Fifty Sounds
By: Polly Barton
4.15
Format: 345 pages, Paperback
In this dazzling debut, Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of…
Want to Read $ 14.68"Over time, I have come to believe that if language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling."-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
"Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language' (Rachel Cusk)…In writing, one can be at a remove not only from the observing eye of society, but also from the somatic memories attached to conversation."-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
"Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at home there, you know really comfortable. I mean with him it's mostly the, the, the-" My brain silently fills in the next word: anime. "The animation and so on, you know he's really into technology. I mean he's only seventeen, you so who knows what is going to happen. But it does seem like, you know, a real thing for him." "Right," I say, and I nod. "That's great." Sometimes at times like these, what fills my head is the things I do not and could not ever say. For example: "You have no idea how many stories I've heard exactly like that one!" Or: "You know, even though I'm generally reluctant to admit the existence of 'types" among people, I'm often shocked by the parallels that exist between the kind of young men who like anime and all things Japanese, to the extent that I sometimes struggle to believe that a group of people with such intensely similar interests are in fact individuals." Certainly I do not say: "And what would you like to bet that he ends up marrying a Japanese woman and becomes an academic teaching the world about Japanese culture while she gives up her job to bring up his children?" But even if these things flicker through my mind, I'm not anywhere near as rageful as any of that makes me sound. In fact, if anything, what I feel in this particular moment is something like envy, for this son of hers that I've never met, I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond, and which hew closely to the colonial paradigm even if there are important differences (and even if Japan also has a history of colonialism of its own to reckon with); and that even leaving all of this aside, this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in. And yet I can't help but look at the sort of person who feels "immediately" comfortable in Japan and wish that I had felt like that, only because it might validate the way I've dedicated a lot of my life to the country, but because the security of that sensation in itself feels like something I would love to experience."-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
"Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at home there, you know really comfortable. I mean with him it's mostly the, the, the-" My brain silently fills in the next word: anime. "The animation and so on, you know he's really into technology. I mean he's only seventeen, you know so who knows what is going to happen. But it does seem like, you know, a real thing for him." "Right," I say, and I nod. "That's great." Sometimes at times like these, what fills my head is the things I do not and could not ever say. For example: "You have no idea how many stories I've heard exactly like that one!" Or: "You know, even though I'm generally reluctant to admit the existence of 'types' among people, I'm often shocked by the parallels that exist between the kind of young men who like anime and all things Japanese, to the extent that I sometimes struggle to believe that a group of people with such intensely similar interests are in fact individuals." Certainly I do not say: "And what would you like to bet that he ends up marrying a Japanese woman and becomes an academic teaching the world about Japanese culture while she gives up her job to bring up his children?" But even if these things flicker through my mind, I'm not anywhere near as rageful as any of that makes me sound. In fact, if anything, what I feel in this particular moment is something like envy, for this son of hers that I've never met, I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond, and which hew closely to the colonial paradigm even if there are important differences (and even if Japan also has a history of colonialism of its own to reckon with); and that even leaving all of this aside, this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in. And yet I can't help but look at the sort of person who feels "immediately" comfortable in Japan and wish that I had felt like that, only because it might validate the way I've dedicated a lot of my life to the country, but because the security of that sensation in itself feels like something I would love to experience."-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
If you liked the nonfiction plot in Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton , here is a list of 12 books like this:
1. Lost Japan
By: Alex Kerr , Bodhi Fishman
3.97
Format: None pages, Paperback
An enchanting and fascinating insight into Japanese landscape, culture, history and future. Origina… read more
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- memoir
- travel
- asia
- nonfiction
- japan
2. A Horse at Night: On Writing
By: Amina Cain
4.03
Format: 136 pages, Paperback
A virtuosic meditation on literature and life in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s … read more
Want to Read $ 9.99Similar categories in Amina Cain's A Horse at Night: On Writing book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- nonfiction
- memoir
- essays
- writing
"For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess."-Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing
"Female solitude is weighted with a particular power in literature."-Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing
"I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader's mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like."-Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing
"Perhaps solitude is a practice as much as an instinct, its pleasures very much contextual. Sometimes being alone is terrible."-Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing
3. Cold Enough for Snow
By: Jessica Au
3.73
Format: 99 pages, Paperback
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the a… read more
Want to Read $ 9.99Similar categories in Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- asia
- japan
"She had kept, I knew, all the tickets, brochures and guides we had been given to take home, as if she would take them out later to read as one reads a novel."-Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
"The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached the state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere."-Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
"Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, an…"-Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
"Then she reached for her bag and took out a small book. She explained she had found it at a store near her home, and that it described the nature of your character based on the date of your birth. (.…"-Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
4. A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun (Brief History of Asia Series)
By: Jonathan Clements
3.75
Format: 304 pages, Paperback
This fascinating history tells the story of the people of Japan, from ancient teenage priest-queens… read more
Want to Read $ 2.99Similar categories in Jonathan Clements's A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun (Brief History of Asia Series) book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- travel
- asia
- nonfiction
- japan
5. Box Hill
By: Adam Mars-Jones
3.56
Format: 160 pages, Paperback
Box Hill is a sizzling, sometimes shocking, and strangely tragic love story between two men, set in… read more
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6. A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma
By: Noreen Masud
4.20
Format: 256 pages, Paperback
A surprising and lyrical journey—part memoir, part nature book—meditating on the meaning of "flatne… read more
Want to Read $ 15.99Similar categories in Noreen Masud's A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- travel
- biography memoir
- nonfiction
- memoir
"We tell stories to make them visible. Or we tell stories so that we don’t have to look at them any longer."-Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma
"Supposedly trauma transcends language and time, and is therefore untellable. Perhaps sometimes it does and is. But I think traumatized people do know how to tell their stories. What’s difficult is th…"-Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma
"Supposedly, trauma transcends language and time, and is therefore untellable. Perhaps sometimes it does, and is. But I think traumatized people do know how to tell their stories. What’s difficult is …"-Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma
"I was held captive by this unyielding, silent space, and I began to understand two things. The flatness wasn’t an absence - not in the way we might assume it is - but something strong and original an…"-Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma
7. Butter
By: Asako Yuzuki
3.60
Format: 464 pages, Hardcover
The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist inten… read more
Want to Read $ 14.99Similar categories in Asako Yuzuki's Butter book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- japan
"Dessert was home-made candied chestnuts, chiffon cake baked with amazake and rice flour, and cups of gingery chai. Biting into the cake, Rika discovered that it was perfectly fluffy, with a pleasing …"-Asako Yuzuki, Butter
"Soon after, Rika heard the sizzle of butter melting in a hot frying pan. It smelt to her like life itself. Maybe because it was animal fat, there was rough, raw depth and fragrance to its smell, whic…"-Asako Yuzuki, Butter
"Milk was originally blood. In that case, was the butter in the Babaji story actually a metaphor for all the carnage that took place under the cover of the jungle? What seemed pure, white and creamy h…"-Asako Yuzuki, Butter
"The whipped butter had already started melting across the waffles' latticed brown surface, creating a golden trickling waterfall that pooled in their hollows. Rika bit into the dough, savoring how ju…"-Asako Yuzuki, Butter
8. Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World
By: Matt Alt
4.20
Format: 368 pages, Paperback
The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that ca… read more
Want to Read $ 12.99Similar categories in Matt Alt's Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- asia
- nonfiction
- japan
9. Alphabetical Diaries
By: Sheila Heti
4.02
Format: 224 pages, Hardcover
A thrilling confessional from the award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour. Sheila Heti kept a… read more
Want to Read $ 13.99Similar categories in Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- memoir
- biography memoir
- nonfiction
- essays
- writing
10. It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
By: Anne de Marcken
3.82
Format: 128 pages, Paperback
Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how m… read more
Want to Read $ 8.61Similar categories in Anne de Marcken's It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
"Fasting makes sense of the hunger. The constant internal grasping. The only sensible answer to this is to always withdraw the thing after which I grasp. To subvert. To thwart. To deny. It closes the …"-Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
11. Mild Vertigo
By: Mieko Kanai
3.55
Format: 176 pages, Paperback
Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and… read more
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- asia
- japan
12. How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart
By: Florentyna Leow
3.89
Format: 96 pages, Paperback
How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart is a collection about the ways in which heartbreak can fill a place and… read more
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- memoir
- travel
- asia
- nonfiction
- essays
- japan
13. Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
By: Rebecca May Johnson
3.75
Format: 192 pages, Hardcover
Cooking is thinking!The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the car… read more
Want to Read $ 9.99Similar categories in Rebecca May Johnson's Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- nonfiction
- memoir
- essays
"Mrs Beeton writes in anticipation of her absence."-Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
"Cooking by the recipe a thousand times and more gives me this insight into language and its relation to living things."-Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
"Cooking is the tool I use to draw close to other people, though closeness makes me anxious. Cooking is how I manage closeness."-Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
"What I want for the people I cook for is for them to enjoy their own perversions at the table, to feel free to exhibit a lack of constraint."-Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
14. Woman Running in the Mountains
By: Yūko Tsushima
3.86
Format: 275 pages, Hardcover
Pregnant and unmarried, Takiko, who lives at home with her violent, alcoholic father and her hard-w… read more
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- asia
- japan
15. Owlish
By: Dorothy Tse
3.39
Format: 224 pages, Paperback
A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporar… read more
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- asia
16. Fifty Sounds
By: Polly Barton
4.15
Format: 345 pages, Paperback
In this dazzling debut, Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of… read more
Want to Read $ 14.68Similar categories in Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- linguistics
- memoir
- language
- travel
- asia
- biography memoir
- nonfiction
- essays
- writing
- japan
"Over time, I have come to believe that if language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable …"-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
"Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language' (Rachel Cusk)…In writing, one can be at a remove not only from the observing eye of society, but also from the somatic…"-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
"Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at hom…"-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
"Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at hom…"-Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds
17. Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia
By: Marie Darrieussecq
3.65
Format: 288 pages, Paperback
A restless inquiry into the cultural and psychic sources of insomnia by one of contemporary French … read more
Want to Read $ 13.99Similar categories in Marie Darrieussecq's Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- biography memoir
- nonfiction
- memoir
- essays
18. The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth
By: Elizabeth Rush
4.12
Format: 424 pages, Hardcover
An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Risi… read more
Want to Read $ 10.99Similar categories in Elizabeth Rush's The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
- travel
- biography memoir
- nonfiction
- memoir
"It occurred to me... I ought to treat Antarctica not as a desolate outpost at the end of the earth but as a place where life begins."-Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth
19. This Little Art
By: Kate Briggs
4.35
Format: 365 pages, Paperback
An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a genre-bending s… read more
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- memoir
- language
- nonfiction
- writing
- essays
20. The Coming Bad Days
By: Sarah Bernstein
3.48
Format: 265 pages, Paperback
A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She jo… read more
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21. Cartoons
By: Kit Schluter
4.07
Format: 176 pages, Paperback
Set in the uncanny valley between Bugs Bunny and Franz Kafka, Cartoons is an explosive series of ou… read more
Want to Read $ 15.37Similar categories in Kit Schluter's Cartoons book and Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds
