Une langue venue d'ailleurs

The day I seized the French language, I lost Japanese forever in its original purity. My native language has lost its status as my native language. I've learned to speak like a foreigner in my own language. My wandering between the two languages has begun. I am therefore neither Japanese nor French. In the end, I never fail to become a stranger to myself in both languages, traveling and returning from one to the other, so that I always feel out of place. But, in fact, it is from this place that I access the language; it is from this place, or rather from this non-place, that I express all my love for French, all my attachment to Japanese. I am foreign here and there, and I am foreign. A. M.