“Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you” – too intrusive – and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.”
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