A Japanese translator recalls her complicated relationship with the language through some of its slippery locutions.Barton's sharp, belletristic debut is a culture-shock story that cannily avoids the conventions of the genre. A Brit who first arrived on the Japanese island of Sado to teach English, she was often thrown by the culture's conventionality (its particular forms of address) and outrageousness (its outsize consumption of pornography). Refreshingly, the author doesn't follow the typical fish-out-of-water arc from embarrassment to assimilation. For one thing, the structure is episodic, filtering experiences through "mimetic" Japanese words that aren't necessarily onomatopoeic but still convey a mood through their sound. For example, kyuki-kyuki evokes the sound of a marker on a whiteboard, and jara-jara is "the jingle-jangle that seems to get into your blood and stir it up so that sleep is the last thing on your mind." Barton attaches each chapter to a particular sound as she chronicles failed relationships, homesickness, despair, brief blissful moments of connection, and, in an especially powerful chapter, a hiking trip and coming across a man who had hanged himself. Her experiences speak to the book's other main distinction: Though Barton gains fluency in the language, she rarely feels anything like comfort within the language or its society. Some of that is acute awareness of her standing as a Westerner with a more independent streak. "A key part of being in Japan is that gradually, without realizing, the state of being unlike others comes to seem more and more repellent to you on a subcutaneous level," she writes. But she's also philosophically fascinated with the relationship between language and identity (she has a few thoughtful and self-deprecating riffs on Wittgenstein) and consistently looks at her experiences in Japan with candid uncertainty.A refreshingly honest and novel look at the nuance and revelatory power of language.

A Japanese translator recalls her complicated relationship with the language through some of its slippery locutions.Barton's sharp, belletristic debut is a culture-shock story that cannily avoids the conventions of the genre. A Brit who first arrived on the Japanese island of Sado to teach English, she was often thrown by the culture's conventionality (its particular forms of address) and outrageousness (its outsize consumption of pornography). Refreshingly, the author doesn't follow the typical fish-out-of-water arc from embarrassment to assimilation. For one thing, the structure is episodic, filtering experiences through "mimetic" Japanese words that aren't necessarily onomatopoeic but still convey a mood through their sound. For example, kyuki-kyuki evokes the sound of a marker on a whiteboard, and jara-jara is "the jingle-jangle that seems to get into your blood and stir it up so that sleep is the last thing on your mind." Barton attaches each chapter to a particular sound as she chronicles failed relationships, homesickness, despair, brief blissful moments of connection, and, in an especially powerful chapter, a hiking trip and coming across a man who had hanged himself. Her experiences speak to the book's other main distinction: Though Barton gains fluency in the language, she rarely feels anything like comfort within the language or its society. Some of that is acute awareness of her standing as a Westerner with a more independent streak. "A key part of being in Japan is that gradually, without realizing, the state of being unlike others comes to seem more and more repellent to you on a subcutaneous level," she writes. But she's also philosophically fascinated with the relationship between language and identity (she has a few thoughtful and self-deprecating riffs on Wittgenstein) and consistently looks at her experiences in Japan with candid uncertainty.A refreshingly honest and novel look at the nuance and revelatory power of language.