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As my year of intensive Japanese study at the IUC comes to an end, I've been thinking about how far I have come linguistically. Japanese is an incredibly complex language (see here and here), and in learning the language for academic use my classmates and I are engaged in a very difficult activity that goes far beyond the mastery of daily conversation. Many of the articles that we read in Kushida sensei's art history class would be difficult for a native speaker, and the classical texts that I've been tackling as of late are rewarding, but exhausting. On a rainy day a number of weeks ago, after a particularly grueling afternoon of coffee shop reading, I decided to clear my head by wandering along the shopping street at Kannai. I popped into a Yurindo bookstore, and remembering a conversation with a classmate about the relative ease of reading Murakami Haruki in the original Japanese, I picked up a 400 yen paperback version of 神の子どもたちはみな踊る (after the quake) as the collection of short stories seemed approchable to me. I found the book on the second floor of the sprawling shop amongst the small sized paperback versions of a variety of books. As many Japanese people have a long commute it's common to see these miniaturized books on the train, complete with a paper book cover. Since spring I've been spending my short subway commute slowly reading the stories and enjoying the fact that while I don't know every single word, I know the vast majority of them and I can understand the unknown vocabulary in the story from context. It's these little moments of linguistic clarity that make all the flashcards and grammar points of language learning so worthwhile, and after a difficult day of academic discussion in Japanese, when my confidence is shaken, I can turn to my small book to remind myself of how far I have come and how much I enjoy the Japanese language.
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