What a marvelous book! A perfect book to read while traveling and thinking about language. Translator Polly Barton writes 50 short essays about 50 mimetic words in Japanese (kind of like onomatopoeia but for ideas and feelings), giving a funny, fascinating dictionary form to her years spent living in Japan and becoming ‘fluent,’ though she doubts the existence of such a state. I’ve never read anything this good on the weird, inexplicable, enduring romances we have with certain countries or the daunting, painful, awkward, exhausting, exhilarating experience of language learning. This is really kind of a book about the loneliness at the heart of communication, and about finding some comfort in the permanent liminalIty of translation. It is SO good, I know like 10 people who are going to love this so much, I’m gonna text you all