Dear Japan, Four Salinger

[If you are my friend and you go to jail, I might write you something like this. I'll hope you like it.]

I don’t know what to say to you or how to say it. Lesser men would respond to such a problem by saying nothing, or worse, by saying something they shouldn’t have said and in the wrong way. Greater men would respond by saying the correct thing in the correct way. A man of my exact caliber, however, and more specifically myself particularly, would respond to such a problem by breaking it down into smaller, more palatable problems and solving them individually, successfully, and thirdly.

The first part of the problem is, “I don’t know what to say,” which is a condensed way of saying “I know that I don’t know what to say,” and it implies that something should be said, otherwise I wouldn’t say that I don’t know what to say, I would just go ahead and not say anything. I don’t, for example, know what to say when a blade of grass sways gently in the breeze, but that’s not a problem, it’s simply a fact about myself that is very strange for me to be aware of consciously. “I don’t know what to say,” then, is actually quite assertive, in contrast to the phrase, “actually quite assertive,” which is the phrasal equivalent of, say, fixing yourself a light brunch at home and eating it alone.

Seen in this light, the first part of the problem is clearly the first part of the solution. The problem cannot be solved unless I say something. But not only that—it cannot be solved unless I say something that I do not know to say. That is, I have to say something that I do not have the knowledge within me to say. I have to say something that I did not know to say, either out loud or to myself, before, during, or after I said it. So basically I have to say something that I would never have thought of and that I did not, do not, and will not think applies up to the moment you receive this letter, at which point I am entitled to change my mind without consequence to the truthfulness of this letter within its intended context.

One obvious solution to part one of the problem then is to quote to you a letter I did not write, which was instead written for reasons unknown by a complete stranger to a dead author (of a book I don’t understand), the meaning of which appears to rely heavily on understanding references to a musician and a poet, both of which I am indifferent to, and none of which applies to you in any way known to me.

The second part of the problem is “…or how to say it,” which seemed simple enough to fix (translate the letter into another language so that I literally don’t know how to pronounce the words) until I realized that this letter might be read as a security measure and that it would probably violate some rule or another to end it with a solid paragraph of, say, Russian or Arabic. Another problem is that, for this to be something that needs to be said to you, you have to be able to understand it, so it has to be in English anyway. I hope you will accept the best solution to this problem I could come up with, which was to use Google Translate to thoroughly translate the letter into several different languages before re-translating it back into English, ensuring that it is indeed something I didn’t know to say, and that I didn’t know how to say it as much as possible while still making sure it reached you in an acceptable form.

So, without further introduction, the letter translated from English to Chinese to Japanese to Korean to Russian and back to English:

“Dear Japan, four Salinger

When I was younger, my friends lie to me, as the release now I bought a paper copy of the precipice. The jacket, he probably will take me after graduation, our friendship and our lives are touched by the changes you've written. Notes, he and David Bowie misquoted. My friend David Bowie once said, the date, time may change me, but you can not change. Bowie concert, in fact, time may change me, but you can not keep track of time. Apparently, he's on a misconception of Robert Burns Horton that emotional intimacy with the body of a misunderstanding really grabbed Rai said. I never tell their friends about their mistakes. I just go.”

Mission accomplished. So, you’re welcome. Or I’m sorry. One of those.