The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura (introduction)

INTRODUCTION MARI YOSHIHARA AND JULIET WINTERS CARPENTER

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he F all of L anguage in the Age of English ( Nihongo ga horobiru toki: Eigo no seiki no naka de ) by Minae Mizumura caused a sensation when it came out in Japan in 2008.

Not only did the book achieve high critical acclaim, winning the Kobayashi Hideo Award for the year’s outstanding work of nonfiction, but also it was a surprising commercial success: soon after being published, it ranked number one on Amazon Japan, an almost unheard-of feat for a work of such intellectual substance. As of April 2014, sixty-five thousand hardcover copies had been sold.

Controversy spurred the book’s success. An influential author and blogger flatly declared The Fall of Language a “must-read for all Japanese,” sparking an Internet flame war fanned by irate people who had either not read or misread the book and equally irate people who had read it and disliked it.

Legions of others joined in, equally vociferous in the book’s defense. Thanks to this initial controversy, other media picked up the book and it went on to reach readers far beyond literary and academic circles.

Though originally written for Japanese readers, Mizumura’s book has the power to extend its reach. The broader themes of language and literature the author addresses will lead those who come across the book in translation to ask themselves about the missions of their own language and literature in a world where English functions as the universal language. Mizumura’s analysis is breathtakingly innovative and will appeal not only to those interested in Japanese studies or the humanities but to all who care about the written word.

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MINAE MIZUMURA, NOVELIST

In Japan, the book made a special impact partly because of its author, the acclaimed novelist Minae Mizumura.

Born in Tokyo in the 1950s, Mizumura moved with her family to Long Island, New York, at the age of twelve. Even though she lived in the United States for the next two decades, she never came to feel quite at ease there, and she spent her teenage years yearning for home while absorbed in stories from a sixty-three-volume collection of modern Japanese literature—an experience that forever shaped her sensibilities about language and literature.

She studied French literature and literary criticism at Yale, both in college and in graduate school, during its heyday as the center of literary theory; her first publication was a much-praised critical essay in English on the central and controversial theorist Paul de Man.1 Yet she never considered a career in academia, and she returned to Japan to devote herself to doing what she had always wanted to do—write fiction in her native language.

From the first, Mizumura has played with ideas of language, literature, and translation in her fiction, returning repeatedly to the question: What does it mean to read and write in the Japanese language—or any language other than English—in the world today? In her debut novel, Zoku meian (Light and dark, continued, 1990), she daringly and mischievously completed the final, unfinished work of Natsume Sōseki, the titan of the modern Japanese novel, perfectly capturing his idiosyncratic style. Her second novel, Shishōsetsu from left to right (An I-novel from left to right, 1995), was equally but differently audacious. Written as a fictionalized autobiography, a long-cherished genre in Japan, the text is interwoven with English and printed horizontally—marking the first time that a work of Japanese literature was printed in this way, “from left to right.” Her third novel, A True Novel (Honkaku shōsetsu, 2002)—available in English—is an imaginative tour de force, a complex, multilayered retelling of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In it, she follows in the footsteps of earlier Japanese writers by basing her work on a Western classic while bringing the extraordinary romance home for Japanese readers. Translations have been published in French, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean as well as English. Mizumura’s most recent novel, Haha no isan—shinbun shōsetsu (Inheritance from mother: A newspaper novel, 2011), was, as indicated by the title, originally serialized weekly in a major newspaper. Narrating the saga of three generations of Japanese women, the first of whom tragicomically identifies herself with a heroine in a newspaper novel, the work highlights

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the role that such novels played in the formation of the modern Japanese language and psyche. Each of Mizumura’s novels has won a distinguished literary prize: Zoku meian won the Minister of Education Award for New Artists; Shishōsetsu from left to right, the Noma New Author Award; A True Novel, the Yomiuri Prize for Literature; and Haha no isan—shinbun shōsetsu, the Osaragi Jirō Award.

Precisely because Mizumura keeps returning to the question of what it means to read and write in the Japanese language, examining the traditional in highly unconventional ways, her novels have a unique attraction for Japanese readers while posing unique challenges for the translator. For instance, the intermingling of English and Japanese in her fictional autobiography cannot possibly have the same effect in languages using the Roman alphabet. That novel also inserts vertical printing amid the horizontal text and mixes different typefaces and modes of notation, new and old, for different effects. The difficulty—or impossibility—of translating her novels is undeniable; yet, resisting any temptation to write in a more transparent style, she has continued to stimulate and amuse her readers (and herself) by producing works of literature that evoke the path that written Japanese has traveled. Why she does so will become clear in The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH

In this, her first nonfiction book, Mizumura discusses the same issues she has grappled with as a novelist. She takes a critical look at the phenomenon of the English language functioning as the singular universal language today, in the digital era, and what this means for national languages and literatures of the world. The effects of English supremacy, though vaguely acknowledged, have nowhere been so lucidly and mercilessly examined as in this book. The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it.

Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all.

Mizumura opens with an engaging account of her experience in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2003. Through sometimes humorous, often touching encounters with authors from around the

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world, she begins to consider the meaning of “national literature,” especially literature being written in non-English languages. She next turns her attention to French, a language she herself spent years studying. She reflects on her own relationship with Japanese, English, and French to shed light on a recent historical shift by which French, once the world’s reigning language, was reduced to being merely one among many. At the core of this section is a talk she gave in French in Paris, slyly urging the French audience to confront the deplorable downfall of their language. It is a delightful read—unless you happen to be French.

From there, Mizumura traces the development of the hierarchy of languages using three core concepts—universal language, local language, and national language. Building on Benedict Anderson’s now-classic Imagined Communities (1983), and revealing a critical blind spot in his analysis, she provides insight into what a universal language truly is. The highlight of her analysis rests on her focus on the role of translation—an endeavor little understood or appreciated in the modern era. According to Mizumura, it was the very act of translation from the universal language into various vernaculars that gave birth to national languages and literatures.

Then she contemplates a miracle: nineteenth-century Japan’s production of an extraordinary corpus of modern novels shortly after opening its doors to the West, despite geographical, cultural, and linguistic constraints. In aggregate, these novels are now counted among the major literatures of the world. Mizumura devotes an entire chapter to a groundbreaking analysis of Sōseki’s bildungsroman, Sanshirō (1908).

Next her examination of English as today’s universal language challenges the naïve celebration of the Internet as the conveyer of global knowledge.

She cautions that the act of acquiring knowledge is wholly dependent on the language one knows. The less English one knows, the less access one has to global knowledge. This leads more and more people in the non-Englishspeaking world, especially those whom she calls “seekers of knowledge,” to be drawn into the “universal” world of English, possibly leading to the impoverishment of their own language—an outcome that would, in turn, assuredly lead to the impoverishment of the entire human race.

In the final chapter, Mizumura begins by reflecting on the possible future of various languages, Western and non-Western alike. She then takes the reader to a specific period in Japanese history, the years following the defeat in World War II, and the detrimental effect that period had on Japanese language and literature. Her account of how the war and the American occupa-

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tion affected the nation’s written language will surely come as a surprise to many readers, as will her description of the current sorry state of language arts education in Japan. The book closes with suggestions for major policy changes in the nation’s education system.

THE AFTERMATH

The impact of The Fall of Language in Japan has been tremendous. As we have seen, the book’s initial commercial success owed much to controversy that erupted on the Internet. That flame war was fueled in part by the book’s provocative original title, which means literally “when the Japanese language falls: in the age of English.” Some took the title as a warning that the Japanese language is at imminent risk of perishing under the dominance of English. Yet Mizumura makes no such claim. She clearly indicates that the long history of the Japanese language, the large population of its users, and the nation’s relative economic stability and cultural autonomy make it highly improbable that Japanese will disappear in any foreseeable future. She is concerned about the quality of written Japanese and about whether Japanese modern literature— that is, those works worthy of being passed on for generations to come—will continue to attract readers.

The power of the Internet to ignite diatribes aside, the ferocity with which the book was initially attacked—antagonistic readers resorted to deleting favorable Amazon reviews, which a major newspaper found newsworthy—deserves some attention. The book broke taboos, especially in the final chapter.

That Mizumura is a woman in a society where men still basically control intellectual debate must have contributed to the vitriol. None of her suggestions for improvements in the education system is drastic in and of itself, but the accumulation may have worked to exasperate people, evoking reactions like these: Mizumura says we must defend the Japanese language. She must be a jingoist who ignores Japan’s imperial past and the way we imposed our language on other Asians.

She says children must read classics of modern Japanese literature. She must be a hopeless reactionary.

No, she must be an elitist.

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She says to give special English education to a cadre of chosen people?

Then she is definitely an elitist.

She talks down about contemporary Japanese literature, when even Americans say it’s great!

Really, who does she think she is, a privileged bilingual preaching to the rest of us Japanese!

Then, on November 26, 2008, while the controversy was still in full swing, a review came out in the literary arts column of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun in which, after conceding that the book “is large in scope and inspiring,” the columnist voiced comments closely echoing the attacks circulating on the Internet: the book was “virtually indistinguishable from nationalist cries,” “an affirmation of elitism,” and even, said this woman, “just all too macho.”

(Asahi Shimbun, it should be noted, is Japan’s closest equivalent to the New York Times or Le Monde.)

As the initial buzz subsided and the book reached wider readership, however, The Fall of Language indeed became a must-read among the welleducated segment of Japanese society. A flood of reviews, essays, roundtables, and interviews appeared in well over a hundred newspapers, magazines, and other national print media. It seems as if everyone from novelists, poets, translators, linguists, and literary scholars to journalists, schoolteachers, diplomats, businesspeople, physicists, and neuroscientists has written or spoken publicly about the book. This surge of attention attests to the urgency with which the Japanese reading public was waiting for a book like this, one that gives voice to their angst about the linguistic future of their country. Eventually related books began appearing; one has even called for the Japanese language to be protected by law.

That said, it is our opinion that the book will be even better served when read outside Japan. Japanese readers have been traumatized by years of senseless language and literature education in both English and Japanese; as a result, they tend to focus all their attention on the final chapter, where Mizumura talks about the need for pedagogical changes. The ideas presented in earlier chapters often get lost in the shuffle. Yet what makes this book a genuinely worthwhile read is its theoretical and historical analysis of written language, literature, and translation, a contribution that has significance far

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beyond the rise and fall of any one language. May readers around the world engage in a fruitful dialogue with the ideas presented in this fascinating book.

NOTE ON NAMES AND BOOK TITLES

Except for the names of the author and the translator Mari Yoshihara, who have established identities in English, Japanese names are rendered family name first, as custom dictates in Japan. For authors writing at the dawn of modernity who are better known by a pen name, that name is used, after their name is first introduced in full. For instance, Natsume Sōseki is referred to as “Sōseki.” For Japanese books that have been translated, the title is given in English first, with the original title in parentheses; for untranslated books, the Japanese title is used, with an English gloss.

Praise for T H E FA L L O F L A N G U A G E I N T H E A G E O F E N G L I S H “A dazzling rumination on the decline of local languages, most particularly Japanese, in a world overshadowed by English. Moving effortlessly between theory and personal reflection, Minae Mizumura’s lament—linguistic and social in equal measure—is broadly informed, closely reasoned, and—in a manner that recalls her beloved Jane Austen—at once earnest and full of mischief.”

JOHN NATHAN , translator of Light and Dark: A Novel by Natsume Sōseki

“The Fall of Language in the Age of English provocatively participates in current debates on world literature, translation, reading, and writing in the age of global English and the Internet, bringing forward a new and illuminating perspective on the translingual formation of national languages and the now endangered arc of modern literature. It is written from the viewpoint of a noted Japanese novelist as well as from a wider theoretical and historical perspective.”

TOMI SUZUKI , Columbia University

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.