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 ... She describes accurately that feeling of not being truly at home both in your native and your adoptive country, of somehow being both too little and too much ... perhaps best read as it seems to be intended – as a series of phrases that build to a story, each of which expresses something subtly differing about the objects they describe: in this case, the life of the author, and of the country and language that becomes her own. Barton is adept at capturing language and life in the same way, showing the impossibility of true understanding, both of meaning and of the self. The vignette style of the book shows this slipperiness in elegant miniatures, but can at times be its downfall, their separation making the pace a little disjointed. However, Fifty Sounds is an engaging whole, a description of a country and a life that shows how we can never truly interpret ourselves, let alone the other. Perhaps the charm is in never fully understanding.

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 ... isn’t perfect. Barton acknowledges her privileges in a Japanese context—that she gets to be a stranger in a strange land, that her whiteness covers all manner of sins—but she never really addresses her privileges back in the West ... For all this, though, she is always respectful of Japan and Japanese people. She never presents Japan as Other, reliably noting the things that might seem odd or idiosyncratic in her own culture as well. Above all, she is brutally honest about her feelings and failings ... what really makes the book sparkle is Barton’s abiding love of language itself ... Barton is brave. She celebrates this space between knowing and not-knowing a language. She approaches Japanese with the melancholy knowledge that she will never be able to fully integrate into the language’s embodied community. Nevertheless, her love of this liminal space is so great that she emboldens the reader, too, to sit in linguistic limbo.

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 ... Barton as a writer is searching, analytical, sharp; the character of younger Polly she portrays is precocious, naive, and stubborn, sometimes frustratingly so (but she’s twenty-one, so you can’t hold her to it). Reading Barton in critical conversation with other texts—she loves Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet—is a joy ... the text’s power is often undercut by moments of excessive self-cogitation and psychoanalysis. But Barton’s insight into and passion for language is ultimately a wonder.

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 not a run-of-the-mill, 'My Year Abroad'-style narrative about falling in love with a place and its people. Barton does fall in love, but she is honest about the difficulties and confusion that beset her immersion ... Neither is this the story of a single, fleeting but transformative encounter. It is, in fact, the justification of Barton’s entire life ... You get the feeling she is trying to untangle the reasons for her own benefit as much as ours.

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 ... demonstrates Barton’s belief that to understand another language – to really, truly, get it – she had to immerse herself within it, building up a library of sensual associations to draw on. Every adventure she has – culinary, sexual, or emotional – adds to the depth of her vocabulary ... The book is testament to the thoughtfulness that goes into translation: the weight of choosing one phrasing over another. At times, these dilemmas verge on neurotic, spiralling off anxiously...But for the most part Fifty Sounds is a delightful, granular account of communicating across languages, as Barton gradually becomes able to consider the world not in a new light, but with new words.

Barton presents a candid blend of memoir and exploration of linguistics ... Throughout the memoir, Barton lays bare her difficulties and triumphs—both personal and professional—with unflinching honesty and self-deprecating humor ... The philosophical explorations of linguistics may be esoteric for some readers, but many can relate to Barton’s journey of finding her place in the world. Readers who are fascinated by the art of translation or stories about living between cultures will find much to unpack here.

Barton’s sharp, belletristic debut is a culture-shock story that cannily avoids the conventions of the genre ... Refreshingly, the author doesn’t follow the typical fish-out-of-water arc from embarrassment to assimilation ... A refreshingly honest and novel look at the nuance and revelatory power of language.