In Barton’s revelatory and candid memoir, she frames her experiences in Japan in 50 dictionary entries, journeying through her vulnerabilities, otherness and identity in a foreign place and finding solace (and humour) in writing. One of the most powerful stories is about a death she witnesses, entitled 'uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken'. Grappling with emotion through the medium of language is, however, what Barton does best..

... begins slowly and not particularly engagingly, focusing more on the mechanics and fickleness of language. Whilst Barton’s ideas around translation and its slipperiness are interesting, it felt at times a little dry. However, when she brings in the human element, as she moves to Japan to work as a teacher and embarks upon an affair with a man senior to her both in age and in her work, the book really gets going. It becomes less about the abstraction of language and more about how the process of learning and absorbing another tongue is inflected by those we learn it from, and how we learn it. The katekanas work well here, as they show how another language can be made to fit but can also describe the shape and the feeling of something that cannot be expressed easily in one’s native tongue.

Throughout the memoir, Barton’s intelligence and erudition come across in every sentence of liltingly beautiful prose. As it is in her translations, her writing here is also unapologetically British.

Barton’s centring of doubt in her narrative – doubt about her linguistic skills; doubt about her relationships with people she meets, and with the country itself – brings nuance to her account of learning a language outside the classroom. It is doubt that eventually makes her a successful Japanese translator..

What is uncovered about this journey of self through studying or teaching abroad is not revelatory—surely anyone who’s immersed themself in another culture is going to have felt similar things as Polly, even if they’ve not dissected it in such an articulate way—but what makes this memoir special is Barton’s unequivocal and complicated love for the nuances of meaning, and of Japan, even as she struggles to feel at home in Sado, or even cosmopolitan Tokyo.

There is therefore something oddly satisfying about reading how someone now considered highly proficient in a language stumbled, toddler-like, through her first encounters with it...It is also satisfying to read as she gradually unlocks more of the language, reassuming her role as a beginner to explain not just what a word means but where she first encountered it and its range of associations.

This is no 'what I did on my summer holidays' book – although there are plenty of humorous mishaps along the way. Barton has clearly dedicated her life to working language like it is clay.

Barton presents a candid blend of memoir and exploration of linguistics.

Barton’s sharp, belletristic debut is a culture-shock story that cannily avoids the conventions of the genre.