Bara Bara

Bara Bara: (Japanese) When something that was once whole is split up into pieces.

Years ago, I found the first half of a Japanese/English Dictionary in my parents’ house. It was the translation dictionary my dad used when he first immigrated to California in the ’70s. I’m not sure when it split in half but I often joked that my dad’s broken English was the result of learning from a dictionary that had been cracked apart.

A few months ago, my mom stumbled upon the missing half and asked if I wanted it, not knowing that I’d been holding onto the first half these past years. I reached out to Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder (a Japanese/German/American book artist) for help restoring this bara bara dictionary. For three days, I watched her tape, sew, and glue these stacks of torn paper into a functional dictionary, now more beautiful than its original form.

With this dictionary once again whole, I’m excited to continue learning Japanese through the same pages my dad once used to learn English.

On the way home, I thought about how books tell great stories with only a fraction of the words available in a language. On the other hand, a dictionary holds all the words but doesn’t tell a story. And yet somehow I feel like this dictionary now holds my favorite story.