IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, we reserve the pronouns of personhood for humans—”he,” “she,” “they”—and not for animals, plants, and landscapes. Yet in many of America’s indigenous languages, such barriers are dissolved, and so, too, is the sense of distance between human and nonhuman.

I conceive of myself as an ecosystem. I use the pronoun “they” in my bio. I’m interested in using that pronoun because I like this idea of really recognizing that there are more microorganisms living in our bodies than there are of us. And the body is an ecosystem. I think somehow, there’s another self, more “us” than “I.”

Yet in Japanese there exists no grammatical equivalent to, for example, the English word “I.” There is no grammatical “I” that can be used by anybody—which ultimately means no grammatical “I” that can speak as a “subject” independent of its context. In fact, there is no single word for “I” in Japanese but a variety of “I’s,” depending on who the

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