“A language?” “Sure. Between Japanese and English.”

March 6, 2022 11:32 PM

"You shall not bear a child, but a language.” "Annunciation" by P. Akasaka (a Japanese writer living in the UK), published last month in Strange Horizons, is a short, fantastical story about an unexpected pregnancy.
posted by brainwane (3 comments total)

Hot damn. As someone stuck between English and (conversational) Japanese, teaching junior high students who have lived overseas, but are passable at best in both English and a Japanese, I have a strong desire to show them this story. Thanks for posting it.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:22 AM on March 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Really interesting. Thanks! (Also, more short stories need embedded citations. I mean that sincerely.)
posted by eotvos at 11:52 AM on March 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like this. I've been in a relationship with a Japanese woman for almost two years now. She was born and lived most of her life in Japan, but she's been here > 20 years now, and her kids were born here. English is her second language, but its her kids' first language.

She speaks a mixture of Japanese and English to them, and her own version of English is highly unusual. It's full of odd little malapropisms and weird syntactic arrangements imputed from Japanese grammar, which is quite alien to English grammar. And I love it. I find it deeply charming, and I can't resist incorporating elements of it into my conversations with her.

I've been slowly learning Japanese, and I find it very logical, intuitive, and efficient, despite its use of three different character sets. I imagine a hybrid of Japanese and English could be quite powerful.
posted by mikeand1 at 12:24 PM on March 7, 2022