Bin 11/12

 The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Four years before this book came out, Facebook was launched; a year later, YouTube appeared; and in 2007, the iPhone changed the world. The early 2000s were the age of globalization, when English was turning into the “universal language” and the internet was spreading everywhere. Writing at that moment, the author voiced her worries about digital globalization and the challenges faced by non-English languages—especially Japanese—and their literature. Even back in 2008, she sharply sensed that while the internet was tearing down old information barriers, it was quietly building new kinds of language monopolies. (Ironically, the flood of non-English data only made English’s dominance stronger—English libraries would become global, while others would drift into isolation.) She also warned that national languages and traditional literature might fade as writers began writing more and more with English-speaking readers in mind.

War Bride

This story reads like a quiet tragedy. The girl gradually learns to restrain herself—to keep silent as a way to avoid hurting others or getting hurt. In the end, everything comes to a strange stillness: a burning house in a vast, silent world. It’s an open ending that could mean many things—the death of language, of violence, of trauma—or maybe just a kind of spiritual extinction.

The Emissary

This is a soft sci-fi story with a very human core. Its biggest flaw, for me, is the flatness of the characters—everyone feels more like a symbol than a person—but the writing itself is beautiful, and the setup is fascinating: the disappearance of language, a locked-down country, fragile newborns, immortal elders. The author seems to see post-Fukushima Japan as a society forced to rebuild itself, and that idea echoes in her dismantling of language. When I noticed that the practical use of language was fading but its poetic function was getting stronger, I started wondering: does this fall and rebirth of language hint at the shifting of civilizations, the collapse of old knowledge systems? The author seems to say that life keeps finding new paths among ruins—that new centers will rise, new orders will be born, and both language and life will find new forms to exist in.

A Poor Aunt Story

To me, the “poor aunt” stands for the forgotten—the names lost, the memories buried deep in our minds, the moments we had no choice but to leave behind. In the story, the poor aunt is tied closely to the past. Her defining trait is that her name fades away even before her body does—symbolizing the people and things we once held dear but can never get back. She doesn’t have a fixed shape, because everyone’s sense of loss is different. To some, she appears as an old mother; to others, a dog that died of cancer, or a teacher burned in an accident. All carry pain, sorrow, and helplessness. People don’t want to remember them, and that powerlessness becomes loneliness. The protagonist feels this deeply—watching a young girl being disciplined but unable to help, growing distant from his girlfriend, and finally reaching a point of despair where he sends a plea for help only to get silence and indifferent replies. They can never truly connect, because the girlfriend can’t see the “poor aunt” he carries inside.

The Great Passage

In The Great Passage, Miura Shion finds something epic in the most ordinary things—she turns a massive project into a collection of quiet, everyday moments. Beneath that calm, steady storytelling, I felt something deeply moving. I especially love her metaphor of the dictionary as a ship. I’ve been reading some intro books to Buddhist philosophy lately, and they say that while truth goes beyond words, we still need words to express it—they become extensions of truth itself. In this novel, human emotions and thoughts flow together like a river of language, and the dictionary is the vessel that lets us travel across it—communicating, exploring, surviving. It’s an “extension upon an extension.” Even something as simple as the word dog doesn’t just point to an animal—it carries cultural and emotional weight too.