The Japanese present and future tense: How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, is a lovely book, to be read alongside Platero y yo and Le Petit Prince as soon as possible. Only, since I don't know Japanese anywhere near as well as I know Spanish and French, I had to wait until the book, long classic in Japan, was translated into English, thanks to its popularization of the likes of Hayao Miyazaki, said to be basing his final film on its story, and Neil Gaiman, who contributes the foreword.

The title, as translated by Bruno Navasky, is How Do You Live?

The last line, however, is given as "How will you live?"

These are both possible renderings of the same phrase in Japanese: 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimi-tachi wa Dō Ikiru ka)

How can this be? In the original language, what we would call the "future" and "present" forms of the verb are the same. The meaning, present or future, will depend on the context. Like so much does in Japanese, and in every language. Verbs in Old English, for example, have a similar ambiguity as to present/future. 

In terms of Owen Barfield's view of language, though his examples tend to be nouns--and if we're interested in Barfield, we're in good company, because Verlyn Flieger makes the strong case for JRR Tolkien's essential agreement with his fellow Inkling on this point, though his examples tend to be adverbs--Japanese verbs might well give us insight into some truth of the world's unfolding. Not, as Gatsby would have it, that we are "borne back ceaselessly into the past," exactly, but that the present is somehow continually becoming one with the future. 

Consider the way friendship happens. The growth of a person into who they want to be, or of a plant putting itself out from a seed into the light. Or the sense of anticipation we feel whenever we open a book we've heard a lot about and hope that it won't disappoint. Really hoping, perhaps, that we are ready to understand what it has to say. All of that is what this book is about. 

Other resonances might be with the Kurosawa film Ikiru (To Live) and the video game EarthBound, where the uncle's notebooks' second-person voice carries over into the dialogues with the developer over tea and coffee. But standing alongside Juan Ramon Jimenez and Antoine de St-Exupery on the shelves is already pretty good company.