A language is an island, constantly changing its shape, whose long coastline is being washed by the incessantly approaching and breaking waves from many other languages. Just as migrant birds come to sojourn foreign words may visit for a temporal stay, or begin to sprout there, take roots, and grow into a big grove just like a coconut incidentally washed ashore from an unknown land. In any one language resonate, at any given moment, many different languages. Such is the spirit of "omniphone" which literally means "all the sounds."
When I was ranting something like the above, a Canadian friend of mine spread her wet blanket by saying: "But isn't that the name of a telephone company or something?" What! Well, it could be. I didn't dare looking into it, as I knew I would be sorry to learn the truth. I, for one, would like to continue using the word as a general adjective following its original sense. Let's take a look at the field of literature. There are numerous cases in which a work seemingly written mono-lingually turns out to be an omniphone work in its explosive, creative spirit.
Patrick Chamoiseau called omniphone writers such writers as Dante, Rabelais, Joyce, Celine, among others. In their works are brought together many different languages, widely covering regional, historical, and social variations. They may well be called "logothetes," or the founders of languages. Each of these grand writers gathers in an unprecedented way different languages, thus making up a heterogeneous verbal agglomeration charged with an incredible creative potential. They are the trainers of savage animals, or magical gardeners of exologic plants.
Among contemporary writings in Japanese, my pick for the exemplary omniphone work is the autobiography by Masato Seto (1953-) "The History of an Asian Family" (originally published in 1998 as "Tooi and Masato," which is surely a far better title). Masato Seto is a photographer born as Tooi, the son of a former Japanese soldier who exiled in a Vietnamese community on the Thai-Vietnam border after Japan was defeated in 1945, and a woman in the soldier's host community. Years after the war was over his father decided to reveal his identity and went home to northern Japan, followed a couple of years later by his children, then his wife. Growing up, Masato loses most of the memories from his Thai childhood, let alone the languages he spoke there, until as an adult he goes back to visit the town where his family started its history. There, a graceful and moving epiphany takes place.
In Seto's writing in Japanese are resounding at the same time the Fukushima dialect (of northeastern Japan), Thai, Vietnamese, admirably reproducing the rich vastness, flavors, sounds afar, for which we have no other name but "Asia." I can't quote here passages from his dense, passionate prose (they remain mostly too weak if translated). But I can probably correctly point out the founder of his style spoken with an ardent breath, and we will know what is taking place, as far as literary history is concerned, in Seto's ecriture.
The founder's name is Kenji Nakagami (1946-92). Just as we can speak of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Edouard Glissant writing in the wake of Faulkner, we can say some contemporary writers in the Japanese language are writing from the vantage point offered by Nakagami. It was Nakagami's profusely colorful, baroque style that first hinted to me the possible trans-Asian horizon of an omniphone Japanese.
