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Polly Barton

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Polly Barton



Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her debut book Fifty Sounds , a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021. In 2022, Fifty Sounds was shortlisted for the 2022 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (
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Average rating: 3.59 · 71,667 ratings · 11,467 reviews · 19 distinct worksSimilar authors
Butter

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3.57 avg rating — 44,957 ratings — published 2017 — 35 editions
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There's No Such Thing as an...

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3.59 avg rating — 15,666 ratings — published 2015 — 23 editions
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Where the Wild Ladies Are

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3.77 avg rating — 6,109 ratings — published 2016 — 24 editions
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Terminal Boredom: Stories

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3.58 avg rating — 5,675 ratings — published 2021 — 13 editions
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Mild Vertigo

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3.52 avg rating — 1,570 ratings — published 1997 — 8 editions
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Spring Garden

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3.27 avg rating — 1,515 ratings — published 2014 — 20 editions
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Fifty Sounds

4.17 avg rating — 886 ratings — published 2021 — 5 editions
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Porn: An Oral History

3.34 avg rating — 717 ratings — published 2023 — 4 editions
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Hunchback

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3.60 avg rating — 390 ratings — published 2023 — 15 editions
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Ultimate Adventure Word Sea...

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More books by Polly Barton…
Quotes by Polly Barton  (?)
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“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

“Lying curled up on the pavement, Rika understood; this was how Kajii's victims had died. The thing they had treasured had been cruelly shattered. She had to face it this time: Kajii was a killer. It didn't matter whether or not she'd murdered her victims with her own hands. Clearly, there resided within her a violent loathing of other people. Rika hadn't been able to see it until she herself had been struck off. The situation had come about through her own lack of care, but without the damage Kajii had inflicted on her, she would never have sunk this low. There was no doubt that those three men had experienced the same flow of emotions, the same shock.”
Polly Barton, Butter

“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

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics posts views last activity  
Japanese Literature: 2020 New Releases 110 324 Dec 15, 2020 01:58PM  
Japanese Literature: 01/2021 Where the Wild Ladies Are, by Aoko Matsuda 27 93 Jan 22, 2021 02:05PM  
Japanese Literature: 06/2021 There's No Such Thing As an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura 21 120 Jul 04, 2021 03:24AM  
Japanese Literature: 2021 Upcoming New Releases 139 594 Dec 07, 2021 08:15PM  
The Way of the Ja...: Book Suggestions 34 58 Feb 10, 2022 04:30AM  
The Sword and Laser: This topic has been closed to new comments. Quick Burns (2022) 753 542 Dec 24, 2022 04:19AM  
Contemporary Fiction: * Publishing Calendar - New and Forthcoming Releases 1 1 Jun 05, 2023 02:14PM  
Contemporary Fiction: Top 10 Reads of 2023 1 1 Aug 07, 2023 12:38PM  


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