The Fall of Language in the Age of English

by Minae Mizumura, Mari Yoshihara (Translator), Juliet Winters Carpenter (Translator)

Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but also raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge, yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity.

Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional--and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages.

Mizumura calls these writings "texts" and their ultimate form "literature." Only through literature, and more fundamentally through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language, and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.

Genres: Nonfiction, Japan, Language, Linguistics, Essays, Japanese Literature, Philosophy

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2008

About the author

Minae Mizumura (水村 美苗 Mizumura Minae, born 1951) is a novelist currently writing in the Japanese language.

Educated in the US, she wrote her first published work in the English language, a scholarly essay on the literary criticism of Paul de Man. She is often portrayed as a Japanese novelist who questions the conventional boundaries of national literature. Her novels include Light and Darkness Continued, An I-Novel, and A True Novel, which has been selected for the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, a national program to promote translations of Japanese literature. She also writes essays and literary criticism in major newspapers and journals. Many of Minae Mizumura's works have been described as highly readable and often entertaining, while, at the same time, resonating with historical significance. They are also known for their formalistic innovations, such as making use of unusual printing formats and inserting English texts and photographic illustrations. Because she returned to Japan as an adult and chose to write in the Japanese language despite her coming of age in the United States and her education in the English language, critics have often noted her particular love for Japanese language and her commitment to Japanese literature. Her analysis and observations on the demise of the Japanese language, detailed in her book of criticism called The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English, gained much attention from the mainstream media as well as the Internet. In the same book, she wrote of the significance of preserving the great literary tradition established during the time of building modern Japan.

Minae Mizumura has taught at Princeton University, the University of Michigan and Stanford University. She was a resident novelist in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2003. She has won the 1991 Agency for Cultural Affairs New Artist Award, the 1996 Noma New Artist Award, and the 2003 Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Minae Mizumura now resides in Tokyo, Japan.

Source: wikipedia

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Linguistic Nightmare

Minae Mizumura is a critical observer. She is also a critical reporter, especially of people she encounters. None of her writerly companions attending an international assembly in the middle of Iowa cornfields escapes her sharp-eyed evaluation. And since most of the participants can’t converse with each other, her judgments are mostly only that, sharp-eyed. Nevertheless Mizumura rates with Louella Parsons or Roger Ebert in spotting the character behind the persona.

Mizumura doesn’t like America much. I understand. In terms of popular culture, America is the biggest island on the planet. But apparently the campus of Iowa State University is an exception (see comment #1 below). The authorities there have been importing literary talent for three month stints of ‘interaction’ for decades. This oasis of diversity is what Mizumura is mainly reporting about in this memoir that edges into polemic as it goes along. She, like me, is a curmudgeon (termagant seems vaguely sexist) who, while being mostly civil to everyone she meets, does harbour dark fantasies that she has no hesitation disclosing in print.

One of these fantasies is that the English language is as oppressive as the American people. Mizumura was ripped (her word) from her native Japan at the age of twelve to study in the USA. She never got over the experience and escaped back to Japan as quickly as she could, blaming English (or at least its American variant) for polluting not just her writing but also the entire Japanese language. She is, therefore, not overjoyed to be participating in an academic programme whose only commonality is some degree of fluency in English.

Some part of Mizumura’s distaste for America is cultural. She projects American brashness and unawareness of subtlety onto the language itself. But the principle source of dissatisfaction is racial. She feels out of place in an area dominated by blond-haired blue-eyed giants who start to look old by their mid-thirties and are likely overweight in any case. Having sat in the rear of a Tokyo bus, and looked forward to a busload of people with exactly the same (to me) hair and head features, I can empathise with her alienation.

But I can’t help feeling that there is a latent racial prejudice in her attitude toward English. Her earliest high school educational experience in the Great Neck suburb of New York City is probably to blame. She and I are rough contemporaries in that same school system, which at the time was highly segregated and decidedly lacked diversity of any sort. I can imagine that Mizumura was considered strange if not vaguely threatening to her schoolmates who weren’t even vaguely cosmopolitan.

This school experience seems to me what is behind Mizumura’s somewhat bizarre obsession with saving the Japanese language. She worries that if even a former international lingua franca like French could fall prey to the linguistic magpie of English, - the “valiant” (her term) Académie Française notwithstanding - what chance does Japanese have to retain its integrity? While in Iowa she began to worry not just about the fate of Japanese but also of Mongolian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Nynorsk (a Norwegian dialect), and Tswana (the native language of Botswana) to name but several. Clearly her issue is of worldwide import!

I can’t understand the nature of this issue though. Mizumura meets several other writers from dictatorial and other regimes which attempt to restrict or direct what is written about and how. She recognises this as oppression. What she apparently doesn’t recognise is that language is the ultimate form of true collective decision-making. Language users are constantly inventing and importing new words and phrases, usually modifying their meaning dramatically along the way. Some of these innovations are rejected and some become part of everyday speech. And some are just what the doctor ordered to sabotage directive authority. Few are coerced; none of these last except as irony.

But Mizumura has a very different logic. “There is a hierarchy among languages,” she thinks. On the top of her hierarchy is English, not because it has the largest number of speakers or because of the ease of learning it but because it is the dominant second language and has thus become ‘universal.’ She is worried because “To a writer, the fall of one’s own language means nothing less than the fall of one’s national literature, of which every writer is a bearer.” For them not to feel this way would be “ethnolinguistic betrayal.” It appears that she regards her fellow writers and the readers of Japan with a disdain at least equal to what she feels for Americans.

I do share a certain nostalgia with Mizumura about lost languages, - Latin, Classical Greek, Aramaic, and Anglo-Saxon get my votes for revival - mainly because each language is really untranslatable. Each cuts the world at different joints, as it were, and has connotations, echoes, and substrates that are unique. Yiddish for example has only several million remaining speakers but continues to decline and has no significant literary production today. But American English has absorbed an enormous number of Yiddish words and phrases, not as translations but as part of itself (schmuck, bupkis, chutzpah, klutz, glitz, schlep are just a few that come to mind). If anything, Yiddish is to some extent preserved in English. This is what English has always done. It is the whore of languages, mating with all and sundry, and taking whatever seems more precise, or beautiful, or different, or just because it makes communication with a non-English speaker possible.

So, Mizumura’s plea to the Japanese people to appreciate their language more by limiting the influence of English is more than just bizarre, it is also counter-productive. Linguistic insulation is not something at all desirable. Attempting to achieve such insulation implies totalitarian measures which history has shown to be ultimately ineffective. Language is not something we control but something we submit to. We may tweak its edges but whether those tweaks result in any permanent effects are not things we can determine.

I have to conclude that Ms Muzimuza’s lament is really a working out of a teenage trauma rather the formulation of a serious suggestion. I hope that as therapy this book and her fictional companion volume are successes. But as a literary theory both are bunk.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few months ago my 3rd year junior high school students (about 14-15 years old) were doing some group work in my class. As I was monitoring them discussing what they were working on, I overheard some boys saying something to each other that was new for me in 12 years of teaching English. To roughly translate: “I don’t understand why we are studying English. In 20 years everyone will be speaking Chinese. Why aren’t we studying that?”
The part about “why are we studying English?” isn’t new. Most people involved in English education, myself included, don’t do a good enough job communicating to students why English is important instead of just saying “because”. The part about these young Japanese boys thinking that Chinese will become the universal language in 20 years however was, if not fanciful, at the very least, interesting.
Minae Mizumura in her book “The Fall of Language in the Age of English”, would vociferously disagree with my students however.
The thesis of her book is largely that while the Japanese language has a long and quite remarkable history, particularly in its written form via literature, it is under assault from the universal influence of English.
She cites the growth of a unique Japanese literature that flourished from the late 18th century up until the end of World War 2, a literature that despite the prevalence of English in other world literatures managed to be written almost solely in Japanese despite it restricting its global reach.
After the war, she cites the decision by the Japanese Ministry of Education, under pressure from Occupation forces and prominent Japanese academics to restrict the staggering number of Japanese characters in common use to a number slightly above 1, 800 (now slightly over 2,100.
Mizumura argues that this did irreparable damage to the Japanese language that continues to reverberate today in that works in the Japanese “canon” written before 1945 have become inaccessible to a large number of the postwar generation. (She also notes that as horrible as this was for Japanese culture, it was at least preferable to the push to eliminate Japanese in favor of romanized characters). This is for her, akin to robbing Japan of one of its greatest artistic achievements in the name of trying to simplify the language.
It is quite an interesting argument and one that I am quite sympathetic to. Japanese in particular, as opposed to some Nordic and European languages, is extremely difficult to render into English due to not only its radically different sentence structure, 3 styles of characters all with different nuances, as well as the cultural significance of particular characters and turns of phrase. English often fails to capture what Japanese can through centuries of shared history can convey.
She is also correct in her assessment that Japanese young people, as opposed to American schools to cite one example, are rarely exposed to their own literary history in primary school:

“The sad truth is that assigning any book of Japanese fiction, let alone a modern classic, to be read from first page to last never happens in any Japanese classroom from primary school through college, with the possible exception of college classes for literature majors.”

While students will read excerpts of Natsume Soseki or Dazai Osamu in their Japanese languages classes, I can attest to the notion that the idea of students reading complete novels for class just doesn’t happen. Her argument that this needs to be rectified is one that is difficult to argue with.
It is at this juncture however where Mizumura loses me. She blames this state of affairs on Japanese “leftist” and “public intellectuals”:

“Japan’s leftist intellectuals staked everything on two principles: pacifism and egalitarianism. Their devotion to the former is certainly understandable. But their trumpeting of the latter was not only because egalitarianism forms the basis of leftist thought. It was also because they saw the military and government elite as the perpetrators of World War II, and the common people in Japan and other countries as the war’s victims. In other words, to sever Japan as completely as possible from its imperial past, they were fiercely against patriotism and elitism.”

While there was certainly a tendency on the Japanese left to feel guilt about the country’s conduct doing the war, this was not something confined solely to the bogeyman of the “left”. Japan attempted to do some soul searching, much like postwar Germany, but stopped far short of coming to terms with the war years than the latter. It should also be pointed out that the same right leaning political party dominated Japanese politics almost uninterrupted from the end of the war up until the present day. To argue that the “left” was trying to destroy the Japanese language in coordination with the occupation authorities because they hated patriotism is speculation on her part. The left had no real power to do so as attested to by the fact that we still use Japanese today.
So how do we reverse the state of affairs in which Mizumura where English is undermining the Japanese language?
This is where I think Mizumura is particularly misguided. Her proposal is to eliminate compulsory English education Japanese schools.

“As long as the goal is universal bilingualism, such methods will never result in the high-level bilingualism Japan now requires. The only realistic way to develop a cadre of skilled bilinguals is to head in exactly the opposite direction, that is, to give up on the notion of universal bilingualism. This means abandoning once and for all a principle held inviolable (at least on the surface) by the Ministry of Education and the Japanese populace ever since World War II: the principle of egalitarianism. By giving special education opportunities to a select stratum, Japan must choose a path it has until now shunned, a path it has seen as morally wrong. The national budget cannot be expanded indefinitely to accommodate English education. Not every child is eager to learn English (in fact, English is the most abhorred subject in Japanese schools). It makes no sense to spend the nation’s limited resources equally on those who do want to learn English and those who do not. Those resources should be devoted to a limited pool of talent, the government leading the way.”

There is so much to unpack in that paragraph, and while I am certainly not unbiased in my role as an English teacher in Japan, I find her conclusions to be extremely irresponsible on so many levels.
For one, how are we to judge who is in this “select stratum” deserving “special education opportunities”? While she goes out of her way to say she doesn’t favor elitism in education this seems to me to be the prototypical example of it. How for example do we judge what child gets to have a full English education? Implying (if I’m being generous as to what she is proposing) that well off children of government officials need English more than a child living in a rural village is extremely short sighted and reminiscent of feudalism where only the sons of samurai had access to career advancement. Whether she is happy about it or not, being able to speak English is a major advantage in a competitive job market both within and outside of Japan. Denying that to a large segment of children is to limit their possibilities for the future, and by extension Japan’s. Children are not “talent”. They are human beings who deserve equal opportunities to better themselves and expand their horizons.
As far as her contention that “English is the most abhorred subject in Japanese schools”, how exactly does she know this? Has Mizumura ever taught English in elementary school? Junior or senior high school? If she has, I apologize. However to say that all kids “abhor” English is just not correct.
Are there kids who don’t like English? Yes, of course.
Are there kids who don’t like science or social studies? Yes and yes.
What seems to be lost on Mizumura is that we are talking about children. Most children don’t know what they like. The years spanning elementary school to high school are extremely formative ones where children are exposed to new things and ideas and go back and forth on them depending on how they are presented and their life experience.
There is quite simply no monolithic bloc of kids who “abhor” English.
That Mizumura feels this way is particularly dissapointing in that the first part of this book is spent describing her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she encountered writers from all over the globe and communicated with them in English.
I more than once felt that her relationship with English was complex. Take for example this passage, which I’m not sure why she felt the need to include:

“Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English, those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language, would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position, and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to become a universal language used in every corner of the world. English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.”

I’m not sure what the nature of the “jokes” she is referring to here are. If they are racist jokes than yes, she has a very valid point as to their being inappropriate. However if we are talking about international conferences, do we need to consider each nationality in the room? English is the lingua franca of international conferences. I don’t say this in support or criticism of it. It simply is. There will be some there undoubtedly more skilled in English than others but is it incumbent on native speakers to not tell complex jokes that not everyone may understand? This seems like an unreasonable demand. I have been in countless social and professional situations in my 12 years in Japan where Japanese people made jokes in Japanese I didn’t understand. I didn’t get angry or offended however. If anything, it motivated me to improve my Japanese. It is no more incumbent on my Japanese friends and coworkers to speak English around me than it is for members of an international conference to not offend others with their English fluency.

All of this is not to disparage Japanese at all. It is a wonderful language and one that I love (if not one that smacks me around on a daily basis). I believe there is a middle ground however between turning away from English and pretending it is not critical in the modern world, and also ensuring that Japanese children are exposed to the classics of their own culture.
While there is much I disagree with Mizumura about, I’ll close by saying her arguments are if nothing else, fascinating and open up a line of dialogue that is certainly important in an age where English will remain the dominant universal language for the foreseeable future.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, translated copies of Mizumura's books tend to be expensive. And yes - they're completely worth the price tag, if only for how much you feel like you're sitting down in an extremely engaging professor's class throughout reading this.

Reading this has indirectly given me a better understanding of my own country's state of literature and language. Mizumura's careful, incredibly well-researched and insightful exploration of the historical, political, and ideological reasons behind the (initial) rise and (current) fall of the Japanese language is something to be savoured, and contemplated upon.

She gives a wealth of historic examples to support the points she makes - and yet, I find I was never bored throughout the book. It's informative without being self-indulgent - all thanks to Mizumura's ability to write incredibly compelling narratives. Her retelling of Fukuzawa Yuichi's valiant efforts of learning Dutch, then English, is filled with thoughtful admiration. Her lushly detailed (and kind of fangirl-y) analyses of Natsume Souseki's Sanshirō is, simply put, a joy to read. The whole of this book feels a bit like sitting in a hall listening to an amazing visiting professor's impassioned lecture - all about how the reality that English is the universal language has been brought on by fortunate historical accidents. And on how the loss of non-English written languages and literature would be a huge loss to humanity.

I mean - alright, her tone can be pretty dramatic at times, and things can get a little anti-Western, a lot of the time. But hey - in an age where globalisation seems fully bent on making everything uniform (with that uniformity placing the West as the ideal), I'm very thankful a book like this has been written to knock some sense into all of us. Whether that's the native English speakers who need to "at least be aware of their privileged position - and more important(ly), be aware that the privilege is unwarranted", or the non-natives who need to get it out of our heads that our non-English languages and literatures are in any way inferior/unworthy of preservation, simply because they don't fit into the Western model.

This book is a call for all non-native-English-speakers to start thinking about writing literature according to our respective contexts and enriching the world in the process, instead of becoming a mindless consumer of popular English/Western culture.

"Reality is constructed by languages, and the existence of a variety of languages means the existence of a variety of realities, a variety of truths. Understanding the multifaceted nature of truth does not necessarily make people happy, but it makes them humble, and mature, and wise. It makes them worthy of the name Homo sapiens."

This is nothing less than a brilliant piece filled with urgency - strict in its academic research, without lacking passion and true connection to the subject Mizumura's writing about: her own language and her own identity. In turn, it has sparked questions and rumination on my part, about my own language and what it means to be part of the nation I am. A must read for anyone who has any interest in translated literature - or just anyone who wants to be less ignorant, in this age of English.

Last note: absolutely superb translation!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minae Mizamura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English is an highly approachable, surprisingly personal discussion of universal, national, local, and vernacular languages.

Mizamura convincingly argues for multilingualism and wisely counsels humility to native English speakers. ”The rest of the world would appreciate it if. . . [native English speakers] would at least be aware of their privileged position—and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to become a universal language used in every corner of the world. English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.”

Mizamura’s arguments hold particular interest within the context of recent debates about global literature, such as Tim Parks’ excellent Where I’m Writing From: The Changing World of Books and Adam Kirsch’s The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that extols the virtues of "national languages" could easily have been a stridently nationalist book. But Mizumura blew away my expectations with the lucidity of her prose, her beautifully constructed argument, and her inspiring call to arms.

I have always thought that I was lucky to be born into the "universal language" of my time, English. Vast troves of information are easily available, and I can converse with more and more people around the world as the dominance of English spreads. But Mizumura is completely correct when she argues that speakers of the universal language rarely think about the consequences of its creep into the vocabularies of local and national languages. For millions of writers, educators, and professionals, the only way up is through English.

Mizumura presents a compelling argument that nations, specifically Japan, must make a concerted effort to bolster their "national languages" to preserve their unique lens at looking at the world. Even nations that suffered under colonialism or national fragmentation and whose languages are still "local", i.e. without a definitive oeuvre of modern literature, cannot succumb to the temptation of writing, thinking, and philosophizing in English. They must hang on to every scrap of identity and resist. She argues that if only specialists read and write seriously in Japanese, then Japan will lose part of its critical identity and no one will take the country seriously. And the death of literature will ensure, she somewhat melodramatically argues.

Mizumura bemoans "leftist intellectuals" and their obsession with creating egalitarianism in Japan, citing their "dumbing down" of the language by restricting the number of Chinese characters as a reason why Japanese people are reading the classics less and less. This section was the least compelling portion of her argument for me because it seems to be based more on her personal opinion and less on any scholarly inquiry. While this approach works well for the majority of the book, Mizumura's place as an "armchair theorist" weakens her analysis. Also, Mizumura begins the book with a lengthy chapter about personal experiences at the University of Iowa, which detracts from the tone and the message of the book.

Fighting against my own monolingualism is an eternal battle. I have started a new journey through French in the last two years, and while it has been a struggle, it's also exhilarating and rewarding. Parsing my way through a French novel takes time, but when I go an entire page without the dictionary I feel triumphant. Communing with a national language and forsaking my universal language for a few minutes each day has opened my understanding of the world to new vistas. I'll give an example. Just the other day, I came across what has quickly become one of my favorite words. Discovering the word "boursicoter" (to dabble on the stock market) proved to me the versatility and beauty of language, as well as the inherent value of foreign language education, once again.

Mizumura's work has given me a new lens through which to view my study of French and a window into how non-native English speakers interact with my language. Definitely worth reading.

[AK · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't stand most of this book. It reminded me of various academic feuds I've observed in my life, where personal disagreements get couched in political language, in the hopes that lofty language will elevate the dispute into something universally relevant. But it's really just a fight between two people who don't like each other. In this case, the brawl is between Mizumura and the English language, and later between Mizumura and Japanese people who don't feel the way about the Japanese language as she does.

Hating the English language is a pretty reasonable position, especially for someone like Mizumura, who had to move the States as a junior high school student, and who has turned the trauma of that linguistic and cultural displacement into several highly-acclaimed novels. I read excerpts from one (in Japanese) for a class in grad school and was intrigued by her use of form and language, and so I gave this book a shot when I came across it.

The best chapter of this book is the first, which recounts her time at the International Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. It certainly reveals quite a lot about Mizumura and her own prejudices, but still gives a sense of what that kind of international workshop is like, how power is ascribed to languages and the ability to speak them. I also got a bit out of reading the second chapter, which discusses the fall of French as a 'universal language,' because the chapter was still guided a bit by Mizumura's biography, her time studying French from high school through graduate school, partly as a way to get away from dreaded English.

After that, the book takes a turn for the theoretical, and it's a mess. There's a chapter where she gets annoyed at Benedict Anderson because Imagined Communities isn't about her particular bugaboo, the rise of English as a universal language. That's because the book covers the rise of nationalism, a phenomenon that largely happened before English had the global dominance that it does today. I had a hard time with her chapters on Japanese literature, and that's speaking as someone who speaks and reads Japanese and is well-versed in Japanese history and literature. I couldn't imagine assigning these chapters in a class, for example, nor could I imagine someone who doesn't know much about the history of Japanese literature reading these chapters and finding inspiration to go and read Natsume Soseki, for example. (Soseki is great! Read Soseki!) Finally, there's where Mizumura compares, without any sense of irony, the move to simplify some aspects of written Japanese to the genocide of intellectuals by the Khmer Rouge.

This book was originally written to incite debate among Japanese readers, many of whom don't read the classics that Mizumura loves, and who are, to her, uninterested in preserving and protecting the Japanese language. I have a feeling the structure and content of this book make a bit more sense in Japanese, though I haven't looked at the Japanese version yet. I know the translators worked with Mizumura to adapt the book for an English-language readership, and though it seems to be well-reviewed here on Goodreads, it didn't work at all for me.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mizumura blames the butchering of the Japanese language, with only 2000~ish 漢字 in daily use, limiting creative expression in literature, to the elite on a cabal of postwar leftist intellectuals.

It's funny that this book was translated into English as the most interesting parts about it, the critiques on Japan, are utterly mystifying to me, and I've been here almost a year now. Of course my 日本語 ability is still poor, but her stance is not one I anticipated, and though I feel the urge to portray it in a bad light and criticise it, I can't do so until my Japanese improves significantly. Something to work toward!

The book itself is fascinatingly ambivalent. Mizumura dismisses all of contemporary Japanese literature as trash, and while I don't consider Haruki Murakami's books future classics, I'm not so sure how her argument springs from this belief considering I don't think much of any contemporary novel in English's era-defining, transcending classic status. We can hardly see such things, cursed as we are to live in the present.

Mizumura also gives ambivalent... praise? criticism? to Ireland for the government's policies to keep Irish alive as a national language, which I would hardly consider a success as she sees it. I really only took pride in Gaeilge when I no longer had to study it, and I'm a nerd who loves studying. Ireland is not to be envied because the country is pursuing a bilingual policy as opposed to wiping away English, because that policy is completely ineffective and causing a reflexive dismissal and embarrassment toward Irish that many young people feel.

Mizumura implicitly criticises Ireland for not being more strident in eradicating English as our common tongue, but how realistic would that be? Geographically we are still neighbours. I'd've been learning English the same way I learnt Irish in school had we gone that route, perhaps with the same result, except I'd be overall adept only in a language that locks me out of my very work now.

Still, I admire Mizumura's stridency and am sympathetic, even if I also find her completely wrongheaded, reactionary and radical simultaneously. It's good to know that if I put the work in over the next 3,4,5 years to become adept in reading and speaking Japanese, there will be someone to tell me both that the language I've struggled to learn is bastardized and artless, and that the language I already know is much to blame. Cheers, Minae. I'll get to casually studying Classical Chinese as soon as I finish learning Latin and Koiné Greek.

[Claire Reads Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the rise of English as the world's universal language and the implications that has for national languages and Japanese in particular. This book provides a concise history of Japan and the precarious development of the Japanese language that might feel like review for readers who are already familiar with those subjects—for a newbie like myself, the information was at times dense and academic but entirely accessible. Mizumura is a force, provocative and unapologetic in her assessment of the current state of Japanese literature (it's easy to see how this book caused a stir in her home country). But her criticisms are born from her deep love of the Japanese language, and her anguish over the fall of that language is at times painfully palpable. This book is both an elegy and an urgent call to arms that will leave readers (including English-speaking Westerners) with much to think about and consider.

[Mats · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bearing in mind that this book is a translation into a universal language and thus not complete but rather reshaped and retold to fit a universal mentality... (just to keep in line with Mizumura's general ideas)

Pros: Mizumura elegantly puts into words how I reckon many non-English natives must feel and experience English and how its function as a universal language affects their native tongues and texts. Here in Scandinavia, where English is extremely present, anglicisms are gradually seeping into grammar and vocabulary and it seems to worsen with each new generation of speakers and writers (Mizumura calls us bilinguals, I just believe we have adapted). I am personally not as frustrated or scared as Mizumura - I am sure national languages will survive. They will evolve and adapt like languages do but as long as there are nation states there will be a divide. Mizumura's strongest point to me was that every one with the means and opportunity should learn a second language other than English. As she writes, languages are mentalities, words are markers of culture. Even though English is a universal language it can't do justice to the whole world and its literature.

Cons: In the first part of the book - which another review judges to be the best and I agree - there are some remarks that I really believe should've been left out. The students she sees in the US are all white and blond and they all look like Hitler Jugend to her; the German participator in the programme she attends is bald and thus looks like a Nazi (she even jokingly tells him this - I doubt he found it funny); she's initially scared of one the participators from Africa purely because he's big and black. This is not an academic book, it's very subjective, but remarks like those just doesn't do the author or the book any favours in my opinion. In one of the last chapters she starts seeing Communist ghosts everywhere, blaming them and their egalitarian misconceptions McCarthyism-style for the detriment of the Japanese language and Japan society in general. She doesn't mention a lot of names though and those she does highlight were alive a century ago. It's just too comical.

Furthermore she claims that Japanese (written) language has never been guarded, only the opposite. This is not entirely true though. When ideas about genbun itchi (unification of spoken and written language) were put forth in the wake of the Meiji restoration the literate and literary elites came out in full force, determined to keep the archaic status quo, and even though younger authors at the time began using genbun itchi it wasn't until 1946 and the rewriting of the Constitution that it was employed on the imperial and governmental level. As another review mentions, she's rather conflicted by the end of the book; she wants language to be free of governmental influence yet regulated at the same time; she wants Japan to take foreign language less seriously yet English speaking countries to take it more seriously.

Also the book is supposed to be about the fall of languages. However, only the last third of the book is. The rest of the book is about how national languages came about. It should've been proportioned differently.

I guess I was a bit heavy on the cons there compared to the pros but I was disappointed with the book, thinking it would be more academic - far too subjective for that. However, some of her personal thoughts about how we feel and relate to our native languages - where objectivity just doesn't match up - were very insightful and valuable.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

All my life I have been drawn to books about books, about language. From refusing to relinquish a grammar textbook at my first public book sale (I think I was 8) to my recent enjoyment of Alena Graedon's The Word Exchange (which still gives me chills), I have been interested in how language develops and the role of great literature in a human life. Thus, I was very excited to read Minae Mizumura's nonfiction work, The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

Mizumura's thesis is a simple one: through an accident of history, English has become the world's "universal language," i.e., an external language, read or written by someone who speaks another language, through which knowledge is best pursued. This ubiquity, Mizumura argues, threatens the very existence of literature written in other languages, particularly non-Western languages like Japanese. Her first two chapters introduce the issue through her own personal experiences and, not surprisingly, were the most enjoyable to read, but the academic tone of the remainder of the book was still easy to understand and follow. I particularly appreciated the way in which she builds upon the "imagined communities" described by Benedict Anderson, perhaps because his work played a significant role in another book I recently enjoyed (Alessandro Perissinotto's novel For They Have Sown the Wind; I love such unexpected congruences). Mizumura also manages to offer cogent observations on two literary phenomena, polar opposites, which have puzzled me in the last few months: the global success of 50 Shades of Grey and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Patrick Modiano, a French author not well-known in the United States even among voracious readers of literary fiction.

As Mizumura acknowledges, her book was originally intended as a call to arms to the Japanese, the quality of whose national literature has fallen precipitously in her opinion. While she has clearly made substantial revisions to suit a native English-speaking audience, a great deal of the book still focuses on Japanese, a language with which I have no familiarity; I must admit that my attention during these chapters did tend to wander. Nevertheless, as a whole, The Fall of Language in the Age of English did accomplish Mizumura's stated goal of making English speakers not only aware of our "privileged position," but also conscious that, because the works translated into English are usually those which are linguistically and thematically easiest to translate, such works may not reveal the world's diversity but may, in fact, reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language. For those of us trying to diversify our reading, this is a sobering thought.

I think it's time for me to go find my Rosetta Stone CDs.

I received a free copy of The Fall of Language in the Age of English through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Jonathan Peto · Rating 4 out of 5]

I created a shelf entitled “skimmed” for this book, but I ended up reading it carefully and in full…

The book’s first chapter is about the author’s experiences at IWP (International Writing Program), an offshoot of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. They invite writers from around the world to Iowa, and they write. I would love to write full-time, even if only for a few months, so I was absorbed. The experience also fueled her thinking about writers writing in their own languages in a world where English reigns as a universal language. This image of her time at IWP from p. 43, moving about in her group of writers from many countries writing in their own languages, struck me: “…I grew more and more haunted by the idea that we might be a group of people headed for a downfall. Every time we went on an excursion, we boarded the two minibuses, always more or less divided along the lines of whites and Asians. But in the sense that we might be headed for a downfall, we were all the same.” Here is another important quote (p. 45): “…the more I marveled at the good fortune of Japanese literature in the past, the more despondent I grew about where it was headed in the future.”

As I get to the end of the first chapter, she seems to make the case she will explore in more detail later, which is that the writers she’s meeting write in their own languages, that there is a hierarchy among languages, with English dominating right now like no language ever did before, and that this threatens the written language of non-English languages in ways that worry her. She understands that languages have always evolved. She’s not referring to that. I don’t know if her conclusions stand, but her starting point makes sense to me. English is an extremely and uniquely dominant universal language right now. On p. 46 she writes that “There is no need to fear for the future of Japanese literature - not unless the Japanese language is falling…”

Well, I don’t know if Japanese literature is “falling”, but I guess I’m willing to hear her out. Chapter 2, I believe, is about French losing ground to English. I’m looking forward to it!

She gives a brief history of French as a dominant language and includes the text of a speech she gave in Paris in which she states on p. 62: “You too are now made to live in two temporalities: the universal temporality that flows in texts written in English, and the particular temporality that flows in texts written in your own language.”

I don’t know if I fully understand her concept of temporalities, but I enjoyed trying. She makes some important points about “a perpetual hermeneutic circle” that locks some ideas and truths out of English. “…only ‘truths’ that can be perceived in English exist as ‘truths’”. The mechanism that makes this occur is “the works that are usually translated into English are those that are both thematically and linguistically the easiest to translate, that often only reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language, and preferably that entertain readers with just the right kind of exoticism.”

I think these ideas are worth considering. I am excited to keep reading. When she writes about her first novel and why she included some English phrases and sentences, I want to read it.

Chapter 2 ends with more surprises and food for thought. Mizumura comes to understand, years later through various experiences and reflection why she was invited to Paris in the first place, not personally, but as a Japanese writer. Japanese isn’t a dominant language, but she comes to realize that it is considered to have a major literature, and that has a lot to do with Pearl Harbor, World War 2, and the many US soldiers trained to translate Japanese, some of whom made careers out of Japanese literature. Without them, Yasunari Kawabata wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize and many other Japanese writers wouldn’t be known to the West. She’s not saying that literatures aren’t great unless known and anointed by the English-speaking world, but “arbitrary forces of history” are involved in the recognition of Japanese literature as a major literature.

The author therefore recognizes privileges she enjoys that authors from other parts of the world at the International Writing Program may not. Because of this, I trust her more than I did at times in chapter 1. I can’t keep writing this much, because I haven’t even started Chapter 3, but I’m having a grand ol’ time reading this. Maybe when I retire, I’ll start some kind of masters in literature. Maybe I really would if I thought it would be as stimulating as this book has been so far.

The rest of the book in brief:

Chapter 3 - People Around the World Writing in External Languages

p. 80-81; “Those whose mother tongue is English often are unaware that when they are writing in their own language, they are in fact writing in a universal language. They are unaware of what they would be deprived of if they were writing in a non universal language - beyond the sheer number of readers. To apply the phrase I used in the talk I gave in Paris, they are not condemned to reflect on language in the way the rest of us are.”

P. 81 “In his terminology, sacred languages are what we have been calling ‘external languages’ - the languages of old, great civilizations that exerted influence on their neighbors. They are the universal languages of the past.”

She writes to dispel the notion that written language simply represents spoken language, not now or in the past. Instead, written languages were universal languages, and historically, bilinguals used them to seek knowledge. “Before modernity, much of learning was confined to exegesis of sacred texts - in a word, theology.” (p. 86) Eventually, seekers of knowledge in Europe branched out into other domains of knowledge. Latin was their universal language.

One of her starting off points is a book called Imagined Communities, but she believes the author got aspects of language and literature wrong. Besides external languages and universal languages, she discusses national languages and local languages and their interrelationships.

Eventually, national languages in Europe replaced Latin as depositories of knowledge. I am unable to critique her interpretation of how languages and knowledge entwined historically with bilingual knowledge seekers and translation, but it kept my interest. It sparked my imagination. “…the spread of the notion that our writing system ought to represent the language we speak was a critical step in the evolution of human civilization.” (p. 94)


Chapter 4 - The Birth of Japanese as a National Language

p. 106 “Until the dawn of the Western age of exploration in the fifteenth century, much of the globe had no writing. It was only because of Japan’s proximity to the Korean Peninsula that a writing system was introduced by the fifth century (or even earlier) and, by pure geographic luck, and oral culture was able to transform itself into a written culture.”

p. 107 “…the general rule that a local language acquires a written language by translation of a universal language applies to Japanese as well.”

p. 109 “If it is generally the rule that writing in a local language is created derivatively through the act of translation, Japanese follows this rule to a tee.”

As I read this overview of how spoken Japanese acquired a written language and literature, I had a premonition of something I may question later. I’m getting the feeling the author may work her way to some ideal time, some so called peak in Japanese literature. Then she may wax nostalgic about that literature and time period and therefore develop conservative ideas that result in disparaging and devaluing the current literary scene. It’s hard not to guess that’s subjective, like geezer YouTube comments under classic rock songs that inevitably dis all music after the 60s or 70s…

p. 116 “…from a modern historical perspective, the Japanese achievement in developing a local language and literature early on was quite remarkable… Not until the seventeenth century did the first pinnacle of prose fiction in the West, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, appear - some six centuries after The Tale of Genji.”

p. 117 “…Japan was fortunate… for its own indigenous writing to grow… and second in its economic development, which allowed that writing to spread among the population at large.”

A final prerequisite for Japanese to develop into a national language was for Japan “to escape from the Western powers.” She writes that that wasn’t a foregone conclusion at the time, and she lists and describes the “what ifs”. She basically concludes that novelists in Japan, had it been colonized, would have written in English, not Japanese, erasing, I presume, the miracle she writes about in the next chapter.

There is also an interesting account about Chinese characters in Japanese. At the time of the Meiji Restoration, many advocated dumping them.


Chapter 5 - The Miracle of Modern Japanese Literature

I enjoyed this chapter, but I don’t have a lot to say about it, especially her final conclusion. One thing she does is interpret Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro in a way that makes me want to read it. She demonstrates that the text dramatizes the very atmosphere and role that she claims universities had in Japan at the time, which was to translate Western texts and bring knowledge to Japan but not to contribute or add to that knowledge.

p. 147 “Those writing outside academia, meanwhile, tried to capture the reality of Japan, a country suddenly confronted by what is referred to as the ‘shock of the West’, leaving behind the fine writing that still captivates readers today.”

She also uses Soseki’s love of Chinese classics and disappointment with English poetry as a means for discussing forces at work in Japan and elsewhere. This conclusion on p. 151 is interesting: “…externally driven development spread through the non-Western world and is now omnipresent under the same name of ‘globalization”. The conclusion on p. 156, the chapter’s last page, interests me less: “…underneath the surface modern Japanese literature was indeed, in the words of Professor Hirota, ‘headed for a fall’. ” I’m curious how she’ll describe and prove it in the next chapter. All she does here is reveal that literacy rates went up after the Meiji Restoration, more monolinguals became writers, and interest in literature and reading increased. Accusations that she is elitist are possible, especially if she doesn’t really explain her opinion.

For me, the weakest part of the book so far is her idea that modern Japanese literature is a miracle. It rests on the notion that a lot of historical happenstances made it possible and those happenstances were not likely. I don’t think that’s a miracle, because history is full of important coincidences like that. As I learned in a math book called How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg, “improbable things happen a lot”.


Chapter 6 - English and National Languages in the Internet Age

This chapter begins with the end of literature. Forgive me for being skeptical. Even if it turns out we live during a literary low point, I’m confident a new age will dawn eventually, if the human race manages to beat climate change. However, I’m only at the end of the second paragraph. Hopefully, there’s some food for thought even if I probably can’t be convinced of her big idea.

p. 158 “In retrospect, the golden age of national language and of the novel, from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, was a time when novels monopolized the market of cultural goods… Dethroned, the novel has become merely one of many affordable mass-produced commodities.”

I don’t necessarily disagree. Even though I prefer novels over movies etc, I guess I’m just not as alarmed as she is. Perhaps I’m just not convinced it’s a bigger tragedy than climate change. Perhaps I’m just not convinced novels must always be a dominant cultural good for humanity to survive and/or grow. That must be her take on it, I think, but I’m inferring.

Here’s her take on it, from p. 159: “The sight of stacks upon stacks of best-selling books whose market value far outstrips their intrinsic value makes discriminating readers viscerally aware of the end of literature.” She’s writing about the Harry Potter books. I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan, but her argument isn’t as measured or detailed as most of the rest of this book. Oh well. It goes no deeper than a Goodreads reviewer who resorts to telling detractors that they don’t get it.

I want to hear more about this from p. 160: “Reading offers levels of understanding and dimensions of pleasure that other media simply cannot.”

I guess everything above from this chapter is really tangential. She admits there will always be people who read literature. Her real concern isn’t a surprise if you’ve been paying attention: “Entering the age of English means… But this time, English will be the one and only universal language - and will remain so for a long time.”

That may not be right, but it could be… I might finally start skimming now. I think she’s within her rights to wonder and perhaps mourn. When she writes about the internet, she writes about languages and refers to knowledge in different languages on the internet as libraries. It is hard to object to this from p. 164: “It is inevitable that the English library (on the internet) will function on a different level from all the rest.” As she notes, English is also taking over academia, world-wide.

p. 167 “A growing number of canonical texts will begin to circulate in English in academia. / And there is no reason that what is already taking place in academia should not gradually affect how we look at our ultimate text - literature.” This may not alarm native, monolingual speakers of English, but I understand her concern, on some level at least. Don’t you? She describes a way it could go and the effects on writers and naturally literature: “…those writers would have less and less incentive to write in their own language, and there would be fewer and fewer texts worth reading in that language.” If that statement doesn’t make sense, or its importance, perhaps you need to read her argument, step-by-step. “What was once a national language may be reduced to nothing more than a local language; a national literature, to nothing more than a local literature that no discriminating person takes seriously.” (p. 168)

And that right there is Mizumura’s prediction about the future of national languages. Perhaps I will start skimming now.

Wow. I had to add this from p. 169. She’s talking about future academics in Japan: “Even when writing about Japan, the more important the subject, the more meaningful it will be to write in English.”

And finally, she feels literature has lost huge amounts of prestige in Japan since the 1970s. Mmm. She says she’ll explain in the next chapter…


Chapter 7 - The Future of National Languages

It probably goes without saying that she is not very optimistic about the future of national languages. I’m not keen on nationalism, which is related, but I understand Mizumura’s desire for literature to remain or become a vibrant cultural good in lots of languages.

She describes an ideal future situation where a nation’s citizens are mostly bilingual, where English is the universal language but the national languages still flourish. Then she breaks down the difficulties most nations will have achieving this during the Age of English. “First of all, though the fact is not obvious to most people in the West, many non-Western languages do not yet function as national languages.” (p. 176)

Mizumura mentions that there are non-European languages that are “full-fledged languages with a flowering national literature.” She also feels that while the West debates the content of a literary canon, “cherished works of literature written in the national language” are a “basis of education… even in junior high and high school.” (p. 181)

But not in Japan. “The concept of a canon does not exist in Japan.” (p. 181)

I have no idea if that is a controversial statement. I may start asking around though. What she describes does sound damning though. “…the sad truth is that assigning any book of Japanese fiction - let alone a modern classic - to be read from first page to last never happens in any Japanese classroom from primary school through college, with the possible exception of college classes for literature majors.”

She blames, ahem, leftists. “What dealt a major blow to the status of these intellectuals was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But by then, the damage done to modern Japanese literature and the Japanese language was all but irreversible.” (p.183) I cannot, perhaps in my ignorance, take that too seriously.

She also blames the Ministry of Education and the American Occupation after World War Two. The Ministry of Education took the opportunity to simplify the written language. “Out of a pool of tens of thousands of Chinese characters, the ministry limited the number for everyday use to 1850 - without consulting experts, let alone seeking public opinion.” (p. 185)

But, forces within the American Occupation and among the Japanese themselves didn’t succeed in shoving a switch to the Roman alphabet down Japan’s throat. “And since the Ministry of Education was solidly in favor of phoneticism, the movement continued to gain steam even after the departure of U.S. forces.” (p. 186)

Needless to say, all that and other things results in today’s sad state of affairs in Japan, as she sees it. Three more sentences, just three:

Mizumura appears extreme and misguided at times, but I agree that we are in an Age of English, that English is a universal language like no other, and that there is a potential the dominance of English will decimate large swaths of languages and literatures, wiping out diversity of thought and perspective and limiting the possibility for multiple, varied, and culturally distinct “truths” to prosper. In an understandable bid to protect the Japanese language from external and internal forces, she looses touch with that and veers off into a minefield of tangential polemics before offering some possibly controversial suggestions, but take heed of this:

p. 203 “If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes.”

[Zara Rahman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic read, truly. It provides a thoughtful analysis of the role that English is playing in the world today, and the consequences not only for Japanese speakers, but for other (formerly) major world languages. Some of the framings introduced (eg. 'english supremacy', and the idea of local, national and universal languages) are valuable tools for thinking things through. As someone who's studied languages for much of my life, I found it to be an excellent overview of the consequences of our increasing focus on English as a mode of knowledge-sharing.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can sympathize with Mizamura's sentiment and fears about the Japanese language devolving into solely borrowed words, as classic books sit disregarded on dusty shelves, but some of her comments are off-putting.

"I was stunned by how many blond, blue-eyed people there are on earth. People who I secretly thought would look perfect in Nazi propaganda films as members of the Hitler Jugend-though they might not like the comparison." (Pg 25)
I imagine most don't.

She 'teases' a German author giving him a nickname: "Hi Perfect Cranium!" stating, "I'm sure he was aware I was teasing about the Nazi's eugenicist claim to be the most advanced race." (Pg 29)
I feel bad for this poor guy, because this simply isn't funny. She is later unnerved herself when a fellow author says "Banzai!" reminiscent of a war cry, but turns a blind eye to the discomfort she causes herself. (Pg 36)

[Maire · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. First chapter was painfully self-absorbed, so I skipped ahead. Still very self-absorbed. I really should have picked up on this from the introduction, but alas, my optimistic heart was blind to it.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

On seeing the title of this book, one might wonder how translation into English affects Mizumura's rhetoric. In fact, on opening it one discovers that the force of her argument is actually not in how the nature of the Japanese language influences storytelling, but how the existence of a “national literature” can transform how it feels to be a speaker of any non-English language, and why 21st century English makes all other languages into minorities. As such, the target audience of this book is not merely Japanese speakers but readers, writers, and critics of all literatures. I am confident that if readers approach it with an open mind and an understanding that she is grounded in the Japanese canon, they will be able to get a powerful message out of it. Native English speakers will finish this book able to better contemplate and doubt the assumptions that they make when they speak about globalism and common communication. Speakers of other languages may feel a renewed confidence in reading and writing their own national literatures, and a better understanding of why these literatures must be preserved and passed on to future generations.

This book is written in a rather personal and confidential tone, which makes it rip-roaring read — I spent all night reading my copy, unable to put it down. It is rather unusual for a work of literary criticism to be this readable, and as the introduction to the book notes, it has been the subject of much unfriendly critique from people who prefer to nitpick writing style rather than try to see into the mind of the author. Having read the whole book, I endorse it without reservation, because while individual passages may show the author’s peculiarities, the central argument is much deeper and quite important to anyone reading or writing in the 21st century.

The central texts engaged with are Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” and the novels of Natsume Soseki. But Mizumura puts her broad intellectual reach to work, integrating all sorts of books from many different languages. Here, Juliet Winters Carpenter once again displays her otherworldly talents as a translator in making this colorful collection of literatures into a seamless and extremely readable whole.

[I was provided with an advance copy of this book by NetGalley. I received no compensation.]

[Hikaoru · Rating 2 out of 5]

Looking from a place of privilege, I should have more empathy but I just can't. This book jumps from one point to another so fast making me agree one second and then totally annoyed in the next page. I get that English seeps in every nook & cranny, not to mention Western media everywhere but this lady's personal hatred towards English is definitely palpable.

[Tim Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very messy writeup below, I am a puddle of weird thoughts and apologise in advance.

The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a sobering and urgent book for any lover of literature, especially those born outside the Western world.

I cannot overstate the immense impact The Fall of Language has had on me. I have not been wholly touched in such foreign yet intimate way perhaps since I read Portrait of the Artist for the first time years and years ago when I bawled my eyes out and felt so incredibly seen by a man from a country I had never visited, born over 100 years before myself. Though Mizumura is still very much alive, she, like Joyce, lives in a country I have never visited but has allowed me to see the world through new eyes. I think it is fitting that like Portrait this work explores the sticky intersection of nationality, language, literature, and selfhood. Ugh. So much good stuff. Let’s get started.

Mizumura’s impassioned book very largely describes the dominance of English. As a Japanese writer, she considers herself as the purveyor of a “second class language.” She provides a history of the relationship between writing, language, and literature, and how other languages now fight over scraps at the bottom of the barrel. It’s not as simple as just saying ‘colonialism’ and being done with it, although colonialism is very much a part of the story. Alongside tracking English’s rise through the centuries, she provides long, ponderous asides to the likes of Latin (the ‘universal written language’ of Europe which allowed for communication between various spoken languages) and French (a language that has since fallen from intellectual prominence) as well as the unique development of Japanese, both from its spoken form and its later written form. This is quite riveting. As she shifts between memoir to literary analysis to cultural criticism, she is very much at home and it is clear her ideas are well marinated.

As somebody who spent 20 years in the US before returning to Japan (she went to graduate school for French literature), Mizumura is uniquely primed to speak about this subject. Aside from her compelling histories, I think one of the book’s great strengths is the frameworks with which she provides the reader to help untangle the relationship between language, literature, and nationality.

For example, she defines the ‘asymmetrical relationship’ between the West and the non-West, and then goes further to define the asymmetricity of culture from English to everyone else. Where the West as a whole, through colonialism, could ‘make their voices heard by the world’, English is now the lone alpha wolf in a world of beta languages.

English lives in a ‘universal temporality’; the rest of the world has become beholden to Anglophone culture. Intellectual Japanese, she writes, are able to talk about English literature, at least through translation. However, this interest is asymmetrical because it is one way: aside from the likes of Japanese specialists in the West, there is little interest for Japanese lit in English. As such, she lives in the ‘particular temporality’: and uneven, lopsided existence due to the dominance of the US, and, before that, the UK. In one intriguing chapter, she ‘invites’ French speakers to join her in ‘my side of the asymmetrical relationship,’ since they are no longer the dominant literary language. This is not due to any sort of bad move on the part of the French: English became universal “through a series of historical coincidences”, making its power an accident.

Whilst Mizumura provides excellent tools for analysing language and one’s relationship to English, she also becomes a resource for thinking about the divergence between literature and the humanities. Something that really hit home for me was her explanation of knowledge via “textbook” and “texts to read.” This is largely exists along artistic and scientific fault lines. For example, she talks about how mathematics is a “universal language” and scholars across the globe understand the same mathematical symbols. Because the heart of scientific content is mathematically presented via numbers, graphs, etc, “The international prominence of Asians is well recognised in all fields of science.” The point of this knowledge, therefore, can be easily encapsulated in a textbook, allowing easy translation of papers into English for global circulation as well as quantitative understanding of their work.

Things are gloomier for the humanities. Literature is a “text to read,” the knowledge is inherent in the text. Though you can summarise or rephrase Shakespeare into a textbook, you wouldn’t gain the full breadth of the knowledge Shakespeare has to offer unless you read or watch Shakespeare. As long as Japanese remains only written and understood by Japanese people, they will never garner wider readership because they are not important ‘texts to read’, due to the asymmetrical relationship she previously outlined. As a creative writer interested in 'texts to read,' she ruminates the impact of ‘textbook’ knowledge and ‘text to read’ knowledge:

“Thanks in large part to India’s colonial past, many Indian nationals … are now recognised not only as fine scientists but also as fine writers in English … as far as the world knows, East Asians - Chinese, Koreans, Japanese - are a race of people who have brains only for mathematics.”

This hit me particularly hard. The trope of Asians being good at Math and Science is long known, and, in my experience, largely true. I will die on that hill. The number of kids from my high school who have become drones to medicine is preposterous. In my Singaporean childhood, the humanities have always been ridiculed. Through my high school experience, classes with science and math focus were far more popular than classes with a humanities or language focus. I think Mizumura has pointed out one major reason why: mathematics is universal.

Surely, though, I cannot immediately drape my concerns on her own. After all, English is the language of instruction back home, and the literary texts we read were in English. That is to say, I gained entrance into the world of English literature as a high schooler in a way that Japanese students do not. Therefore, this might more largely speak to the valuation rift between the humanities and the sciences as opposed to why so many more East Asians are valued for their scientific ability than their writing ability, even if their literary skills are evident. She herself defines Singapore as “Anglophone,” and most Singaporean writers write in English. However, this doesn't remove from the fact that East Asians are commonly stereotyped as slaves to math and science, and I have found this view accurate in my experience. I wish I could figure out why.

Mizumura spends a lot of time concerning herself with the idea of a ‘national literature,’ recognising that this is a phenomenon largely exclusive to Europe, though Japan itself has a long history of literary production and has its own national literature. Some other non-European countries, too, have rich histories of written literature. She considers how not every country has one, and how countries that embraced nationalism early on tend to form national literatures eventually. Indeed, many colonising European powers themselves have national literatures, and Japan, itself a colonising force in the mid-twentieth century, does as well. I do not think she dwells on this too much, but it is an interesting thought experiment. The national literature unites the nation under an 'imagined community', how does this then lead to the exploitation of others?

However, her final arguments turn toward Japan, where she examines the importance of the canon and explores how Japan’s lack of canon post WWII has been destructive to the country. Despite all the forces that affected the development of Japanese literature through the years, it is ultimately the postwar Japanese themselves who are desecrating their own language and throwing away the privilege of having a grandiose national literature. This section was emotional and worrisome.

There is a real grief here, and a very urgent concern. My heart goes out to Mizumura and the Japanese people. Her writing is quite striking and very moving. I have certainly never read any of the ‘modern classics’ of Japanese lit (i.e., early 1900s), let alone the older more celebrated writing from Japan. Even so, this book has made me express a grave concern for a language I have no experience with and probably will never have any experience with. Surely, I have read some contemporary Japanese novels, but nothing ‘canonical’ to her mind.

Of course, Mizumura can seem quite dramatic, and her concerns regarding a canon can seem quite elitist. Her proclamations, especially about Japan and its people, can sometimes seem like a sweeping indictment. Even so, her hot takes regarding canon formation shouldn’t be surprising, as it goes along well with her theories and concerns about national literatures in general. However, I found her arguments to be very persuasive, especially when she reasoned that the West is so entrenched in the canon that it can make space for arguments against it. They fail to realise the privilege of being able to have these conversations in the first place. A person like her is just trying to save the way her own language is written so that older texts can still be read.

Okay. I think I will stop here. This was a very sloppy writeup and I have plenty of unfinished thoughts. If you've hung out thus far, I thank you, for I do not think this is a very good essay.

All in all, I think this book appealed to me more than most, even though I am an East Asian person currently living in a Western country who grew up speaking English in Asia. I am at a weird intersection of the cultural baggage regarding nationality, language, and literature, quite a distance from her. However, I appreciated the tools she provided to help me understand my place in the world as a reader and lover of literature, and for that I am only thankful. I hope to revisit this book in the future and use the arguments and tools presented here to navigate further conversations regarding my relationship to the wide, beautiful, and asymmetrical world of literature.

[tatterpunk · Rating 2 out of 5]

TWO STARS for two chapters of interesting personal insight that devolves into fascist propaganda.

I was excited for this. I was excited for the perspective of a literary-minded person discussing the cognitive disconnect of existing in a world so soaked-through with the English language, when that is not one's own language or the language of their literary tradition.

And the book delivered for the first 70 pages or so, while Mizumura keeps to their own experiences as a writer and reader of Japanese, existing in an American program with other non-American writers. There's some stuff in there that pinged me a little oddly -- the way Mizumura talked about some of her fellow writers, a certain level of snobbery and superiority towards all things non-Japanese, backwards humble-bragging, and some odd non-sequitors (Jane Austen would be "appalled" to see how many other people write in English nowadays? Or women? Because she was a "modest lady?" No I still don't get it.). But it wasn't off-putting, exactly, it gave her voice color and character.

Then things got... bumpier. At the top of the third chapter Mizumura asserts that the "islanders" of Japan have never had "their language" threatened, from "within or without." Now, has Japan ever been colonized by an outside force, or Japanese sublimated by a colonizing language? No. But the statement AS MIZUMURA MADE IT is factually incorrect: there are inhabitants of Japan who were culturally genocided, whose language was all but wiped out -- indigenous minorities suffer that exact fate Mizumura (repeatedly) brags the wider islands escaped from Westerners, only they suffered their travails at the hands of the majority Japanese population during the Meiji Period.

And glossing over this particular fact is a certain red flag that you are dealing with a Japanese nationalist. How hard they gloss over it depends where they land on the scale of "proto-fascist" to... well.

The bumps in the road kept coming, until it was genuinely chaotic. I would never disparage Mizumura's personal experience as a Japanese person, as a novelist, as a woman of her generation, etc etc. But she's not a linguist, or an anthropologist, or much of a historian when it comes to Europe, at least, and she makes a complete hash of anything she broaches in those areas. Actually, as I'll address later, I'm not sure if it's personal ignorance or deliberate obfuscation on her part -- but the result is the same. She makes up arbitrary values for terms she then wields like weapons, she declares all European languages come from basically the same root, she conflates Classical Latin with Medieval Latin with Neo-Latin. She ignores entire pre-modern literary traditions in England and Russia, and hilariously doubts that the Bengali language will ever be able to establish a literary tradition after English and Hindi have gripped India. I mean, Bengali literature predates Japanese by 100 years, it's a major cultural force as reflected in the subcontinent's popular and literary products, and Bengali is arguably a much better case study than Japanese for the effects of global English as its poetic allusions and framing are all-but-untranslatable... but sure. Maybe someday, a Bengali writer will produce something worth your attention, Mizumura.

She also self-contradicts at an astounding rate. She acknowledges Don Quixote as the birth of the modern novel in the Western canon but also insists modern novels are those from the mid-1800s onward, with an exception made for Austen. She claims without any citations that Kierkegaard wrote in Danish as a deliberate choice, since he knew enough German to read some otherwise untranslated books in it. This is after her own anecdotal evidence that reading in a language is a world away from writing in it, coming from a woman who literally studied four years of French Lit at Yale, but when called upon to give a speech in the language labored intensely and double-checked her work at a Berlitz center. She gets huffy about how "the West" can produce canon writers like Defoe, who never even went to university, quelle horreur, while the modern greats of Japan all had to be "bilinguals," aka roughly versed in non-Japanese languages. Well... so did Defoe, darling, by your standards. He got the usual English early-1700s education, which means Neo-Latin, some Greek, and then as he was sent to a dissenter's academy he probably also got Dutch and German. (Please note: this rough grasp is what Mizumura fights to be recognized as "bilingual.") This subtext that more is demanded of Japanese writers to be acknowledged as writers doesn't wash, if only by her own standards, and this is before we get into the fact that Defoe rose to cultural prominence initially by political writing, not literary or academic, which has a markedly different career trajectory that doesn't require a university education.

(She also has a nasty little aside about how vital the establishment of a cultural canon is to a cultural tradition, and the only reason people would insist on more "female" or "foreign" or "nonwhite" authors to be included in their canon is because they feel have "no need" to "defend" their culture's or language's global prominence, such as Americans. Yeah, well, I'm sure you could nab a segment on Fox News about it if your English skills ever improve, Mizumura.)

By this point in the book I was willing to write off Mizumura as proto-fascist. Like, I get it, girl, you had to move to the states as a kid, you never really grokked English despite years living here, you dreamed of returning to your home country and being among the same intellectuals as you encountered in your father's library of literary lights. As much as Mizumura insists (gee, I wonder why) she and her family were never "immigrants," it's actually a very common immigrant sentiment to have an ideal vision of the home country in mind, to elevate its best representatives (in books, in music, in movies) to such heights that encountering the actual fact of that country, which has continued to alter and shift in your absence, can be something of a let-down. And Mizumura is decidedly let down by Japan as it is, as opposed to how (she imagines) it was. She hates the kind of writing it currently produces, she disparages modernity in urban sprawl and growth, she sneers at how easily impressed her countrypeople are by her foreign education and credentials. Displacement trauma and the effects of constantly being the Other at a formative time of life can have a lasting effect: I was willing to cut her a break and say that, while her book is mostly hogwash and a complete misunderstanding of the fields she discusses, the impetus behind her misinformation was more emotional than political.

And then, in the final pages, she goes fully mask-off. While briefly, fleetingly, admitting that Yeah We Did A Bad In Korea And Taiwan (what about within Japan, Mizumura? what about CHINA?) she -- and I'm not kidding -- also manages to equate colonialist occupation with "modernization," and insists that there is nothing to really be ashamed about in Japan's efforts to "modernize." She digs in her heels and insists the Meiji Era was Japan's cultural peak, actually, and the downward fall of Japanese culture since has all been the result of its intellectuals moving "far left" since the end of the war, making "patriotism" a dirty word and embracing "Marxism." (She disparages that Das Kapital is still taught "in utter seriousness" in Japanese universities... yeah, babe, it's a major philosophical work? That's what universities do: they teach the subject.) She even goes as far to insist the reason the great writers of the pre-war era aren't as popular -- or at least, not as popular as SHE wants them to be -- is because alterations to how Japanese is written, in the times since, renders them too archaic to appeal... not, say, because of cultural shifts or changes in generational attitudes, the changes when it comes to the treatment of women, or the working class, or Japan in general.

Mizumura actually says, and I can't believe she actually left it in, even revising the book seven years later for English-language publication (where, apparently, she TOOK OUT some of the more overt nationalist sentiment), that post-war, intellectuals defaulted toward "pacifism" and "egalitarianism." The former she must concede. The later, she mourns, went a step too far.

I'm not surprised this made a splash in Japan when it was first published in 2008, because yeah, it's sensationalist. I just wish it wasn't sensationalist claptrap; the pseudo-intellectualism of a writer poised to make very interesting insights but who chooses, instead, to pettily point out that when native English speakers make jokes she can't understand when attending conferences, they're meanies. I wish this book was an actual, serious look at how English becoming the new lingua franca affects globalism and literary cultures all over the world, instead of fearmongering via plainly untrue claims about the American educational system.

I would have even settled for an appreciation of the writers she loves that isn't steeped in hardcore nationalism, or an exploration of untranslatable concepts or literary forms. I'm glad actual Japanese writers and intellectuals apparently called Mizumura out on her bullshit, back then. The Japanese language and Japanese literature deserves better than The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A smart, beautifully written (& translated!) work that spans the critical and the reflective. Mizumura has a real knack for weaving the historical with inward reflection, and for making transnational affairs feel deeply personal — indeed, this is what language itself does, make the abstract intimate to our mouths, tongues, hands.

I think her observations here were particularly prescient given the current rise of AI language generating / translating technologies, and many anxieties that other reviewers have decried are being fulfilled. On a more positive note, though, Mizumura leaves us with a long reading list and craft workbook, letting us know that despite the increasingly auto-hegemonized status of English over “local” writing, there exist an endless variety of techniques and texts to explore which preserve the minor literatures that so often sustain our souls.

[Eva]

Some thoughts:

* A very interesting read. I liked Mizumura’s insightful and often cutting style – and I also respected that she did not bother disguising her scorn for the United States or otherwise concealing her inner thoughts in order to be more likeable to a general audience. Particularly in the first chapter, she quickly establishes herself as disagreeable, a bit dramatic and judgmental, but she definitely has the courage of her convictions.

* Overall I enjoyed the analysis, although sometimes I couldn’t help but feel that Mizumura was prejudiced (which I guess can be somewhat expected given her lonely childhood in the States). I think that it is much easier for her to disparage English because of her native language: Japan has 125 million native speakers, making Japanese the 8th most spoken language in the world (if the number of second-language speakers is also taken into account then Japanese falls to the 13th place but it still holds its own). This means that, similarly to Spanish- and French-speaking people who are notorious for their reluctance to speak English, she is part of a large market that a) internally produces many novels and b) makes it profitable for translations of “external language” novels to take place. My own native language being spoken by 12 million people worldwide, there are more things that I take into account when evaluating the impact of English: my country’s internal market is smaller, and in terms of translations, not all books reach us (the author’s books included, I might add). It is for that reason that I am grateful for my access to this “extended library”: I get to read non-English literature that has been translated for a large English-speaking audience (keeping of course in mind that not everything CAN be translated and that I thus have access only to a filtered percentage of the worldwide literary production), and I also get to consume English-speaking literature in a way that translation just cannot replicate.

* Mizumura seems to suggest that “true” literature demands the author to always be conscious of the language they are using, to struggle with it, and to produce a text that is specific to the language. She seems to suggest that if something can be said in all languages, then the language itself is not used properly. To her, a true piece of literature must be highly idiosyncratic. I am not yet sure if I agree with this particular notion.

* The most fascinating part, for me, was the historical analysis of how written languages came to be, and the dismantling of the myth of the “national language” (according to which written language merely represents spoken language).

* The history of Japanese language and literature was quite interesting: Japanese people experienced a disconnect from classical Chinese and thus from pre-modern literature a) during the enforced contact with the West which lead to the birth of their national language, and b) due to postwar reforms which carelessly botched the Japanese language and rendered early modern works inaccessible to many.

* I was expecting a deeper explanation for Mizumura’s disparaging attitude towards her contemporary Japanese authors.

* I agree 100% with the fact that each country should provide a counterweight to English by making students engage with the national canon in a meaningful way (even when speaking about a “modern western canon”, the fact that it includes primarily English-speaking novels is ridiculous).

* In the end, Mizumura suggests that Japanese acquire a level of “basic proficiency” in English (although she does not specify exactly what she means by that), and that those with an aptitude for it continue on with their study of the language. I cannot really agree with this suggestion – students in their formative years should be equipped with as many resources as possible and limiting such a vital skill to a fraction of the population seems a bit short-sighted, especially given today’s highly competitive job market.

* The way I see it, the only solution to overcome the dominance of English literature is simply translation TO english. I feel like we are much more receptive to foreign literature today compared to the year of the book’s publication, so I do not feel too pessimistic about the situation – yet Mizumura’s thesis was definitely compelling.

*** Quotes ***

In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to become a universal language used in every corner of the world. English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.

The works that are usually translated into English are those that are both thematically and linguistically the easiest to translate, that often only reinforce the worldview constructed by the English language, and preferably that entertain readers with just the right kind of exoticism.

The honorable Nobel Prize in Literature inevitably suppresses all the problems inherent in the act of translation.

While English is gaining force, an ever greater number of knowledge seekers will become bilinguals. In the process, how these bilinguals engage with their literature will inevitably be affected, which in turn will inevitably affect their literature—and their language. For the fall of language is first set in motion when these bilinguals unknowingly begin to read English and their own language on two different levels. […] The fall of a language is set in motion when such people begin to take more seriously what they read in English. It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events—they may or may not be conscious of the Anglophone bias there— and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip. It is set in motion when they hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fi ne books written in their own language. (Watching American or British television dramas rather than their own is not unconnected to this process.) Finally, it is set in motion when, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English—especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon. A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. To make matters worse, this would be correspondingly truer for writers who take their writing seriously. Without a trusted readership, those writers would have less and less incentive to write in their own language, and there would be fewer and fewer texts worth reading in that language. Through the process of negative selection, writers who continue writing in their own language would be those whose books do not deserve to be called texts.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the first two chapters hard to get through and not particularly useful.

The third chapter, however, starts to delve into the application of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism to the emergence of Japanese as a national language (as an example of the general application of his theories). (Her citation of the differences in the widths of the channels that separate England from continental Europe and Japan from the Asian continent, and the resulting influence on the divergent histories of these two island nations, was an eerie echo of lines that I listened to yesterday in -- how strange reading is.)

Then there are two really useful chapters that provide short histories of the development of written Japanese and its literature: one pre-modern (up to the Meiji restoration) and one after the restoration. Japanese really is a unique amalgam of adopted and cadged components; she does what seems a good job of describing this. I got several reading ideas, and brief lives of Natsume Soseki (an author I was already familiar with) and Fukuzawa Yukichi (new to me), an essential thinker on education and other topics during the emergence of Meiji Japan. One shocking fact was the proposal during this time to abandon Japanese and use English as a national language; another was to butcher the language in various ways to make it more ‘accessible’ after centuries of connection between the written language and Chinese classics.

The last part of the book is really addressed to writers and readers in Japan, and relates to the importance of maintaining Japanese as a vital literary language rather than giving in to universal English.

It makes interesting reading alongside two other works I’ve just read: the novelization of the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, active in the revolution that resulted in the Meiji restoration and some types of westernization, and Worlding Sei Shônagon, a compilation of dozens of translations of the first paragraph of The Pillow Book into about twenty different languages over 200 years.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's always a delight to encounter a beautifully written book, containing new and unexpected ideas about an old topic.

"Through this bilingual form, I wanted to directly appeal to Japanese readers, to impress upon them that their language is different from English, different from any Western language, different indeed from any other language in the world. Not that I tried to make a case for the uniqueness of the Japanese language; I tried rather... to make a case for the irreducible individuality of all languages, the reason for which writing even in the most local of all local languages becomes a worthwhile activity in itself.

Just imagine. Imagine a world one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now, a world in which not only the best-educated people but also the brightest minds and the deepest souls express themselves only in English. Imagine a world in which all other languages have been reduced to stillness. Imagine the world subjected to the tyranny of a singular "Logos." What a narrow, pitiful and horrid world that would be. To live in such a world would be infinitely sadder than to be confined to the asymmetry we have now."

[Graham Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review here - http://therumpus.net/2015/02/the-fall...

Overall I loved the nonacademic parts of this and hated the academic parts. I love her observations about IWP, about the position and politics of non-English writers, about the quirks of Japanese language and education. I hated her constant need to try to prove Japanese as a language is 100% unique, and to try to argue that it's naive for discussions about the internet as Library or Benedict Anderson's book to not assert the problems of English hegemony.

The ending felt so conflicted too. She spends a full page lamenting the government's intervention in language post WWII, then 2-3 pages later insists the government should step in and prevent Japan from becoming more Anglocized. She calls for the education in Japan to be changed so less people become bilingual, then ends with a scolding of the US for not producing enough bilinguals. I'm not sure how those beliefs are compatible, even given the asymmetry of power.

[Kamil · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Japanese version]

Despite the rather specific (and provocative) title, the first third of the book is largely wasted on the author's tangential anecdotes, which feel like an excessively-long introduction at best, and at their worst sound elitist or borderline racist. This is a real shame because once the book finally settles into its main topic it is well researched and insightful. Even then, the book is rather lacking in specific examples of the Japanese language's decline, but at least it offers an interesting history of global languages and the forces that led to our present situation. By the end, Mizumura makes a compelling case for how language education and literature should be approached, not just in Japan but around the world.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent read for native English speakers who haven't thought about the perks of knowing a universal language. Having speaking and writing access to a universal language without even thinking about it means quite a bit, and the book deftly illuminates the implications.

It also dwells in length on the beauties of modern Japanese literature—something I’ve been discovery on reading translations of Sōseki and Tanizaki. Mizumura argues strongly that non-Western cultures must value and save their languages, philosophies, and literature and not let it get swept away by valuing only western culture.

[David Dinaburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language is a constant source of delight. Imagine you overhear the statement, “Tupac’s gone, but I’m still here.” Is this a mournful paean to the fragility of life, a bold claim to personal excellence, a reaffirmation in the face of existential breakdown, or triumphant bravado in the face of a downed rival?

When I inform you that I heard it from a rather shabby looking older man on a subway in New York City, the panoply of potential intentions probably collapsed into a singular vision of “crazy, meaningless babble.” To some of you, however, hearing that it wasn’t Kanye’s latest humblebrag or a line from Diddy’s next press conference may inspire a warm regard of what can be defined as folksy wisdom—a true insight into reality—from the words. This type of mystification is not localized to our particular culture:

The ideology of national language would later have it that a humble peasant who tilled the soil and did not know what “democracy” meant even in Japanese was held up as the true safe, possessing a kid of wisdom that the educated could not possibly attain. This jaundiced view of higher education was possible only for those Japanese who could take for granted the existence of the Japanese language as it is today, who came late enough to be blissfully ignorant of how their language and literature developed.

When applied externally, this idealized simplicity can become blinding and dangerous, a simple and insidious way of cutting down other cultures while attempting to appear to be rational. This was a concept I hadn’t encountered until The Argumentative Indian:

In this pre-selected ‘East-West’ contrast, meetings are organized, as it were, between Aristotle and Euclid on the one hand, and the wise and contented Indian peasants on the other. This is not, of course, an uninteresting exercise, but it is not pre-eminently a better way of understanding the ‘East-West’ cultural contrast than by arranging meetings between, say, Aryabhata (the mathematician) and Kautilya (the political economist) on the one hand, and happily determined Visigoths on the other.

This of imbalance—where the pinnacle of Western thought is brought to bear against the simple enlightenment of the exotic peasantry—is egocentrism and privilege laid bare. A more subtle privilege that most people I know will likely never encounter is one of language:

Those whose mother tongue is English often are unaware that when they are writing in their own language, they are in fact writing in a universal language. They are unaware of what they would be deprived of if they were writing in a nonuniversal language—beyond the sheer number of readers. To apply the phrase I used in the talk I gave in Paris, they are not condemned to reflect on language in the way the rest of us are.

It is hard to admit that English writers have a leg-up in a global society that places English at the forefront of international communications; that you, a writer of English, has potential connections numbering in the billions rather the hundreds of thousands or even millions that delineate someone that was born into a less global language. You could write in English, or you could write in your native language; hopefully, someone is around to translate for you. If you’re an author and a book does well enough in its native language, the definitive version of the text might end up in English regardless of your desire.

A translated text can create a cacophony of voices that doesn’t flow in the same direction; what comes from the author and what the translator? The Fall of Language in the Age of English is not an exception to this; in fact, such an intense focus on language and translation made me more aware of the filter of language and mind that stood between me and the author of the original text:

Once we left the college town behind, tall buildings disappeared and modest, two-story houses typical of the American countryside took their place, lit by the white morning light.

Is “modest” the adjective a woman that lives in Tokyo would choose to describe a two-story home, or is that a cultural holdover from the translator? A few pages later:

What I got was not a suite but a room, and not even a very spacious room at that, considering this was the American Midwest and not Tokyo.

I can feel the distance from the source that the physical words impose upon the reader; not because these phrases are contradictory— because they are not—but because there is room for me to ponder from whom they originated. Perhaps a transliteration would have brought homey or quaint rather than modest, or perhaps the casual cultural cliché of modest american home was intended for immerse effect; whatever the case, I was constantly reminded this was originally a Japanese text.

Which is a great thing. Close attention to the text—constant engagement with the language itself rather than just the concepts the text is attempting to explain—is what it means to actually read a book. When a book (the history of Coleco, if you’re curious) I wanted to support on a crowdfunding website mentioned that it would only unlock the French language edition—the authors’ native tongue—as a third-round stretch goal, I thought of Fall of Language and the primacy of English in the stream of commerce. When the Oxford English Dictionary selected an emoji for word of the year, I thought of Fall of Language and the primacy of phoneticism in Western culture:

Social Darwinism, which saw Western civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution, was applied to writing systems as well, suggesting that human writing evolved from ideograms to phonograms. Among the varieties of phonograms, syllabaries like hiragana and katakana that combine a consonant and a vowel in one letter were considered less evolved...

Chinese characters, by exemplifying ideograms, went blatantly against such phoneticism. Though regarded as more evolved than Egyptian hieroglyphs, they came to symbolize the backwardness of East Asia, crystallized in China’s defeat in the Opium Wars.

English is a language of cooptation, amalgamation, and theft—it makes almost no sense at a base level, and it would be hell to learn as an adult. Adding pictures—ideograms—back into the fold is just another step in our linguistic evolution; as simple written communications increase via text messaging, it seems it will only continue to increase. Adopting unpronounceable—non-phonetic—symbols into our written language is a break with the lockstep that English has held with phoneticism for hundreds of years. Take that, outdated and painfully racist concept of Social Darwinism!

During my week with Fall of Language, it inserted itself into my interpretation of almost everything that happened around me. Whether the cause of my enchantment was the original writing in Japanese or the translator’s skill—likely both—the words are dense but never clunky, and the core concept always stays within viewing distance:

The fall of language is set into motion when such people begin to take more seriously what they read in English. It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events--they may or may not be conscious of the Anglophone bias there--and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip.

It is set into motion when they hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fine books written in their own language. Finally, it is set into motion when, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English--especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon.

A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. Without a trusted readership, those writers would have less and less incentive to write in their own language, and there would be fewer and fewer texts worth reading in that language.

The Fall of Language in the Age of English stands as an exemplar of the type of thinking that may be lost in a global community dominated by English; its existence has proven its thesis elegantly.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s all too humbling to glimpse the fact that the islands of accepted reality we stand upon are small, narrow things. We sometimes come to see that our thoughts and actions are all caught up in something much larger than anything we could individually support or resist in any meaningful way, but can appreciate the fact that our boundaries of awareness have been incrementally widened. This is the gift of Minae Mizumura’s book The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

As the title portends, the book explores the spread of English and how Mizumura believes it to be impoverishing languages throughout the world. Mizumura takes this on through personal, political, literary, and historical perspectives that focus most heavily on Japan and the social costs of its pursuit of English. The book starts with Mizumura’s personal accounts of seeing different languages meet and ultimately try to bridge the gap of communication. It’s a personal section about her growing awareness of differences between the East and the West, and the ways in which exchanges between the two is often one sided.

From here The Fall of Language transitions into linguistic history, with a brief overview on the formation and propagation of English, and a similar but more detailed look at Japanese and how it came to be in its current state. It’s all well written and informative, but drags a little compared to the beginning of the text. The second half picks up the slack with a discussion on Japanese literature, how the internet and globalization have influenced the world of language, and ends with a call to defend national languages while making peace with the ever-rising tide of English.

Reading reviews prior to reading the book made me wary that this would be a thinly veiled alarmist argument for nationalistic beliefs but having finished I think it’s anything but that. Mizumura is level and considerate in her rhetorical steps, and raises interesting points of discussion that she is confident enough to give voice to and let wander from her main quandary, like what role literature plays when the modern world does not leave much room for it. Mizumura’s writing is of a deft mind that veers neither into tirade nor chilly academic objectivity, with an implicit lament for the ruins of languages the world has lost or is in the process of leaving behind.

It’s an invaluable text for an English speaker because we take it for granted that our language has spread to the extent it has, often validating and promoting a western, and some might even argue specifically an American, sense of reality. As is the case of various forms of privilege, when that reality is like the air you breathe, it is everywhere, it is invisible, and it is seemingly ludicrous to question. We monolingual English speakers see the open doors of our world but cannot comprehend what worlds our limited linguistic framework has locked us out from. The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a nudge towards seeking out those other worlds, or, at the very least, understanding that reality is more multifaceted than one language will ever allow us to grasp.

[Trevor Kew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read several books on this topic before ("The Language Wars" for example) as well as plenty of scholarly educational literature on bilingual education, I went through the first couple of chapters of this book slightly skeptical about Mizumura's approach. Her attitude to languages seemed strongly influenced by her own personal experience with English, French and Japanese, and her knowledge of the history of the English language (and of European history) itself was at times slightly patchy, leading to some odd, and occasionally contradictory, lines of argument. Given that this book was written in Japanese for a Japanese audience, this is a bit problematic as some Japanese readers may take it at face value (much as some English readers take, say, "Shogun" as representative of Japan...although that's an unduly harsh comparison!!! Maybe "The Sword and the Chrysanthemum").

The latter chapters on Japanese language, or more particularly Japanese literature (this is really a book about literature more than language), are far better. While I am fairly well-versed in Japanese history and literature, Mizumura unearthed some fascinating details to me, particularly connected to Fukuzawa Yukichi's study of Dutch and English. I chuckled out loud when she related Fukuzawa's experiences queuing with fellow students to use the one Dutch-Japanese dictionary. Her explanations of the long evolution of the Japanese written language, while not totally unfamiliar to me, were also incredibly detailed yet clear. One thing that I would add to her astute observation that the average Japanese person takes their language for granted is that they also tend to take their national identity for granted, despite much of this being constructed or "reframed" since the Meiji Restoration (e.g. "bushido" was never a thing in the Edo period or before, tea ceremony, State Shinto, etc.), which is natural of course in that most Japanese during the Edo period would never have known of an international Other and would thus not have reflected at all on what it "meant" to be Japanese.

Here are 5 points that she makes that I thought were interesting:
1) Literature in the Japanese education system - I was beyond shocked when I heard that full texts (and canonical texts) were scarcely if ever read in schools (heard this when I lived there as well as in Mizumura's book). Mind you, this is quite true in the UK when I taught there as well. It varies by school but the problem is largely the exam system (in the UK) which emphasises extracts over full texts (to some extent).
2) She argues for canonical texts - I don't totally agree that "reading the classics" is the best way forward in any language (she does tend toward rose-tinted glasses at times) but I did notice in Japan that I almost never met young people (or even old people) who had read any of the famous Japanese writers that I had (admittedly, in translation, at first).
3) the imbalance of texts - one of the things that saddens me is how few novels are translated into English from Japanese (as opposed to the other way around). It is one of the things that motivated me to learn Japanese! We are really missing out.
4) the influence of the Internet - while she is certainly right that the internet is overwhelmingly in English, it is also true that English speakers can now access Japanese materials in ways that were unthinkable when I was growing up just 20-30 years ago (I think we had one book about Japan in the whole local library). As with all things on the internet (and Mizumura makes this point), one big problem is curation: how do we find "the good stuff." Merely relying on recommendations isn't always best (popular doesn't equal good, otherwise cat videos and would be the epitome of artistic expression). It saddens me to see the younger generation growing up now with access to incredible opportunities and resources but not making use of them. For example, I recently found that many of my students were using Google Translate to write instead of the brilliant online language dictionaries that could help them LEARN as they wrote. Fukuzawa must be spinning in his grave...
5) the value of learning a second language - one additional benefit of learning in multiple languages which Mizumura touches on but that I think deserves more emphasis is the way that learning another language forces us to reflect on our mother tongue itself. Learning Japanese has provoked me to reflect about English, language more generally, and even the nature of words themselves.

As the father of a young bilingual (Japanese-English) child, I also empathised with some of the contradictions Mizumura encounters. Do I want my child to know English as the functional universal language?...yes. But I also want him to experience this language in its myriad forms and in ways that it expressed intensely local or personal experiences. With Japanese, I get irritated when I hear other parents of bicultural children refer to learning Japanese as a sort of "luxury," as something not really "useful," as if language was supposed to be merely utilitarian. For one thing, in speaking to some of the most important people in his life (his monolingual Japanese family), it is beyond useful. The Japanese language should be a huge part of his cultural identity, as it is of mine, despite me being a white foreigner. I envy him the life he has ahead of him, with all the riches of Japanese film/literature/etc. and English film/literature/etc. to explore. Even with picture books (of which Japanese has many, many wonderful examples), he is already so lucky to have two such wonderful sets of different literary experiences.

Given that English is my mother tongue but I am fluent in Japanese as a second language, I would like to read this book (or at least some of it) in Japanese. It must have been a challenging book to translate!

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly insightful and rewarding read. With effortless persuasiveness coming from her erudition, Mizumura examines the birth of national language/literature, the twists and turns in the evolution of Japanese, and the importance of valuing one’s mother tongue in the age of English domination.

[L · Rating 1 out of 5]

⭐️✨
I read part of this book at the same time as The Count of Monte Cristo. Guess which of the two books I wish was shorter. I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the one that was almost 1200 pages long. Given how long-winded, repetitive and full of useless digressions or sections the text is, I can definitely understand how, as she kept reminding us at the beginning of the book, the author wrote an inordintately long novel (around 850 pages in its English translation). In addition to that, I was not a fan of the author's writing style in general nor of what shone through of the her personality; in my opinion, she came across as a rather unpleasant person, so I didn't love reading from her point of view.
Having said that, when the author got to the point, she did discuss some rather interesting topics and issues. Some of her arguments were definitely thought-provoking and worth considering, but a few others were either badly expressed and argued or points with which I personally disagree.
All in all, I think this was a worthwhile read, but definitely not an enjoyable one; I wish the book had been written by somebody else, because the topic is certainly fascinating.