Languages of Reinvention

I’ve been a Jhumpa Lahiri stan ever since buying Interpreter of Maladies on whim from a Santa Monica bookstore in my freshman year of college. Her characters have always felt shockingly real, from their dialogue to the way they move through the world, the scenes and dynamics they inhabit. It’s the immigrant narrative refracted in all its beautiful and mundane variety. From time to time I recognize echoes of Lahiri in my own writing style, usually in a certain detached diction or urbanist, quasi-academic subjectivity. In short, she’s someone I hold in immense esteem.

That she has not only indulged, but made a whole new career of her love of Italian language has been a thoroughly impressive plot twist in her public narrative. Her latest novel Whereabouts (a.k.a. Dove mi trovo) was written entirely in Italian, a language that she took painstaking efforts to learn as an adult. And, fittingly enough, she translated it into English herself. This crossing into new linguistic territory recalls the careers of Eileen Chang, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett, among other literary icons of the mid-20th century. I’m sure there are more such writers, but am I wrong to say that this phenomenon feels incredibly rare in today’s globalized yet generally monocultural world?

Anyway, I recently reread Lahiri’s New Yorker piece on her quest for Italian fluency. It heartens me, as someone really struggling with Japanese right now, to see her write so frankly and humbly about the long and tortuous road to mastering another language. To go from bumbling awkwardness to writing Literature in the target language is a feat that few native speakers even manage to pull off. Goddamn. I’ve yet to read Whereabouts, but I understand it’s quite a departure from her previous work. But this much can be forgiven, surely?

Lahiri’s life has unfolded in self-proclaimed “linguistic exile,” English superseding her mother tongue, Bengali, which she claims to speak maladroitly and cannot read. Italian offered to her yet another displacement, one of her own choosing. “I felt a sense of rapture, an affinity,” she writes of her first visit to Rome. She strives to liberate some aspect of her personhood through the acquisition of Italian language. She’s not there just to eat, pray, love; she seeks nothing short of metamorphosis.

I wonder if Italy’s relative neutrality (as far as I know) to Lahiri’s Bengali lineage allowed her to fully embrace this third culture, to indulge it with such fervency. I came across David Hoon Kim’s article on his relationship to French as a Korean-American and thought it resonated with Lahiri’s quest for Italian in many ways. To Kim, French language and culture represented a third space for the construction of an identity that was steeped in neither the familial intimacy of Korean nor the Asian minority subjectivity of English. At the recommendation of my friend J., I’d read Kim’s short story “Sweetheart Sorrow” long ago and felt a pulsing affinity to his maudlin tale of an adopted Japanese Dane living in Paris.

Back when this story came out in 2007, I was freshly out of college with a double major in French—a rather spontaneous add-on at the eleventh hour—and still harbored some fantasy of returning to Paris, where I’d studied for a semester a year prior and had a series of experiences I’d describe as formative and destructive in equal measure. I kept up with French for around two years or so after graduating, but eventually that petered out as I became more focused on rehabilitating my Chinese. French was a language that I’d chosen, too. “Before my encounter with French, I never felt that I possessed a language,” writes Kim. “Neither the Korean that was always mine, nor the English that was imposed on me after I immigrated to America with my mother.” Although I’m a far cry from fluent these days, I’ve managed to retain reasonable literacy in French. It’s a language I still speak with my friend T., a Japanese woman I met during my time in Paris and who now lives in Yokohama.

Which brings me to Japanese. I feel that I occupy a funny position in learning this language, as someone who has a healthy interest in Japanese cinema and literature but, say, much less emotional investment than your average otaku. (No judgment!) While contemporary Japan is implicated in my doctoral project, it’s by no means the sole focus and I’m not required by the department or the school to use any Japanese-language source texts in my work. (Though it certainly couldn’t hurt.)

A still life by Anzai Mizumaru, one of my favorite Japanese illustrators who currently has a retrospective on view at the Setagaya Literary Museum.

My dalliance with Japanese is halfway between happenstance and intention. It does not manifest in a “space of separation” as Italian does for Lahiri, now that I’m full-on immersed in Tokyo life. Nor does it offer an opportunity to transcend the familiar self, as Kim finds in French. I feel earnest and blasé at once about the layered locutions and deferential gradations of Japanese. And Japan certainly has a complicated history with the cultural affiliations I claim—both of them. But that’s what’s interesting about it, too, you could say.

It occurred to me at some point, while dreaming of leaving New York for Tokyo in the past years, that life in Japan could be the literal manifestation of my in-betweenness. After all, it was China that had immense historical influence on Japan, while America cast the mold for Japanese nationhood after World War II. The linguistic and cultural imprints of both sides can be seen, felt, and heard in daily life, in cognates and loanwords, in certain aesthetics, all mediated through my own sensitivity to such things.

Of course, I’m not trying to offer a reductionist view that Japan is just a mashup of other cultures or anything like that. It’s a thoroughly special and strange place, with which I have only a superficial acquaintance. But I like that so many linguistic signifiers correspond exactly with Chinese, or were even invented on the Japanese side and then recirculated to China in the modern era: everyday terms like 政府 zhèngfǔ / seifu (government) or 社会 shèhuì / shakai (society) or what have you. The kanji have always felt close to me, even when their meanings are a bit different or they’re modified into wonkiness (see: 渋). At the same time, echoes of English abound in everything from literature (フィクション fikushon) to cigarettes (タバコ tabako) to fruit (トマト tomato). With some quirky new or specific meanings assigned to English words and phrases, like “tension” テンション or “one pattern” ワンパターン.

And that doesn’t get into common Japanese loanwords from languages such as German (アルバイト Arbeit), Portuguese (ブランコ balanço), and French (コンクール concours)… The pervasiveness of this linguistic importation is part of what makes Japanese language so unique. But English and Chinese are by far the most conspicuous and prevalent influences.

Where was I going with this? Languages are weird and tough and language learning is always such a personal journey, I guess. I have no ambitions to pull a Jhumpa Lahiri or even a David Kim with reinventing my writing life anew, especially when I’ve a ways to go in my native tongue. But perhaps I could try writing more in Japanese for my own sake. At the very least it could help me memorize some goddamn vocab words.