Babel

It’s a fairly long novel, and although it took me a while to finish it, I found it very engaging as an epic novel. Although Japanese is my first language, I live in an environment where English and French—languages that are not my native tongues—are spoken. In that context, I sometimes keenly feel a distance that, no matter how hard I try, I can never fully bridge. Reading this novel made me reflect anew on that “linguistic distance” I had vaguely sensed all along. I also found the conflict between the West and the colonized—and, in particular, the perspective of how the world is viewed from the side that was dominated—to be extremely fascinating. In modern history, Japan was not so much on the side of the colonized as it was on the side of the colonizers, the rulers. Perhaps because of this, when I talk with friends from Southeast Asia or India, I sometimes sense a difference in our perceptions of history and the West. After reading this novel, I feel I’ve gained a better understanding of where those differences stem from and can now imagine, to some extent, how they perceive the world. The education I’ve received and the worldview shaped by it are not unrelated to the history my own country has followed. In that sense—as it made me reflect on this once again—it was a truly fascinating book.