Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

I bought two copies of Fifty Sounds (2021) by Polly Barton in the year it was published – one for a friend and, because I couldn’t resist it, one for me. Not only was it that beguiling Fitzcarraldo white, adding to my growing pile of matching covers with diverse insides – but it was about languages. As a monoglot, I find the experience of becoming fluent in another language a total mystery, and absolutely fascinating. That is all the more true when an author writes about immersion in a language and culture, and even better if translation is involved. Polly Barton’s memoir (of sorts) was thus unmissable for me.

Fifty Sounds is about a lot of things, but the most obvious of them is Barton’s experiences moving to Japan to teach. The chapters are each headed with a ‘mimetic’ – close to what we’d call onomatopoeia in English, though Japanese has far more of them and the link between sound and meaning isn’t always immediately clear. And often the word has several different meanings, each of which can be traced back to some slippery integral sound-meaning, or may rely on subjectivity. Some examples of these chapter titles include ‘hiya-hiya: the sound of recalling your past misdemeanours’, ‘kyuki-kyuki: the sound of writing your obsession on a steamy tile, or the miracle becoming transparent’, and ‘shi’kuri: the sound of fitting where you don’t fit’.

Before Barton moved to Japan aged 21, she knew very little of the language or culture. It seems a very impulsive move – she cannot answer the questions she gets about why she chooses Japan. The surface answer is that a boyfriend convinced her they should both apply – though, as it happened, only Barton got a place. As you get to know her more in these pages, it’s a decision that embodies so much about the way Barton approaches situations: bravely, adventurously, perhaps unwisely. She doesn’t even go to Tokyo or somewhere that might be on a bucket list – she goes to a small island, and dives head-first into a period that seems absolutely overwhelming.

I loved Fifty Sounds for many reasons. As I’d hoped, Barton is so interesting on the topic of language-learning. The moment when she understands something she reads casually is described like an awakening. There are fits and starts as she gets closer to fluency – though ‘fluency’ is a concept she will examine in the book, as well as exploring what the stages between ignorance and fluency could be. And she is so good on the different personalities one might have in different languages, and what that phenomenon does for one’s sense of a stable identity.

Barton’s primary interest isn’t a clash of cultures – she finds the idea of exploring Japan only in relation to her own Englishness rather shallow and reductive – but she does write about how a language will interplay with a culture’s unspoken norms. And how much one may have to adopt a cultural viewpoint when one adopts a language. Here, for instance, is a conversation she has with Y – and older, married colleague, with whom she is having an affair:

That day, I had been reading something about kimi, which, the book said, is used by older men when speaking to subordinates at work or younger men, and also by men to women.

‘Is it true?’ I ask Y now of the above, and he nods. I actually end up asking him this question about a lot of things I’ve read in the textbook, like an idiot: is it really true?

‘But you don’t ever say kimi,’ I say. ‘I’ve never heard you say it.’

‘I could do,’ he says. ‘It’s kind of cute.’ And then he says, kimi, your hair is hanging in front of your face, and tucks it behind my ear.

And so, though I sense I am not allowed, I try it back. I call him kimi.

‘No,’ he shakes his head. ‘You can’t say it to me.’

‘Why?’ I say, in a way that is aiming to be cheeky and a little bit kittenish, but in fact makes me seem like a child. ‘Because you’re a man? Because you’d older than me?’

‘Yes,’ he says, serious. ‘It’s rude.’

‘But it’s not rude if you say it to me?’

‘No.’ He seems utterly unapologetic in a way that surprises me. I think I make a noise, some form of pff sound, and we get onto another conversation.

As that mention of her older, married boyfriend suggests, Barton doesn’t cloak anything. She is very open about her poor choices, indeed she often seems quite excoriating about herself in a way that makes Fifty Sounds as much confessional as linguistic exploration. It’s occasionally quite painful to read. As always with this sort of book, I can’t help feeling what the reactions were from friends and family (and exes) on publication day.

But I am not among that number, so I can simply admire the ambition and innovation of this book. It’s genre-bending, as so many of Fitzcarraldo’s output are, and Barton combines all the different influences with incredible success. I’ve previously loved Bleaker House by Nell Stevens and This Little Art by Kate Briggs, and Fifty Sounds feels rather like the meeting point of those two brilliant books. It is certainly an exceptional, and exceptionally interesting, achievement.