Hello hypothetical audience!
I’ve had a lot on my plate, grappling with the coronavirus-prompted realization that I am a background character in everyone’s life stories (well, except my family and my confidant. They talk with me like everyday for some reason) and haven’t had the willpower to polish those anime-related posts I’ve been researching and drafting. Maybe I’ll have to cut them down from 5 post of 10 into 10 posts of 5? So I can write them weekly or so on? Or maybe I’ll do one post for each creator…
That might be the way to go.
Oh, but in the meanwhile, I finished Book 1 of a middle grade series (60k words!) and am currently planning two other books (one fast-paced upper MG over 50k, and a cozier lower MG under 50k) that are more what The Market wants. Maybe that’s why I’m so busy...
Plus, I wasn’t sure how to keep my normal jocular tone during a time when anti-Asian sentiment is on the rise. Some part of me is like isn’t it clear that I’m an ally? I won’t shut up about solidarity in all my classes, to the point that I’m sure my colleagues resent me as a poseur and a wannabe, and not a jaded AmeriCorps/nonprofit alum who is looking for a sustainable mode of activism that suits her.
But yeah, to be more explicitly pro-Asian in a way that fits National Poetry Month, I want to talk about what non-Native and bilingual speakers of English taught me about how to use the language. Some people call it “broken English” or even worse “Engrish,” but I’d like to think of it as bending English, a language which was a flexible mongrel. I mean, as a fan of AAVE/Ebonics and skin-official siblings of the coiner of “based” and “bling,” I should know a thing or two about the extra-boxilar possibilities of English.
The non-Native and bilingual speakers in this case are all J-Pop and J-Rock artists, hence the blog title.
Study 1: FictionJunction YUUKA
First off, I want to start with the song “Silly-go-Round” and the band behind it, FictionJunction YUUKA. The band name is already a poetic bend of English: the subtly rhyming “fiction” and “junction” are conjoined to create a new word suggesting the place where fictions meet. I don’t doubt that they understand the meaning of the words and chose them intentionally--we all have access to dictionaries nowadays, and denotations are the easy part of language learning. Connotations are the hard part.
But I do think that Yuki Kajiura, the mind behind everything FictionJunction, has fresher eyes than a native speaker might when it comes to word choice. That freshness is what I want to look at!
As a monolingual English speaker, words ending in -tion have stiff, formal, unromantic undertones: rain is more earthy than condensation, spin is more sprightly than rotation, metamorphose is more decorative than evolution. In a way, a word ending in -tion is often less its own word than conjugated form of the actual word: condense, rotate, evolve. I think we barely even register these words as rhyming, and simply toss them into the bin of weak endings.
But English words, when translated into Japanese look and work differently. FictionJunction is can be romanized to Fikushon Jankushon and is pronouncedフィクションジャンクション. The words are now a step removed from their Latinate histories, less burdened by formal expectations. We can break them apart in unusual places--maybe the jun/jan/ジャン in Junction is similar enough to
“じゃーん” meaning “voila!” It now has the connotation of surprise and wonder, a surprising meeting. Fictions join here, in this art, colliding with a crash! Or, to quote Taro Okamoto, “Art is explosion!”
Study 2: “Silly-go-Round”
On to the song title, “Silly-go-Round” always fascinated me for it’s transformation of the set phrase “merry-go-round.” In addition to normal and grammatical prefixes and suffixes like macro- and meta- or -ism or -ology, English also has plenty of playful bendy affixes, like -copter for things similar to helicopters, even though the word rightly splits into helioc and pter, spiral and wing.
There’s also -gate, which confusing implies a scandal regarding that to which it’s affixed. There’s -orama, which has come to mean “a lot of something” in contrast to its original Greek definition of view, horama. There’s also -holic, a back-formation that does more denotative work than makes sense, given its etymology.
When English speakers play with the affixes within merry-go-round, they seem to be take -go-round as the suffix to create the image of other kinds of carousels: Marriage-Go-Round as a revolving marriage, Ranter-Go-Round as a card-passing game, We-Go-Round as an inclusive carousel, sound-go-round, baby-go-round, water-go-round, pet-go-round… The implicit rule is that the first phrase should be a noun, and that -go-round gives it revolving characteristics. The one major exception I find is scary-go-round, which follows the rules of the original ‘merry’ in a way similar to the song’s “silly-go-round.”
FictionJunction YUUKA observed that the initial phrase in merry-go-round is an adjective, a feeling, a mood. What’s revolving is not objects but emotions. Rather than ask “what is a ‘merry’ and why is it going around?,” they take ‘merry’ as the way that things are going around. They then ask what other feelings can be placed into this phrase to prompt a different kind of dizziness. Is there something other than merriment repeating? Maybe foolishness, mistakes, childishness?
This is how FictionJunction YUUKA (and Yuki Kajiura) bend English! Ms. Kajiura is one of many Japanese creatives who have taught me to think more flexibility about how words join and what words imply. I have lots to say on this topic, so maybe this too can be a series.
That’s all for now, so thanks for reading!