What the practice of the heterolingual address evoked in me was not the sense of the peculiarity of writing for two linguistically different readerships/ rather, it made me aware of other social and even political issues involved in translation, and it illuminated what I had long suspected about the assumptions of the nonheterolingual address, namely, the homolingual address. In this respect, the practice of writing these essays confirmed what I had expected when 1 analyzed the conceptions and regimes of translation in eighteenth-century discourse in what is referred to as Japan today. Strictly speaking, it is not because two different language unities are given that we have to translate (or interpret) one text into another,- it is because translation articulates languages so that we may postulate the two unities of the translating and the translated languages as if they were autonomous and closed entities through a certain representation of translation. In my previous book, I claimed that the schema of what Roman Jakobson called "interlingual translation" became possible as a consequence of a new discursive transformation in the eighteenth century, and that an introduction of a certain regime of translation, perhaps for the first time, gave rise to the possibility of conceiving of a spoken ordinary language, of people living in some vague area designated by the name Japan, as distinguished from and contrasted to the language(s) of the Middle Kingdom, that is, China.1 But, of course, as the country was divided into many domains and social groups with vast dialectical and stylistic variety, nowhere could the Japanese language as universally spoken by the "Japanese people" be found in the eighteenth century. The Japanese language could only be conceived of as a lost and dead language whose restoration was earnestly called for. I argued that the Japanese language and the Japanese ethnos were stillborn, then, as the phonocentric notion of language became dominant in certain discourses. Thus the emergence of Japanese language and Japanese ethnicity was irreparably associated with the problematic of translation.