accepts so few asylum seekers.

Besides, I loved the author's writing style and her reflections on learning a foreign language. They are not only spot-on but also beautiful. Just a few examples:
The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover.
If language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.
My body was alive with the sounds it had collected up throughout the day. When I shut my eyes in bed at night I was souped in them, sounds that hovered between known and unknown, as if comprehensibility were not in fact the currency in which my brain dealt any more, and what was being processed was rather the rhythms.

Needless to say, the best way to put Polly Barton's opinions on Japan, the Japanese and their language to the test would be to simply go there. Hopefully, I will do it in the future, provided Oscar Wild was wrong when he declared: In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.


David Burliuk, On the Beach, Japan.

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literary translator Polly Barton’s book’s composed of a number of intertwining threads all originating in a move to Japan in her early twenties to take up a position teaching English. She ties together a highly individualised exploration of language learning with snippets of memoir, diversions into analytical philosophy - mainly late Wittgenstein - and a slightly bewildering assortment of vignettes commenting on Japanese language, culture and society. I found the end result fascinating and frustrating in equal parts. At sentence level Barton’s writing frequently impressed me, and scattered throughout there were numerous passages that really resonated. I also liked Barton’s innovative method of structuring material based on Japanese onomatopoeic or mimetic language: each of the fifty sections focuses on a particular example which frames or represents an experience or an encounter, so “moja-moja” which suggests sheep’s hair, or the kind of frazzled hairdo associated with Struwwelpeter, inspires a brief account of how her Japanese students reacted to Barton’s curly hair. But I wanted more clarity about other choices, particularly her reliance on Wittgenstein as a foundation for discussing language and culture – beyond the fact that she happened to study him at university. I thought her account of his work was quite dry and slightly opaque, ultimately too basic to be much more than ornamental. And it bothered me that she didn’t clearly distinguish between its impact/relevance in terms of philosophy of language or its later deployment in areas of linguistics especially discourse analysis. And Wittgenstein in the linguistics context seemed to make far more sense for what she’s trying to talk about here. So, his inclusion just felt like an attempt to lend weight to her personal observations about her immersion in Japan and its language.

Barton provides continuity by telling her own story chronologically, starting with her initial move to Japan and ending with her final return to England, but her analysis of how language might operate, the complex relations between language and identity or language and culture, is far less systematic, slowly fading into the background as Barton’s account of her life in Japan progresses. Instead, Barton’s own messy, entangled relationship with Japan and, notably, her married lover Y starts to dominate. This portion of the book definitely compensated for the drier elements of her earlier discussion but there was a tendency for it to tip over into an overly effusive, confessional mode with Japan as the backdrop for Barton’s turbulent emotional state, and I just didn’t find that an engaging prospect. I was hugely relieved each time she returned to talking about more concrete aspects of Japanese language or society. I also found some of Barton’s observations remarkably naïve, and off-putting. Her thoughts about her Japanese lover Y seemed perilously close to replicating the kind of Western exoticisation of Japan and its culture that Barton tries so hard to distance herself from - for example her ideas about ‘British’ sex and, by implication, the contrasting ‘Japanese’ sex she has with her lover Y, which seemed to communicate more about her sexual encounters before coming to Japan than it raised anything of any substance about sex and cultural difference. And there was something quite staged and stagey about her representation of her time with Y, although admittedly this is something she later tries to address. And even though Barton gradually, and increasingly, laid bare her own feelings, and the intense conflict between attachment and alienation that Japan arouses in her, there was something missing, almost slippery, about how she presented herself, so I didn’t feel that I got any closer to understanding or relating to her as a person, and towards the end I wasn’t really sure I wanted to.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is it like not only to learn another language, but to live in it? As someone who can only speak/read English and has never been particularly good at languages, it’s not something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. But Polly Barton’s memoir is so thoroughly immersive that I now feel I know something of what it is to have the experiences she describes.

Barton didn’t set out to become a translator: she studied philosophy at Cambridge before applying, almost on a whim, for a programme to teach English in Japan, which saw her assigned to the small island of Sado. Fifty Sounds is an extended attempt to answer the question ‘why Japan?’, chronicling her experiences in the country alongside a guide to the entwined intricacies of language and culture. It’s a tale of self-discovery, of loving a country that often seems reluctant to reciprocate, of how learning a language can be a personal revolution.

There were times when I got nervous about where the narrative was going, feeling that I wasn’t up to the task of understanding it – philosophy often forms a framework for Barton’s understanding of her circumstances; she writes of the difficulties of explaining Wittgenstein’s work to a neophyte. But the writing is also so humane, and the result is both more revelatory and much easier to understand than any critical theory I’ve read, showing in practical, real terms how fundamentally language shapes one’s world. Barton takes these complex ideas and ties them down to the reality of a sentence, an experience, and in the process they come to make perfect sense (even to the neophyte, which in this case is me).

Fifty Sounds is an especially effective type of memoir: the kind that makes a part of you immediately want to do the thing it describes, while another part simultaneously rejoices in the fact that you haven’t done the thing and never will. It is also, unexpectedly, type of book I really needed to read right now, as I go stir-crazy living alone in lockdown; I would never have have guessed how much emotional solace I would draw from this story, which turns out to be largely about being an outsider twice over. And on top of being surely one of the most readable memoirs ever, it’s made me really keen to read more of Barton’s translations.

I received an advance review copy of Fifty Sounds from the publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.

TinyLetter | Linktree

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover; it is streams of sounds pouring in and striking off scattershot associations in a manner so chaotic and out of control that you are taken by the desire to block your ears—except that even when you do block your ears, your head remains an echo chamber. ‘

The moment I finished reading Barton’s book, I knew it’s a book that I am definitely going to read again at some point later. Barton’s book deserves more than 5 stars. If I think of Kawase Hasui’s ‘Night Sea’ right now – I will have to say that Barton’s book deserves more stars than the bright splatter of stars against the pitch-black skies in that painting. And then even more, and more. While I’ve always had an endless admiration for the art of literary translation, Barton’s writing just made me love everything about it even more. There is so much humanity and intimacy involved in the art of translation that is so often overlooked. Learning and practising language(s) are lifelong acts. Fluency is an illusion because language is not a ‘fixed’ thing.

‘Another place where people burdened by a sense of the inescapable mire of inauthenticity might seek refuge is in the bosom of another culture. Your own language is irrevocably sullied, you feel; there is too much irony, fraudulence, and you have been too deeply steeped in it. You need a new start. You need a retreat—which, as Barthes characterizes, the foreign environment obligingly provides: The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection…’

‘I still remember the illicit delight I felt at reading about the evolution of Yukio Mishima’s “bad habit,” his insatiable appetite for pictures of wounded, melancholic, muscular men in the mold of St. Sebastian, and the abject horror he had felt, after swooning over a picture of what he thought was a strapping young knight, at discovering that it was in fact Jeanne d’Arc. I liked the extremity of it all, this whiff of austerity and bleakness that I sensed there, as in the Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburō Ōe novels I’d been reading at A’s instigation. Japan seemed like a place where everything was a secret, until it very much wasn’t, and that was attractive to me.’

The word, ‘otaku’ is a strange one. I suppose essentially it means a ‘nerd’, but then it could either be affectionately said, endearing, or even derogatory. It reminds me of a ‘radio interview’ of ‘Yonezu Kenshi’ (a musician I came to like a few months ago) , and he mentioned that he’s an ‘otaku’; and because I like his music, I instantly associated that word with something ‘positive’. ‘Otaku’ doesn’t have to be just about ‘anime’ and/or ‘manga’. And I think if you’re not some kind of ‘otaku’, then you probably don’t enjoy or love anything very much. But I suppose ‘otaku’ has that strange connection to the act of loving something enough to make you ‘unproductive’, which is probably why our capitalist society constantly makes us think of it as something ‘bad’/socially immoral – to quote Barton, ‘chronic reclusiveness, something close to a mental illness’.

‘…if we do define being a geek in terms of finding yourself socially impaired in some way, then we should also stipulate that the payoff is the richness of that inner world, and that the same can maybe be said for standing in between cultures. So maybe in some way I am a geek…because I can make these silly jokes to myself and laugh at them in a way that other people would find incomprehensible, and I’m a geek because I pay some form of social toll. But probably especially I’m a geek because I feel that even if it alienates me in the circles in which I move, that seems like a fair price to pay for what I’ve gained in return.’

Judging from her writing, it’s hard to deny that Barton loves ‘Japan’ – if not literally, then literarily, linguistically, and even ‘spiritually’. And I think that’s the most intimate and sincere way of loving a ‘place’. I am obsessed about how meticulous Barton is about her expression of her feelings about well, just about anything. Does being an experienced literary translator grant you that kind of ‘skill’? Or do you just have to never stop practising/embracing being a more considerate, empathetic, and sensitive person?

‘For a long time, and particularly of late, it has worried me that I don’t love Japan in the way other people around me do; that all I really like is the language. Now it comes to me that the language has never been anything other than a collection of people, real and fictional, whom I’ve felt assorted affections for. If I’ve loved Japanese, I’ve done so because I’ve loved the glimpses of people I’ve caught through it. Which is why, I suppose, my feeling for Japan and its language has always been hot, and embodied, and inappropriate; it has been atsu-atsu. In this moment, at least, I can stand behind it and say not just this is how it has been, but that is probably how it will always be.’

It’s interesting to me that Barton wrote about the reality show, ‘Terrace House’. I used to watch it with someone I no longer speak to anymore. We didn’t finish it, and so I didn’t end up watching/finishing it either. And after all, it’s one of those shows that is only bare tolerable, and at least absurdly funny when you watch it with someone else. We didn’t watch it to the point where the ‘couples’ were matched up so I was unaware of ‘kabe-don’ scenes Barton referred to. A tricky term as it could either be used in a romantic/sexual sense or a rape-ey/aggressive way depending on the people involved and how they feel about each other. At first glance, it seems just like as a rice ‘dish’ to me – like ‘ten-don’ (rice with fritters) or ‘una-don’ (rice with eel).

‘In the Japanese reality TV show Terrace House, a contestant who shows early and consistent signs of being a sexual predator and whose actions subsequently provoke an arguably overdue Japan Times article entitled “It’s Time to Talk About ‘Terrace House’ and Consent,” responds to the appearance of a new contestant he finds very attractive and has previously deemed A5-rank, a grade given to the finest quality of wagyū beef, by saying that maybe he’ll kabe-don her tomorrow: “If the moment to do a kabe-don presents itself,” read the English subtitles, “I’ll take it.” You’ll mean you’ll kabe-don her and ask her where she wants to go on a date? asks one of the other male contestants. “If you’re going to kabe-don, you can’t go asking,” the sexual predator replies: “You’ve just got to do it. You go, ‘You’ll go with me,’ and then, DON.” He reaches out his hand to an imaginary wall to demonstrate. Sitting on my bed watching this on my laptop, I find that I’m making a prolonged retching noise.’

A few years ago when I was on the tube late at night, very tipsy, with a bunch of friends, one of them had asked me to say something random in Swedish (for the life of me I can’t remember why). And I said something like ‘I fucking love strawberry ice cream, but I really don’t like you very much’. I don’t even like strawberry ice cream much. Coincidentally there was a Swedish woman sitting right in front of us, and she understood perfectly what I had said out (too) loud; and she couldn’t stop laughing. And then she quickly apologised, and/but I got so embarrassed that I, too, apologised (but way too much). On a different occasion, when I had an emergency check-in at a hospital in Stockholm a few years before that, one of the nurses (who was speaking English basically flawlessly) kept apologising to me about how his English is awful while helping me carry my 17kg worth of stuff (mostly books). I don’t know why we involuntarily keep 'apologising' to each other unnecessarily. As in like – there shouldn’t be so much ‘pressure’ forced upon to act or process of learning languages/communication in general.

‘The conventional, monoglot sense of what it means to be bilingual, trilingual, and beyond does not permit of difficulties in self-rendering, let alone existential crises or identity trauma. We prefer to believe unthinkingly that what it means to be yourself across different cultural-linguistic contexts is clear-cut: you say the same things translated across your various languages. That the reality is often hugely different is something to which the majority of those who speak another language with some fluency will testify: a survey of over a thousand bilinguals found that two-thirds attested to feeling “like a different person” when speaking different languages. To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form; to assume that you would be the same person in different languages, when not only the norms and rules but most likely also your social status and domains of experience and proficiencies within those languages are likely to be at least slightly if not fundamentally different, seems, when examined, plainly bizarre.’

The ending of the book reminded me of Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett. I can’t really talk about it without spoiling anything – but basically, it’s just a very brief and passing incident that sparked similar reactions/events in both books. Also in Bennett’s book, (although not quite the same as Barton’s) the protagonist had a passionate rant sesh about the nauseating common/national preference for a homogenised way of speaking at the very end of the book, and that I suppose is another thing that made me compare the two books (even if it’s just the little things).

‘…even though my colleague had in a roundabout way just called me gross, I didn’t feel insulted so much as I felt slightly sorry for him. This wasn’t just because I guessed there was a sour-grapes element to this response of his, after having been dealt a backhand slight by his girlfriend; nor was it just because I really liked the way Japanese sounded, and listening closely to and imitating (I felt these two actions to be intimately intertwined) the profile of Japanese sounds and people was one of the greatest joys that I had…I felt sorry for my colleague because I knew full well that my accent had come from undergoing a second infancy, which had been nerve-wracking, full of irritation, and necessitated making myself vulnerable, and I felt like I saw through his words to a simple declaration that he wasn’t prepared to make an idiot of himself like that. That he couldn’t bring himself to pad around, yochi-yochi, while everyone watched; wasn’t prepared to crash into a wall now and then, and to risk the uncanniness of being a semi-professional parrot.’

Barton's extremely attentive and meticulous way of writing gives the book a similar structural characteristic as that of a well-written book of fiction. It begins by introducing the characters, slowly, and so well done that it’s not overwhelming, and then connecting the ‘stories’ to/about them as well as to herself/the narrator. The 'stories' are so seamlessly woven together. Her soft vulnerabilities and her some rather strong personal statements are introduced to us (the readers) in the book so beautifully and tenderly through such a beautiful composition; and at least I, as a reader, do not feel quite deserving of it. I need everyone to read this. But having said that, you might have to be a bit of an ‘otaku’ to properly cherish it all. I was planning to read this alongside Daniel Hahn’s book, Catching Fire: A Translation Diary but I was so ‘immersed’ in it that I forgot about Hahn. Also, I especially love how the chapters are arranged – never too long to allow my mind to stray and lose attention; but not so short that the stories don’t carry enough of anything. It was an absolute treat of a book/read, and most of all – it makes me miss Japan (maybe not Barton’s ‘Japan’, but the ‘Japan’ of my own no matter how much smaller it may be in comparison to hers).

‘Every interaction is a brush-up against these edges, an improvisational performance around the fundamental crevice that separates us, which stirs up the hope of our union as it spotlights our great distance. Yes, every conversation is a dance: if this isn’t eros, I do not know what is. It is not that this dance is only available to the learner; the problem is rather that the seasoned dancer has forgotten what it is they are doing. “Language is a skin,” says Barthes. “I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”’

And to conclude, I’d like to link ONEW’s cover of Kira Kira which was mentioned in Barton’s book. I don’t know if this is the exact song she was referring to (as it may as well be a different song that shares the same song title/name), but this just happens to be a song that I’ve been listening to quite a bit lately, so even if it wasn’t, at least to me – this is my ‘Kira Kira’ song .

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A monolinguist, I am mucho envious of those fluent with more than their native tongue. Oh, I know the second half of the Hail Mary in Polish and can order a beer in a handful of languages, but that's about it. So I'm fascinated by those who are multilingual and I often pester them with questions. What language do you think in, for example.

Here, Polly Barton answers questions like that. Fresh out of university in England, she went to Japan, taught English but learned Japanese, immersed herself, and not just in the language, but language as culture. She would, in time, become a translator. Here, she translates more than just words.

She learned Japanese through sounds, hence the book's title. Onomatopoeia. And that's how she teaches it here, which made for fascinating reading. As if she found the key for how do I tell my story? Without further adieu, here are some samples:

- zu': the sound of never having been like this.

- gara-gara: the rattling sound the inexplicable makes as it becomes manifest,

- bin-bin: the sound of having lots of sex of dubitable quality.

- ba'sari: the sound of nevermore, and how it comes when you least expect it.

Or this: I think of the Japanese word for the time immediately after a man orgasms, kenja-taimu ('wise-man-period' or 'sage-time'); the idea being that this is the period when a man is able to be rational, disimpassioned, wise, free of the temptations that plague him at other times, and it strikes me that this is a good analogy for what happens when a person enters a new language.

As these selections suggest, while the book is much about the nuances of multilingualism, it is also memoir-ish. We learn of Barton's affair (her word) with an older, married Japanese teacher, including her masochism in the relationship; her probable abuse of alcohol and hints at drug use; her sessions with her therapist; seeing a hanged man and how that ruined a friendship; her time with another woman; her chats with her mom. I wondered at times about the authenticity of her vignettes, whether maybe she was just checking boxes ala James Frey, you know, for the titillation. But what gave this a gravitas was that she introduced each moment through one of the fifty sounds. And that's what made this book special.

At one point there's what Barton calls "a musical interlude". - jin-jin: the sound of being touched for the very first time. And there should be a sound for that, no? She writes:

You may think it feels too sonically evocative to be real language: too creepy, too insectual. As it happens, it is both: it is language, and it is perfect sound. Jin-jin, reads the dictionary: the state of feeling pain in part of your body each time your blood pulses there. . . .

Throb throb throb throb my blood is throbbing . . ., she translates. The verse continues, a cappella and sinister as holy hell:

What will it taste like/
That coffee drunk at dawn I've always yearned for . . .

Blues, then. The things I might never have, as time winds down. Somewhere I have a sound for that.

[Katia N · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a lot to like in this book. But the way how each individual reader would engage with this work really depends on her/his expectations. I've picked it up as I was interested in her thoughts on Wittgenstein. She acknowledges his overwhelming influence on her views of language, self, the formation of identity. Also I wanted to find out more about some special linguistic features of Japanese language and her experience of grappling with them. Both of these elements are there. But predominantly it is appeared to be a type of a frank, confessional memoir of her expat experience in Japan; her personality-forming romantic relationships and her ambivalent, bordeline love-hate relationship towards the country. Onomatopoetic mimetic titles of each essay serve thematically and structurally more like a constraint to her narrative rather than a necessary description of individual linguistic phenomena. Unfortunately for me, Wittgenstein was also lost on the way, or rather blended in her own views.

On the personal level, it seemed to me that to some extent she mistook her experience of living abroad with something specific to Japan and its people. When she describes some of her interactions with the locals or her mixed feelings during the visit of her Western friends and relatives who are aloof to the local social norms, her experience sounds very similar to many things I felt here in England in the first 10 years of my life here. So it might be either more universal expat experience or maybe the English and Japanese are not that contrastingly different. I suspect the former.

On this note, I will quote a lengthy passage from the book, her feelings about the Japanese expressing unashamed pride (or maybe a simple boast?) for their country:

"it’s safe, the food is delicious, and I can speak Japanese. And then they might say it again: In Japan, I feel ho’to. Or they’d ask me how to say it in English. From mouth after mouth, across different age groups and in different parts of the country, I had watched these sentiments emerge, dazzling in their uniformity, and when I was irritable I would think reflexively: fuck you. No really, fuck your stable national identity, your crimeless safe haven, your rich and unique culinary tradition. It felt like the smugness attached not just to the qualities of Japan, but also to the meta-activity of leaning back into and parroting the received narrative. And thus, over time, I’d come to associate the phrase ho’to with lazy patriots, uncritical, boring, scared people who lived oblivious to their own privilege, the kind of people who had never even considered what it meant, for example, for their country to accept so few asylum seekers, or why that could be seen as problematic for the third largest economy in the world. Speaking honestly, I can’t promise that if I were back in Japan teaching right now, I wouldn’t feel this exact same rage all over again; even in my calmest moments, I believe this phenomenon merits genuine concern. I see something inherently problematic about the patriotic messaging that pervades Japanese society, and however benign and apolitical its expressions might appear in the context of an English class, I feel it shares an ecosystem with phenomena which are anything but. I could go further and say that I think that when ‘Japan is number one!’ can pass as a simple expression of preference without calling for any unpacking, then that society is bound to have problems, and some of the shapes that those problems will take are nationalism and xenophobia."

Reading this passage, I could not help, but feel if I replace all words "Japan/ Japanese" with "England/ English", it would easily apply to my periodic feelings towards some "over-patriotic" people on these shores, especially after a certain referendum. It was almost uncanny. So i do not think this problem was necessary limited to some Japanese national peculiarity.

Anyway, coming back to book, I enjoyed reading it in spite of certain reservations. She describes a very authentic, visceral human experience of reaching proper adulthood both emotionally and intellectually in a foreign country. And each such experience is unique, insightful and valuable.

Her writing is also very elegant and her thoughts about bilingual identities were interesting and vividly expressed:

What I find the most extraordinary, though, is reflecting that, as translators and therefore, to some extent, surely, also speakers, these people have most likely had to express themselves in multiple languages, which raises a point that feels even more fundamental: have they not wrestled with the brain-warping activity of having to translate themselves across different languages? Have these people not, as I have, watched their identity contort into rainbow fractals, vanish entirely, and then return as a pink-spotted dragon? I know that it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to have gone through existential crises over this – although part of me does really think that if they were sufficiently invested and sufficiently sensitive then they would have experienced at least minor ones...”

Also I’ve recently developed an interest in how the translators imagine their task. And I loved how imaginatively she conveyed her experience of translating:

Connected up with all of this, even though I might not always or almost ever be aware of such connections on a moment-by-moment basis, what I feel is groundedness. It’s strange, really, that such groundedness can exist here, in what seems objectively like an implausible place to find certainty: this in-between place which is translation, this space where you hover spectral between one language and another, where ideas routinely swim, and give way underfoot, and where there aren’t any right answers. It’s not the sort of place that you’re supposed to draw security from, or which is supposed to make you happy or prosperous.

Therefore, for a certain reader having an affliction for a frank confessional memoir combined with stimulating intellectual insights this book might be a good discovery.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating look at the relation between language and culture.

In this book translator Polly Barton takes 50 Japanese onomatopoeic words and places them in the context of Wittgenstein's language theories and her own experiences of living in Japan in her early 20's and her learning Japanese.

The end result is an examination of the intricacies of language and how it also is firmly wedged in our lives. From the day to day conversation to more intimate moments, language is as essential as breathing and eating. Going a full circle, Wittgenstein did expand about this aspect of language in the tractatus.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it’s entirely about Japan/the Japanese language I want to buy copies of this and press it into the hands of everyone who has ever asked me: “So, why China?

Rtc

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each chapter in Fifty Sounds takes as a starting point a mimetic word in Japanese, i.e. a word that evokes a sound or, more broadly, a physical sensation. Japanese has a wider ranger of mimetic or onomatopoeic words than English, such as mushi-mushi, the sound of being steamed alive, or yochi-yochi, the sound of tottering like a small child. Barton uses these words to explore her fifteen years spent in Japan, as well as the ways in which we use language and what language learning feels like. She goes to Japan to teach English as a 22-year-old, and is placed in a rural school on a small island. Over time her relationship to Japanese and Japan develops and broadens: while very young, she has a relationship with an older married man, Y, and his influence helps her to develop her Japanese, but when she leaves him, her relationship to Japanese deepens as she learns new words obsessively and throws herself into language. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book: the chapter are brief and engaging, and capture the mixture of overwhelming and fascinating that characterise immersing in a new language. Barton is often funny, self-deprecating and her work is full of anecdotes.

On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so good, I stayed up the night before my wedding to finish it.

Completely original and unlike anything I’ve ever read.

This is part

faltering autobiography

part love-letter to Japan

part exploration of what it means to learn a language - a process of mimicry, grappling, a second childhood of petulance and wonder

part meditations on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language - that the meaning of words isn’t bolted to some objective reality but rather continuously re-created in context: a network of social relations which function like a playground, or cityscape

part Stockholm syndrome

part visible therapy.

It’s so utterly niche I’m not quite sure who I’d recommend it to. But I loved it.

[H. · Rating 1 out of 5]

If a reader isn't interested in at least three of the following, I think this memoir will plod too much for them: Living in (not visiting) Japan; Japanese; translation; teaching English; the sordid, sleazy side of Japan. It is quite long for all that was not discussed: Very little at all about how Polly Barton actually learned Japanese or the timeline of her learning it; not much insight into how literary translation works or how she chooses or advocates for different texts; nor what translation means to her. What was opted for were largely vignettes about her sex life. Almost everything felt overcast, grayed out by a dull and ceaseless sense of cynicism.

Near the very end Barton writes, "For a long time...it has worried me that I don't love Japan...that all I really like is the language." She quickly says, "If I've loved Japanese, I've done so because I've loved the glimpses of people I've caught through it." Yet she's depicted no friendships or relationships that ended in anything other than sorrow. Not one person in this book came off looking good. I felt surprised by how much it motivated me to perhaps write a memoir of my own, or at least to speak more freely about my experiences in Japan. What I have found in this country is not the constant self-consciousness or suppressed boiling rage that Barton describes, but rather a sensation she says Japanese people frequently express upon returning to Japan after travel: "Ho ... was the sound of exhalation, and ho'to suru meant breathing a deep sigh of relief, the reassurance of having your concerns and worries taken away." That sigh of relief is exactly what I feel after coming back from international travel, sitting on the shinkansen heading home with a warm bento in front of me. Phew.

Despite the cynicism, I found this book worth reading for Barton's ideas on language learning. Especially I liked her expansion on the usual takes about how people have different personalities in different languages: "I started to feel that expecting consistency from people in terms of languages was essentially an unfair and contradictory demand. More specifically, it is a contradiction when this demand for what we could call intrapersonal consistency is amalgamated with another demand we make of people: interpersonal consistency, or fitting in. We expect a person to behave the same across different contexts, and we expect people to behave the same as those they are with, and we are mostly blind to the fact that this is a double bind, because different places often have wildly different codes of conduct."

I continue to look forward to Barton's excellent translations. For readers who want a book that really dives into what translation means and how it can be used for activism, I recommend Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters. For readers who want a Japan memoir by another literary translator, I recommend the much-esteemed Donald Keene's Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan.

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s been any number of reviews/tweets/etc saying how wonderful this book is as a document of language learning, or of the strange and in many ways uncomfortable experience of trying to ‘learn’ a culture, specifically from the position of an English speaker, and the power dynamics that entails. All of this is true, and if I meet someone looking for an account like that, I will recommend them this book. But I also think Polly Barton pays such nuanced and close attention to her own living scenario, her own experiences and her own reactions to those experiences that I would recommend reading this to just about anyone — you’ll realise new aspects to feelings you recognise, and you’ll find a productive and thought-provoking tension in the differences between your experience and the one the book lays out.

Perhaps the amount this book made me self-reflect is related to the fact that I’ve had some very similar experiences — the chapter ‘giri-giri’ is a pretty much word perfect summary of time I’ve spent in Russia — but I think there’s more to it than that, a detailed and intricate portrayal of individual experiences and relationships that forces you to reckon with how you process your own experiences and relationships.

[Georgia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Glup-glup: the sound of mournful tears glupping onto the page as you write your self-indulgent memoir.
Look, if there is any person who should love this book, it is me. Ms. Barton and I came to Japan in bizarrely similar circumstances. We were both 21-year-old BA Philosophy graduates, who applied for the JET Programme mainly because a boyfriend-at-the-time was applying, (who happened to be way more into Japan than us) and both ended up getting in while the boyfriend-at-the-time did not. We both broke up with said boyfriends, and came to Japan alone, with a beginner's textbook in Nihongo clutched under our arms.
That being said, I did not love this book. At face value, Fifty Sounds is a Wittgenstein-filled exploration of a language lover's journey. What I saw it as was a collection of melancholic lamentations that never quite reach the level of self-realisation that you want them to.
Either create a very dry, bare-bones novel about literary translation and the Japanese language- OR transcribe your therapy sessions into prose. Doing both leaves the whole endeavor feeling unsatisfying on both ends.

[Till Raether · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started learning Japanese a year ago, and reading Barton's book I understand better why I did, and also that I'll never succeed. Or will I? Her book is as much about definitions of success, about self-knowledge and the stories we tell ourselves, as it is about the Japanese language and Barton's years in Japan. It's also, maybe first and foremost, a love story. Not metaphorically, but in the most visceral sense of the word.

I'm sorry that I rushed through the book towards the end; I got too excited. Now I'd like to read it again.

[Punk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book-length essay is a memoir tucked inside a personal dictionary of mimetic language wrapped in a reflection on the mechanisms of translation. I enjoyed it a lot, more so when Barton was speaking in her own voice than when she was trying to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein to me like a fangirl describing fourteen seasons of convoluted backstory and not doing a very good job at it, but even that, I think, was driving into an understanding of language that may make more sense to me over time. I hope so, as I do plan to reread this.

Barton is open about her experiences in Japan, the urge to assimilate battling against her need to be seen as an individual, her genuine feelings of alienation alongside her petty grievances and the way they all got tied up together, her love affair with a country that did not want her, or only wanted the idealized version of her, the West, white, small face, exotic, but, in the end, too big and clumsy to fit into that fantasy.

It does get a bit densely academic at times, thanks to Wittgenstein, but he's just a small part. The rest is a breeze to read, with energetic, colorful prose revealing Barton's wonder, frustrations, and self-discovery. And, as a student of Japanese, I appreciated the examination of the language, especially Barton's whimsical definitions of the mimetic terms, but a friend assures me that the book is enjoyable even without any prior knowledge of Japanese.

Thanks to everyone who recommended this to me, but especially Rosamund, who was the first. I'll recommend it in turn.

The title: Japanese is said to have fifty sounds, though there were gaps in that from the beginning, and modern Japanese lost a few more due to changes in the language. So it's more like 46 sounds now. But that's not as good a number. For one thing, culturally, the Japanese fear the number 4. It sounds like the word for death.

Contains: the discovery of a suicide in "uwee," discussion of which is continued into the next chapter, but these two can be skipped and it's not mentioned elsewhere; self-loathing; infidelity; brief reference to BDSM.

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refreshingly open and honest about the language learning process, with an emphasis on how humbling it is, how the goal posts always move, how your personality shifts, and how difficult it is to decide whether or not to assimilate. Also, the book is organized by Japanese mimetics, which is so cool!

I wanted to read this in preparation for moving to do pretty much the exact same job as her, and I’m glad I did! She was stationed on an island (me too!) and discussed its remoteness and her emergent career as a translator. I resonated with how Japanese kind of happened to Barton and she ran with it herself. At some parts in the book, her organization and use of philosophy didn’t quite make sense to me—still, I think this would be a good read for anyone learning a language or who has learned a language through immersion.

[Priya · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something so beautifully chaotic about this book. Whenever the author talks about language learning, translation, or immersion, I feel shivers of excitement and recognition - because I know what she's talking about (and she knows what she's talking about, which is even better!) but also because in her writing: thought, theory and ideation corroborate with experience. Her lived experience in Japan is as a learner, teacher, an interpreter of cultures, habits, people, and words... and her experiences support and hold up her rants on linguistics, Wittgenstein, psychology and literary theory. Her candid, sort of self-deprecating, honesty makes the book an uncomfortable read - but, in a good way? I find it very easy to relate to the writer, and even in moments when she's not her best. ONE day, I'll make time to write a proper review. Till then, here are two (out of many, many) bookmarked tidbits -

on picking up a new word in conversation
And so the magic is done: it’s there, in my vocabulary. Not just the old dust-covered recesses, like so many words I’ve looked up in a dictionary, even written out in notebooks or stuck up on post-it notes but never actually said and which register now only as a faint sense of familiarity when someone uses them. No, this is an actual, real, live word, that I can use with relative impunity. It’s a gift they’ve given me.

~
on an old relationship
sometimes it happens when you’re sleeping next to somebody else, sometimes when you’ve been single for a long time, but either way it’s been a literal decade since you were together, and you know that you couldn’t be with him now, that a relationship with that kind of power balance doesn’t interest you, and yet somewhere in your bodymind he is held there, motionless, the emotional truth of what he was for you then cryogenically frozen, coming back just occasionally to remind you what it feels like, which is to say, remind you how and why it cannot be reduced to ‘just’ anything, and why nothing else comes close, why however mature you believe yourself to be this can still shake you like nothing else

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty Sounds alludes to the 5 x 10 grid system used to organize Japanese syllabaries by the phonemes that comprise them, something akin to Western alphabetical order. Polly Barton adopts this concept to produce fifty vignettes about her life, headlined by a Japanese mimetic, a way-marker of her language and cultural immersion journey. The book is a deeply personal, self-indulgent memoir heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Despite delving into linguistics and philosophy, Barton’s witty and relatable narrative remains approachable and inviting to the reader. At certain moments, it feels like trespassing through places and moments that you have not been invited to. Even so, I can’t help feeling a special pull towards translation and languages, “a rope leading all the way back” to a childhood learning a foreign language, to adulthood as I pursued my studies at University, and, finally, to a career I briefly dipped my toes into.

Full review here: https://thelagomfiles.com/2021/06/17/...

[Wendy Uchimura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shiku-shiku - the sound of wanting to cry due to a prolonged dull pain that at once feels recognisably familiar, yet uncomfortably raw.
If you can make it past Wittengenstein and the car crash, there are some insightful passages into being a single or partnered woman in Japan. My particular favourite was where do vending machines go to die?
If you look closely at the sounds though, there is no waku-waku (the sound of excitement due to the welling up of happiness) or uki-uki (the sound of floating in cheerfulness). Just the silence between the words of never being able to run away from yourself, wherever you may go.

[stefan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but in the end, I mean, right from the start, there was so much mention of Wittgenstein that I realised I was in way over my head.

Unfortunately, I never felt at ease with the text, although I did, in fact, come across chapters or at least paragraphs that managed to hold my interest for a hot minute. Overall, though, there was too much of her, herself and she - and Wittgenstein - for me to want to finish the book.

DNF @page 100

[josé almeida · Rating 4 out of 5]

não sei japonês mas gosto do sabor a literatura que sempre encontro nas traduções de polly barton que já li. neste livro, um misto de biografia e ensaio, a autora recorda as experiências passadas no japão como professora de inglês e analisa, exaustivamente e com graça, o que é isso de viver, sentir, pensar e falar uma segunda língua.

[Lulufrances · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had so many coherent thoughts I wanted to share about this one, but then I got sick, and now these thoughts have left my head.
Definitely worth a read if you‘re bilingual or multilingual or interested in translation and becoming fluent in another language! Not as Japan-centred as expected, truly more about language.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

My son learned violin with a Suzuki Method teacher in Japan. He was not taught to read music as Suzuki method treats music like language. You learn by listening…. Or in the same way we learn our native language, we hear words, letting them wash over us and then tentatively attempt to speak as small children—only later learning to read and write. Polly Barton-- whose translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are is one of my all-time favorites!— learns Japanese like this. She arrives into it. I own three copies of this book, plus the kindle version. I kept starting it --but would flounder. As a translator who lived in Japan two decades, I was puzzled by my inability to keep reading---especially given that I learned Japanese in much the same way as Barton. It was not something planned in advanced. I just arrived in Japan and found that to arrive in Japan is to undergo a new way of seeing. Maybe even of being… and that was what Barton struggles with a lot.

As a philosophy undergraduate who also studied Wittgenstein and Heidegger, her beginning was just so fascinating to me. I feel she was approaching language in such a new way. More than anything I adored how she wrote about translation. Not just the activity of translation being translation as a metaphor for human "being" in the world.

I think I bogged down on the emotional content regarding relationships and feelings. I suppose it is simply less interesting to me. Maybe the human condition is less interesting or maybe I am not interested in the love life and childhood of strangers.

But that said, I loved the concept of this book and the beautiful writing of her sentences. Loved the high-level intellectual content... five stars!

[Tom Stanger · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s something about immersing yourself in another language and culture that always brings romantic imaginings to the fore. I’m sure many of us have dreamt of jetting off to foreign climes and experience a new life in a new world, feeling that every day is going to be a new adventure. In Fifty Sounds we, the readers, are taken on just such an experience, although with the more realistic viewpoint of Polly Barton who did just this, travelling to Japan at the age of twenty-one to learn Japanese and experience the culture.

Fifty Sounds is the debut novel by Polly Barton and follows her time spent in various parts of Japan after her time studying philosophy at Cambridge, and it is this appreciation of philosophy that underpins many parts and aspects of the book, frequently referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Language Games from his work Philosophical Investigations. This provides many of the aspects of this book with a level of added depth to what Barton is portraying, although giving some parts of the book a more ‘clinical’ feel which removes the reader, and the author, from the narrative.

Fifty Sounds very smartly links Barton’s biographical novel with fifty Japanese sounds, for example, “pika-pika: the sound of my floors and your trainers and our graveyards” which refers to shiny, or sparkling, but also describes the narrative of that particular chapter.

Although very much a biographical work, Fifty Sounds, provides a great deal of insight and wisdom into the experiences of someone immersed in a new culture and although I did feel the introduction and was a somewhat confusing start, combined with a somewhat unnecessary narrative that didn’t particularly appeal to myself, leaving me wondering where the book was going to take us there are some incredible moments of insight are the outstanding moments of this book, some of the descriptions and narratives within are simply superb, you’ll know what I mean when you read about the vending machines.

For a debut novel, in Fifty Sounds Polly Barton has brought a great achievement in combining language with biography and philosophy and I look forward to learning and reading what she has in store for future books. Her insight into Japan and her descriptive narrative would, to me, combine the best elements of travel writing and I sincerely hope that is an avenue to be explored.

Fifty Sounds is an ideal introduction for anyone looking to learn a language in another country and immerse themselves in the culture, with many looking to teach English in other countries, Fifty Sounds is an ideal way to learn the experiences of that path from someone who has such a wealth of experience as Polly Barton.

[Alison Fincher · Rating 4 out of 5]

..What really makes the book sparkle is Barton’s abiding love of language itself. She is deeply involved in “the late-Wittgenstenian project” of, in her words, “wrestling the power over language from the hands of the philosophical elite and returning it to the everyday speaker.” Language isn’t an abstract concept, but embodied in the people who use it every day.

Of course, accepting that language is a system embodied in a community makes language learners extremely vulnerable. Barton finds that learning a new language is an “utterly destabilizing” experience of refining your self by fire, of questioning language “in a fundamental, world-shifting, ground-pulled-from-under-one’s-feet-way”.
Barton is brave. She celebrates this space between knowing and not-knowing a language...

Read the rest of my review at Asian Review of Books.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, though had one very big reservation: when she writes scathingly about people who say they immediately 'felt comfortable' in Japan, I felt very seen, but that comfort is because of something she says nothing about - which is how its infrastructure makes living as a chronically ill person incredibly easy compared with any other rich country, something which I imagine is also true about other groups of people she says nothing about (the elderly, people with children, etc). But the rawness and ambiguity of Barton's tense relationship with Japan and Japanese is a huge part of what makes this so much more interesting than the many 'I found spirituality and calm in Japan etc' books.

[Tommy Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lowkey loved this. Polly is an absolute goat and signed me copy and gave me lots of sincere and thoughtful advice about things. This book is essential for anyone interested in translation, Japan, and language (and life). Formally interesting, readable, and philosophically involved.

I loved this book most when it was telling stories. A couple of times, it felt like Polly was trying to give the reader her money’s worth, stretching out ideas unnecessarily, giving equal due to every conundrum of language learning. She won a competition on the basis of a proposal, and probably felt she had to deliver. This is made up for by the concise and vivd summation of what is essentially her entire adult life. Like a long and purifying diary entry, structured around the Japanese language.

[Andreea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book not knowing much about it besides that it's about living in Japan and I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the breadth of the discourse it had. For me, what was most interesting was how the book captures the peculiarities of the 'learner' experience through the specific connections and confusions one encounters while actively living in a non-native language and having to experience life through the prism of this gap in understanding or knowledge of simple mundane words and phrases all the way through to more complex and often ambiguous uses of language. This book delves into regaining a childlike access to a state of constant curiosity and discovery that is required to build that confidence and familiarity with a language so different from one's own, and she achieves this through linguistics and philosophical ponderings as well as anecdotes of her time spent in Japan. The mimetic dictionary she builds which provides this book with its structure is very effective as it offers enough of a hook to each of the chapters to find out what the linked experience is, while also reinforcing the point about the meaning of language being linked to daily usage rather than the conceptual or abstract definitions. It's an introspective and personal book in which the author discovers and shares way more than linguistic theory by exploring some of the thoughts and doubts that otherwise remain largely unspoken in more detail.

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It operated on so many levels.
Firstly, it is an intelligent and informative treatise on two word repetitive words. These are a charming aspect of the Japanese language. If you are interested in learning more about these moderately difficult words, you will enjoy this book.
Next, I liked the book because I can relate to a lot of the author's impressions of Japan. Having lived in Japan and studied Japanese, I was very nostalgic. It is funny at times, too. I gained a lot of insight into my own experiences in Japan, and of learning the language.
Ms. Barton writes a lot about her feelings. She is so honest and forthright. She is very introspective, yet in a healing way.
At first, I thought this book might be semi-pornographic because of a term she used on the very first page. But it wasn't at all.
I love Japanese literature, but every now and then it is refreshing to read about an outsider looking into Japan.