Fifty Sounds

A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing

360 pages

English language

Published March 19, 2022 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.

ISBN:
9781324091318

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5 stars (1 review)

Why Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hi'sori, the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to mote-mote, the sound of becoming a small-town movie star, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, recounting her life as an outsider in Japan. Irreverent, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is an exceptional debut about the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking, and living in another language.

4 editions

Adventures in language and personal demons

5 stars

The book is an essay charting the author's personal odyssey to master Japanese. She starts with a daring jump into the deep end, learning on the job as an English teacher in a remote corner of the country. Witty, insightful and sometimes painfully frank, this becomes a story of an imperfect heroine finding her place in the abyss between the two cultures she originally expected to bridge as a translator.

Beautifully written and not overbearing on the technical, the book uses a clever hook to theme each bite-size chapter on a specific memetic formed of two syllables in Japanese. These titular 50 Sounds enable deeply nuanced understanding between native speakers, but rather than simply being a dictionary of terms, the book's chapters spin the definitions for each sound as a cipher for understanding the many escapades our hero has crashed through on her quest.

The author's bravery in cataloging her …