This week’s most memorable reading for me was The Fall of Language in the Age of English. The author reflects on how English slowly “devours” other languages. When English becomes the universal language, other languages don’t just lose their use in communication. And I started thinking about my own language learning. Compared to English, learning Japanese made me feel much more clearly that you can only really understand a culture when you understand its language and its context. That made me wonder: when I think in a different language, am I becoming a different person? I don’t think so. I think it’s more like finding another path to express myself. People sometimes say, “When you use a different language, you switch to a different persona.” I actually agree with that. Language shapes how we see the world, and using more than one language helps us realise we don’t just have one fixed self.
In The Emissary, I really liked the part about fruit. When Japan stopped importing food from abroad, all the oranges, pineapples, and bananas came from Okinawa. Okinawa becomes like a symbol of Japan’s past — a memory of when the country was open and connected to the outside world. It represents life and energy. However, the fruit was hard to reach Tokyo. This feels like a metaphor for Japan’s closed culture and way of thinking. Tokyo becomes an old, isolated place. The oranges that are mentioned again and again seem to express a longing for the Japan that used to be bright, open, and warm. This part also made me think about Japan’s history as a “closed country.” During the Edo period, Japan isolated itself from the rest of the world. That history shaped Japan’s self-contained traditions.
In The Great Passage, my favorite part is when Araki says, ““A dictionary is a ship that crosses the sea of words.” People ride on this ship and collect small lights on the dark waves so they can express their thoughts more clearly. When I read this, I felt he wasn’t only talking about a dictionary, but about our human wish to be understood. I love this idea. A dictionary is like a ship full of memories and feelings. Every word is like a tiny star that helps people get closer to each other. Language is not only a tool for communication, but also a way of saying, “Please understand me.” When I read this part, I also thought about learning new languages. Each new sentence is like building a bridge. It helps me see the world more clearly and connect with others.
In A Poor Aunt Story, I wondered why he chose an aunt instead of an uncle. But the figure is quite special. Aunt is not the center of the family like a mother, and she doesn’t have authority like a male relative. She exists in between, belonging to the family but also somehow forgotten by it. It might represent a kind of invisible energy? like the people or feelings that society ignores. Maybe Murakami chose a woman because female figures often carry meanings of silence, passivity, and invisibility. When the aunt appears on the narrator’s back, it feels like a ghost. She isn’t evil; she’s more like a quiet weight that never leaves. What’s interesting is that when other people look at the narrator, they all see something different. This makes me think the aunt is not just his ghost, but a symbol of loneliness and emptiness. The ghost Aunt reminds me of a feeling that no matter how much we try to move on or forget, something will always stay with us.
I put “War Bride” as the last piece because, when I first read it, I didn’t feel much. I understood that it’s about trauma and the pain that keeps coming back, but it was hard for me to connect emotionally. Maybe it’s because the story feels very quiet, like it’s being told through a layer of fog — distant and hard to reach. The line that stayed with me most was: A single experience of pain sets off an endless process-you relive the pain every moment of your life. Though the mind may rationalize it as a thing of the past, sorrow returns again and again, grabbing hold of that distant memory. It made me think that memory never really disappears — it just hides inside the body, waiting to come back when touched. But I’m still trying to understand what Kawakami wanted to say besides trauma. Maybe she’s also talking about a kind of fear of feeling, when people who are hurt choose silence rather than try to be understood.
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