Fifty Sounds, page 2
I would like to pause for a moment here and spell out briefly for the unacquainted what this order consists in, because although culturally its function is analogous to that of the alphabet, the detailed picture is somewhat different—inevitably so, when we consider that its component parts, the kana, represent not individual consonants or vowels like the letters of the Greek or Roman alphabets, but longer, rhythmic units of speech called morae. The closest equivalent to morae we have in English are syllables—and indeed the kana are often referred to as syllabaries—but there is an important discrepancy, namely that a long Japanese syllable—tō or kyō—can be composed of two or three morae, so a two-syllable word such as “Tōkyō” or “happi” may be made up of three or four kana [to-u-kyo-u, ha-p-pi].
The system by which the kana are ordered—modeled on the phonology of another moraic language, Sanskrit—is known as the gojūon. This translates literally as “fifty sounds,” and is a reference to the 5 × 10 grid used to display the characters that each symbolize a particular sound. The five vowel sounds found in the top row—a, i, u, e, o—are then transposed in the second “K” row to become ka, ki, ku, ke, ko; in the third “S” row to become sa, shi, su, se, so; and so on, for a total of ten rows. There is also an anomalous addition: the character “n,” added significantly after the origin of the table, is the only kana that doesn’t end in a vowel sound, and cannot be used to begin words. To complicate things even further, this late addition which floats freely at the bottom of the table is not the only deviation from the mathematical accuracy that a name like “fifty sounds” might suggest. In fact, the fifty sounds have never actually numbered fifty: the sounds “yi” or “wu” never existed; “ye” disappeared in the tenth century; and “wi” and “we” were made obsolete in the 1946 script reform, substituted by the sounds “i” and “e” from which they had become phonetically indistinguishable. In its current incarnation, the gojūon comprises forty-six elements, as follows:
A
I
U
E
O
—
a
i
u
e
o
K
ka
ki
ku
ke
ko
S
sa
shi
su
se
so
T
ta
chi
tsu
te
to
N
na
ni
nu
ne
no
H
ha
hi
fu
he
ho
M
ma
mi
mu
me
mo
Y
ya
yu
yo
R
ra
ri
ru
re
ro
W
wa
wo
n
To return, then, to the dictionary, the first page listed words in the order of the fifty sounds: aan, atafuta, a’kerakan, a’sari, anguri, a’pua’pu, ahaha . . . These days, I could tell you what most of these words mean; back then, I recognized one. What mattered, though, was not how much I did or didn’t understand, but rather the realization this encounter brought about. I’m not delusional after all, it ran, all those individual instances of onomatopoeia which have intrigued and niggled at me are part of some recognized holistic phenomenon.
I have no intention of implying that sound-symbolism is in and of itself a unique feature of Japanese, or somehow incomprehensible to us as Anglophones; on the contrary, English has a healthy array of sound-symbolic vocabulary, ranging from words like “oink,” “splash,” and “boom,” which conform to the dictionary definition of onomatopoeia as those words emulating the noise of sound-producing phenomena, to more indirect or borderline examples like “zig-zag,” “trudge,” and “dilly-dally,” which emulate the qualities of things they represent, as opposed to their sounds. In the case of “dilly-dally,” for example, the “d” sounds connote lethargy and heaviness, while the reduplicated structure suggests a drawn-out quality, both of which in some way prop up the word’s meaning of dawdling. When we begin to tune in to this aspect of our language, we find that even verbs which would not commonly be registered as mimetic, like “trudge” and “slip,” do in fact transpire to have sound-symbolic properties.
Nevertheless, the onomatopoeic landscape within Japanese differs from that of English in two main ways. Firstly, there is a discrepancy when it comes to numbers. Although exact quantities of mimetic vocabulary are hard to calculate and compare across languages, it is generally acknowledged that the size of the Japanese onomatopoeic vocabulary surpasses that of Indo-European languages by three to five times, and is by some reckonings the largest in the world after Korean. Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, is the difference in the way that mimetics are categorized; like many other languages, Japanese differs from English in acknowledging a specialized class of onomatopoeic words, and its mimetics take one of a number of several specific patterns, which for the most part make them immediately recognizable as such. As a result, in Japanese there is a far clearer sense of which words are and aren’t onomatopoeic, and much more of a social precedent for verbally naming and acknowledging the use of mimetic language, which forms a marked contrast to the blurred and mostly undiscussed boundary lines of English onomatopoeia. There is also a clear and well-understood distinction between giongo, where words mimic sounds, and gitaigo, where words are mimicking non-auditory properties.
These factors go some way to explaining why it took me a while to focus in on Japanese onomatopoeia, and why I was predisposed to underestimate the importance of its place in the language. Yet the more I read about Japanese mimetics, the more I came to understand that I wasn’t alone in this. Japanese mimetics have been largely overlooked in the field of linguistics and related scholarship, part of a pattern of marginalization that can be traced as far back as a declaration by Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics and semiology, that onomatopoeic elements of language are “marginal phenomena” which are “never organic elements of a linguistic system,” and “far fewer than is generally believed.” Uncomfortably enough, my assumptions made me an unwitting part of a whole movement of Westerners, striding boldly forth with their unchallenged assumptions that the unknown will conform to the pattern of what they are used to, and riding roughshod over any evidence to the contrary.
Indeed, it is really only in the last few decades that linguistics scholars have begun to kick back against this marginalization, mounting the case that, unfortunately, one cannot magic away the thornier elements of language simply because they do not conform to the neat rules upon which one has decided for one’s system. Japanese linguistics scholars of recent years have provided an eloquent and impassioned argument for the affective, somatic aspects of Japanese mimetics, which means they cannot be analyzed purely in terms of their semantic dimension. For those who have grown up with them, argues Sotarō Kita, one such linguist, the ability of mimetics to evoke vivid, affect-rich “images” of an experience, to place listener and speaker alike immediately “at the scene,” is beyond doubt. “The question,” he adds, “is how to characterize this feeling.”
Although admittedly not of a kind which would satisfy any linguistics scholar, we could hazard one characterization of this feeling by turning to the very mimetics whose effect we’re trying to account for. Maza-maza, we might say in an attempt to describe the impressions they leave—the sound of something seeming very vivid. I could translate what my dictionary says about the word: “The state of a certain occurrence being distinctly perceived in the mind,” or else give some examples of the English translations of sentences containing maza-maza which I find online: “a vivid reminder of the fact that,” “clearly brought home to someone that,” “graphic statement,” etc. I could try and explain why it is that I hear the word in my best friend’s voice, the voice of various characters in novels I have read and translated, the voices of a hundred different people, and why I can hear where the emphasis falls when it is to be especially emphasized. I could attempt to describe why it now feels to me that this sort of onomatopoeic language is where the beating heart of Japanese lies. Why, from a certain point in time, I ditched my previous ambition to master the bewilderingly complex web of honorifics that even native speakers routinely get wrong, and which always seemed to distinguish hardcore Japanophiles from those whom Japanese society merely humored, and set my sights instead on being able to use mimetic language properly, naturally. Why, to the extent that I still have a linguistic ambition, it is to speak the kind of Japanese which takes mimetics as its beacon: a Japanese of gesturing and storytelling, of searing description, of embodied reality.
Leafing through my first dictionary of onomatopoeia, identical to that of my colleague, I felt with a vivid certainty that my whole project of learning Japanese was doomed. I’ve misused mimetics and felt burning embarrassment; I’ve used them correctly and felt great satisfaction, and then later, a delayed sort of burning embarrassment, for being a smart-ass. I have found them ridiculous, adorable, intuitive, counterintuitive, enlightening, profound. Now when I look back at the course of my language learning, they lie there studding my path like waymarkers, tracing the course of my evolution. My relationship with the Japanese language has, in general, been an affect-driven one, but there is something about my journey with Japanese mimetics that feels unique.
Throughout what follows, Japanese mimetics will serve not only as a specific linguistic phenomenon, but also the symbol of a particular view of language. In this understanding, language is something we learn with our bodies, and through our body of experiences; where semantics are umbilically tied to somatics, where our experiences and our feelings form a memory palace; where words are linked to particular occasions, particular senses, which gradually fade the more practiced we become but remain there nonetheless in memory, forming a personal genealogy of the tongues we speak. In some way, it represents the opposite of the textbooks, memorized lists of verbs, and smartphone apps that come to many people’s minds at the mention of the words “language learning.”
Since it is inseparable from the bodies that speak it and the feelings that drive it, this form of language does not permit of a reductive semantic analysis. At the very least, such an analysis is bound to miss something, and it is to exactly this something that this book would like to attend. What follows, then, holds no aspirations to serve as a balanced or academically rigorous investigation, vowing instead to concern itself with felt experience; it positions itself less as interpretation, and more as erotics—as unscientific and unashamedly subjective celebration of the interpersonal dimension to taking up a language. Over time, I have come to believe that 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. These pages offer themselves as a paean to this act of devotion.
[A note: in what follows, I will be deviating from the strict dictionary definition of the English word “onomatopoeia” as that which refers exclusively to words imitating auditory phenomena, and rather using the words “onomatopoeia” and “mimetics” broadly and interchangeably to refer to any sound-symbolic vocabulary.]
Fifty Sounds
¶ giro’: the sound of eyes riveting deep into holes in your self-belief, or vicariously visiting the Nocturama, or every party where you have to introduce yourself
SOMETIMES I THINK THAT IF I could telescope the last fifteen years into a single scene it would go like this. We begin with a wide shot, the camera skimming the lofty ceiling of a large, open-plan room. Sunset seeps in through the tall windows, picking out bright parallelograms of light on the walls, and we hear the gentle burble that marks out the early stages of a party. It’s hard to pin down where this party is, because in truth it isn’t one party but all of them, so for the sake of argument let’s have it somewhere in Britain. The Japanese version plays out quite differently, anyway. So the odd snatch of recognizable English, then, as the camera begins to float its way down from the high ceiling, homing in on a corner where a woman is standing with a group, holding a glass of wine, introductions, let’s say it’s some kind of opening and they all have nice semi-creative careers: graphic designers, journalists, event coordinators. Everyone is politely fascinated and fascinating, but when the woman is asked what her job is and tells them she’s a translator, is asked what languages and says, Japanese, you can feel even on screen a crevice opening up in the air. It’s not incredulity or aggression, not awe or surprise or defensiveness, but it’s not unlike any of these things, and there is some exhaling, some eyebrows raised in a way that they weren’t for the graphic designer. Some alert glances and follow-up questions. And then the conversation moves on, shifts away from the woman because her body-language seems to indicate that she doesn’t want to hold forth on what it is that she does. The moment passes, conversation limps along for a while and then the cluster starts to disintegrate. The woman makes to move off, and a man who had been standing opposite her reads her movements and breaks off with her, two fish flitting away from the shoal. He says her name, which he has remembered, and appends to it a question mark. They come to a standstill facing each other, a little way off from where the group was before. He reintroduces himself, maybe they shake hands, and then he leans in slightly, his palm coming to rest against a partitioning wall, a lopsided smile floating on his face, and he says, “So . . .”
We wonder, with the woman, what’s coming, although something in the woman’s expression suggests to us that she knows in her heart of hearts exactly what’s coming.
“Why Japan?”
The camera freezes for a moment to take this in, catch the incline of his torso, catch the look in his eye which, despite the smile still suspended across his face, is strangely urgent. Probing is a word you could use to describe this look, and it feels more marked coming from someone you wouldn’t expect to show unveiled interest in another person—who you might expect to view such behavior as a form of weakness. And then we pan to the woman, and we’re expecting this conversation to proceed in the intense yet witty way that conversations are supposed to go at these parties, particularly in films of these parties, but what comes over her face is instead a look of discomfort. Surely by now, we think, this woman will have formulated an answer to come out with in these situations, something pat, light, flirtatious, even if it isn’t strictly accurate—but it seems that she hasn’t. Instead, she visibly melts from the question, face scrunching up unphotogenically.
“I don’t really know.” She flashes him the hopeful smile of someone trying their pet once again with a food they know all too well it dislikes. “It just sort of happened.”
The camera pans back to the man’s face and we recognize the glint in his eyes from before, undiminished—in fact if anything augmented—and now, if we were not feeling it before, we start to feel uncomfortable. We confirm to ourselves that there was something about his previous expression that was oddly intent, that we hadn’t just been imagining it. It dawns on us that this man is not going to accept this non-answer, and the first note of panic sounds in our chests. We’re unclear why the woman is being so reticent, but what is clear is that the man will do everything in his power not to let her disappoint him. We don’t know why, either—if it’s some specific query he has, or some commonality he’s felt between them: a darkness, a difference. Is he a Japanophile? Or has her uncalled-for coyness piqued something in him? In any case, the look is unmistakable, and it grows more so every micro-second the camera lingers on the glint in his eyes. The glint speaks.
Prove yourself, it says. I’m serious, now. Don’t let me down. You owe me this.
Needless to say, of course, this woman is me. I am the woman who has been asked at a conservative estimate a thousand times over the last fifteen years why and how she found herself in Japan in the first place yet still doesn’t have a decent answer to offer, and I am the woman who is naive enough to go on hoping that the next time she’s put on the spot the response may miraculously come to her as it never has before, fully formed and universally accepted, as edifying to her as it is to her interlocutor. Or at least, I have been, in the past. As the years go by and no succinct answer surfaces, my belief that some new fact will reveal itself as the driving force behind the direction my life has taken inevitably diminishes. In fact, as time passes, something else happens; I’ve become more and more sure that what’s brought me all this way is something verging on a feeling, or a darkness, or a cluster of interrelated feelings and darknesses—something which feels to me quite specific, but is almost impossible to pin down. Except right now, I feel like I might be able to do it. In this moment, the answer I feel to be the most truthful would be to point to that final shot of the man’s glare, poised on a knife-edge between thinking the woman important and thinking her a waste of time, and say, this. This in the eyes right here, this is why I was in Japan.
