With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1.

People often equate Haruki Murakami’s boku narrator with the author himself. Boku has great taste in music, is always hanging out with attractive, quirky women, drinks nice whiskey and tons of coffee, and is really laid back. But in the end, while he might share some traits with Murakami, boku is a fictional character.

Readers who are looking for Murakami’s own personal voice don’t have to look too far (as long as they can read Japanese). In the late 90s he answered reader questions on his website. These have since been collected and published with the title 『「そうだ、村上さんに聞いてみよう」と世間の人々が村上春樹にとりあえずぶっつける282大疑問に果たして村上さんはちゃんと答えられるのか？』, which Jay Rubin has translated as “That’s it! Let’s Ask Murakami!” Say the People and They Try Flinging 282 Questions at Haruki Murakami, But Can Murakami Really Find Decent Answers to Them All?

The questions are fairly random in subject matter and tone, ranging from serious to playful. Many of them ask about his writing. Some of the best ones are the strange ones, one of which I’ve translated for this week:

Big Question 42
Do you put condoms in the refrigerator?
At 3:56 PM, 97.8.5

I’m sorry to ask this all of the sudden, but are condoms something that should be kept in the refrigerator? (I’m housesitting for a male friend, and I found some in the butter tray when I was cleaning the fridge.) Japanese teacher living in Los Angeles, U.S.A.

It must be one of the following:

① They feel good when they’re cold.
② He can get them when somebody says, hey, bring me some more wine.
③ He couldn’t think of anywhere else to keep them.
④ He eats them on toast.
(40-41)

Happy Oyster Day! September is the end of the long, drought-like stretch of r-less months. In English we often say that oysters should be consumed raw only during months with an r in their name; thus, as mentioned earlier this year and celebrated last year, September 1^st can be considered the beginning of oyster season. It’s open season you mollusk motherfuckers! Ready or not, here I come! This evening I’ll be heading to Shinagawa to partake of oysters. Get in touch if you would like to join.

September also marks the beginning of the run up to the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prizes this October. Last year I wrote a series of posts with sections of yet to be translated Haruki Murakami prose, trying to stir up interest before the Nobel announcement (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I will do the same over the next month, starting today. Let it begin.

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement.

For the final post last year, I translated two of the super-short stories from the collection 夜のくもざる. One thing I did not mention in that post is the fact that the 36 stories were chosen from a batch of 44 or so. Murakami initially wrote the stories as a series of advertisements for the J. Press clothing line from ’85 to ’87 and then for Parker fountain pens from ’93 to ’95. When he edited the stories for collective publication, he cut a number of them including the very first one – ホテルのロビーの牡蠣, “Hotel Lobby Oysters,” published in April, 1985.

Because this story was not included in 夜のくもざる, the only ways you can read it these days are by owning a copy of one of the original magazines (a number of publications ran the first set, among them Men’s Club) or by visiting the National Diet Library. I did the latter last December and have since translated it for this day. Without further ado, I give you Haruki Murakami’s “Hotel Lobby Oysters,” a perfect story for Oyster Day:

Hotel Lobby Oysters

At the time I was sitting on the hotel lobby sofa and vaguely thinking about oysters. Not lemon soufflé, not pencil sharpeners – oysters. I don’t know why. I just suddenly realized that I was thinking about oysters.

The oysters I was thinking about on the hotel lobby sofa were different from oysters thought about anywhere else. They were shaped differently, they smelled differently, and their color was different, too. They weren’t oysters harvested in some cove. They were pure oysters harvested in a hotel lobby.

After thinking about oysters for a while, I went to the sink to wash my face, then retied my tie and returned to the sofa. When I got back, the oysters had already disappeared from inside my head. Again, I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I washed my faced or because I retied my tie. Or maybe the hotel oyster season is extremely short.

When the girl came 17 minutes after our appointed time, I told her about the hotel lobby oysters. The image was so distinct I felt like I had to tell someone about them.

“You want to eat oysters?” she asked.

“No, these oysters, they were purely oysters as a concept, unrelated to my appetite,” I explained. “The oysters came into being as the very essence of oys—“

“But you do want to eat some, right?” she said.

When she mentioned it and I settled down to think about it, I certainly had developed an incredible desire to eat oysters. We went to the hotel restaurant and ate 25 oysters while drinking wine. Sometimes I think my appetite originates from a really strange place.

Well, my 1Q84 review is online. I can’t say enough about the guys at Néojaponisme. They did a fantastic job helping me turn my thoughts on 1Q84 into a cohesive article. Major props to Matt over at No-sword.

This is as good a time as any to give a postmortem on my 1Q84 predictions and add a few thoughts about the book. Some very vague spoiler-ish type material is included, but nothing too critical; still, read at your own risk.

Prediction 1: It’s going to be a monster.

Verdict: Yes

This was a gimme prediction. I needed one to guarantee I didn’t embarrass myself with a bagel. At 1055 pages it’s gigantic, but we all knew that going in; that was one of the few things Murakami DID reveal about the novel. Ben Dooley at The Millions noted that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is longer, but only when you take into account Wind-up Bird’s belated third volume. It still only edges out 1Q84 by a meager 100 pages or so. If Murakami adds a third volume to 1Q84, it will easily crush Wind-up Bird.

That said, unless Murakami adds a 700 page third volume with 20 new characters and lots of action, Wind-up Bird will still feel longer. There are more characters and more things happen. And there are no coddamn “Little People” in Wind-up Bird (this will make more sense in a few years). 「ほうほう」と俺が言う。

Prediction 2: He will not re-work a previous short story or novel.

Verdict: Yes

Alright! I’m really happy I got this right, but as mentioned in the prediction, I was hoping he would incorporate something old. Using old material forces him to edit and refine. He’s had a lot of success with that technique (Hard-boiled Wonderland, Norwegian Wood, Wind-up Bird, Sputnik Sweetheart), perhaps because it’s the only form of editing he’s getting. In a college class, I once heard a professor compare the relationship between author and editor in Japan to one of sensei and student – the editor accepts the manuscript from the writer and thanks him deeply before taking it straight to the press.

And this book feels like it could lose some weight. If, say, it had been edited down into one volume, then he could have written a kick-ass second volume to wrap things up. But he takes his sweet time, dragging six months of calendar time in the novel out over 1000 pages.

Prediction 3: World War II will be a theme.

Verdict: No

What a terrible call. The answer was sitting there right in that section of the article I quoted, but I didn’t realize it. Murakami does not use WWII as a theme, but he does use religious cults as a theme. Yes, there is one section in the novel where WWII is mentioned, but it’s brief, not fully connected to other sections of the novel, and there is nothing about the brutality of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific. More about the cult topic below.

Prediction 4: It’s going to be great.

Verdict: No

Well, points to me for being optimistic, but this is not one of Murakami’s better works. I think it’s clear from the beginning of my review that Murakami’s best year was 1985. That five-year period from ’82 to ’87 (A Wild Sheep Chase to Norwegian Wood) is just incredible, and ’85 is, in retrospect, the peak. For whatever reason, his post-Norwegian Wood novels have been all over the place, including Wind-up Bird. That’s one thing 1Q84 did to me – it has changed my opinion of Wind-up Bird. I remember enjoying it the two times I read it, but looking back at it through this most recent novel, it seems more like an unstable collage of randomness, not unlike Kafka on the Shore. In all three novels, there are discussions of WWII that don’t really fit in with the rest of the novel. Wind-up Bird is the strongest of the three, but it’s nowhere close to Hard-boiled Wonderland in terms of construction. Murakami’s technique seems to be much stronger on a smaller scale, like afterdark or A Wild Sheep Chase. Hard-boiled Wonderland seems to be an exception since he had to revise an old work and admittedly rewrote the ending after his wife didn’t like it. (Rubin mentions this on page 115 of his book, referring to the supplement to the Complete Works).

Prediction 5: There will be a flush of short stories later this year.

Verdict: Unknown

We’ll have to wait and see what he produces next, but I imagine that he’s already at work on something. He’s a machine.

Prediction 6ish: The Aum attack will be a theme.

Verdict: Kind of.

After seeing Dmitri Kovalenin’s livejournal and his commenter’s research showing that 1Q84 is some kind of weird gene-thing, I brought up the fact that the Aum attack could be a topic. Well, cults definitely take up a good part of Book 1, but not for the reason we thought – sarin gas has nothing to do with the book. So I’m giving myself half a point here. It seems like Murakami tries to address the cult mindset, combine that with the idea of a similarly powerful groupthink situation, and the fuck everything up with some weird fucking moral quandary (that involves baby-raping, no less). (Yes, baby-raping. Well, more like statutory “rape.” But that can be our little secret until the translation comes out.)

The cult theme, however, gets dropped for the most part in Book 2, so I guess this should really only be a quarter of a point, which means…

2.25/5 = EPIC FAIL! (Although I could end up 3.25/6 depending on how his short stories pan out.) Oh well. It was fun. It pains me even to think it, but Murakami may be losing a step. But hey hey hey, don’t think about that, let’s look at one of his old short stories!

“The Twins and the Sunken Continent” is a great little short story. It was almost unreal to sink back into that same mellow tone courtesy of Murakami’s infamous boku. I started reading the story a year and a half ago but didn’t get around to finishing it until earlier this year. Some bloggy blog blog type thoughts:

- There’s this amazing scene where boku has returned to his office after seeing the photo of the twins. The place is a mess, but before he starts cleaning he chills out with a cup of coffee that he is forced to stir with a pen because the spoons are dirty. Such a simple scene, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the story, I think because the physical mess of the office mirrors his mental confusion, and he just kind of sits with it for a few moments, quietly enjoying a cup of coffee, before he begins to pick up the pieces.

- I’ve always been jealous of how Murakami narrators can just throw down their cups of coffee. The boku here has one at a cafe, and then two more, maybe three, in short order back at the office. And if he was visiting a client, you can bet that they probably served him a cup, too! Hard-boiled Wonderland has that great scene where he drinks a thermos of coffee and eats sandwiches with the old scientist. I start twitching after two cups and then go into an extreme crash an hour or two later, which is why I normally drink coffee in the afternoons, tea in the morning. Sometimes I wish I could drink coffee like boku, but maybe it’s healthier that I can’t.

- I find it very interesting that Murakami decided to write about his old boku after writing Hard-boiled Wonderland. As mentioned in the article, he wanted to go back and see the character again (along with the Sheep Man) after finishing Norwegian Wood (which resulted in Dance Dance Dance). “The Twins and the Sunken Continent” shows that it wasn’t just a one time thing. For the first 10 years of his career, it was a pattern that mirrors the way he goes from long novels to short stories.

- Loss is the main theme that this story shares with 1Q84. It’s kind of spooky how similar the language is. In both case he’s using 失われている. It’s a stranger choice of words in 1Q84, and I think Murakami uses it purposefully to stand out. It will be very interesting to see how it gets translated. In “The Twins,” it’s much more natural.

- Also interesting that Murakami uses the Sun and the Moon as his poles of reality in “The Twins.” In 1Q84, there is a very similar metaphor at play, and a change in the poles signifies a drastic change in reality.

- The dream discussion sequence is also classic Murakami – a character desperately trying to use language to explain something that is totally unreal but vital. If you look back through his works, I’m willing to bet that every single one uses storytelling in this way somehow. This is probably why he’s so much stronger in the first person – Murakami, I think, has strong doubts about the ability of language to accurately describe reality, or unreality, but that struggle is interesting, and it’s something that almost all of us have experienced at some point.

- There’s also an interesting music connection that I failed to mention in the review. In 1Q84, Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” comes up, and actually the novel itself is structured in the same way – two volumes of twenty-four. (Someone far smarter than I am will explain what this means. A scary thing to think about is the fact that there are actually 96 pieces of music in “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – both prelude and fugue for each major and minor key. Is Murakami going to write another 1000 pages?) In “The Twins,” boku puts on a piece of lute music by Bach as he cleans his office.

- Reading this story, I got the feeling that the twins weren’t real people. They seem much closer to Murakami’s poor aunt from the story “A Poor-Aunt Story” – a physical representation of an emotional state, one that is different for everyone. Rubin argues that the poor aunt stands for “everything unpleasant that we push out of our minds by subtly suggesting things we ought to know but have managed to suppress” (Rubin 60). (There must be some long German word that has the exact same meaning. Anyone? Bueller?) The twins, then, represent an idealized past, one that is lost and can never be reclaimed. Life with the twins was easy – boku had a pleasant life at home uncomplicated by sex; simply compassion and warmth. The twins with another man look different because to that man the situation that makes him feel the same as boku did is different. The two of them feel the same emotion, but they require different input for them to get to that emotion. The twins are the physical representation of that emotion.

On second thought, they could also represent a point in life where one is finally comfortable being alone (but lonely) in the world, assuming that the twins weren’t real people and that boku was living alone. This may require further more sober contemplation.

とりあえず、以上です。

(Graphic courtesy of Ian Lynam and Neojaponisme.)

The Japan Times has a short profile/interview of How to Japonese/me online today! Apparently they will be publishing it in the actual newspaper on Wednesday.

In the interview, one of the questions they ask is what Japanese books are good to read in order to improve spoken Japanese. Well, Murakami’s great and easy to read, of course, but I realized that manga are probably better than fiction since you are basically reading a script with visual cues.

One of my favorite manga is Naoto Yamakawa‘s 『コーヒーもう一杯』 published by Enterbrain. Yamakawa writes short coffee-themed manga and publishes one story a month in 月刊コミックビーム. The stories get collected into annual volumes which he intersperses with short prose poem type stories, also coffee-themed. He begins his first volume with one of these, explaining the title of the collection:

“One More Cup of Coffee” is the title of a song from Bob Dylan’s 1976 album Desire.
I started listening to Bob Dylan when I was a high school student, always listened to him after that, and listen to him even to this day.
When I first heard him I thought, “What the hell is this?” But as I kept listening, I got into the habit of listening to him and really came to like his music.
To give you an idea of how much I like him, sometimes I get on a train, see his name on a hanging advertisement, and get so surprised I almost lose my shit.
But when I look closer it doesn’t say Bob Dylan; it says things like volunteer (ボランティア) or body line (ボディ・ライン).
Beyond the title, this manga has no connection with Bob Dylan, but there are many pages I drew while listening to Bob Dylan.

The introduction perfectly captures the feel of the collection – coffee, like Bob Dylan’s music, is something that might take time to get used to, but once you start to enjoy it, it’s hard to live without. And because coffee is a daily ritual, it ends up being strongly connected to other experiences: people you went to coffee with, conversations shared over coffee, the intricate ritual of brewing coffee. The collection diagrams coffee as a social experience in modern Japan.

Brewing coffee is the theme of the first story of the collection:

But it’s also a love story. The young man making coffee in the image teaches the other man how to make coffee, which puzzles him since he already taught him how when working as his assistant. Through the flashbacks we realize that the young man Mameta (豆太; Yamakawa often uses 豆 in his names as a joke, since it’s the character for “bean”) had a crush on Aoyama’s girlfriend Motsumi. At the end of the story after the two have coffee, Mameta walks Aoyama to a cigarette vending machine where they buy Hope cigarettes, and Aoyama confesses that he’s split with Motsumi. Mameta returns to his small apartment, brews another batch of coffee and sits down to process everything that happened while enjoying a cup:

Yamakawa’s unique, warm drawing style is perfectly suited to the content. The stories are all sort of sad, strange and even nostalgic, but it’s a nostalgia for the present day – Yamakawa’s portraits of urban Japan are so romantic that they approach simulacra. He loves the coffee shops:

Used bookstores:

Apartments:

And streets of Japanese cities:

The illustrations in this series are a refreshing change from the kind of manga that gets translated and shipped abroad. I’ll take the back alleys of Shinagawa-ku over the bright lights of Shibuya any day of the week. I do frequent Dry Dock, after all, which I think is the closest I’ve come to a コーヒーもう一杯-esque location in the flesh.

I discovered the series while hunting for manga to read on a flight. I was actually looking for SOIL, also published by Enterbrain, but since they didn’t have it, I went for コーヒーもう一杯, and I’m sure glad I did. It’s perfect plane flight or train ride manga: the stories are short and manageable, fun to read, and beautiful to look at. Highly recommended.

Bonus link! Yamakawa has his own blog, through which I discovered that Volume 5 of コーヒーもう一杯 is the final volume. Probably for the best. All of the stories are good, but Volume 1 was by far the strongest.

A small bonus post today to make up for the skimpy post earlier. Kurodahan Press is having a translation contest. The story for translation is titled 「メルクの黄金畑」 by 髙樹のぶ子, and can be found in her collection titled 『fantasia』. It’s only 15,000 characters long and the deadline is in October, which means you have plenty of time. Professional translators usually translate somewhere from 2000 to 5000 characters a day depending on the type of material. Literary translation should probably take a little longer, but still, the finished product will only end up being somewhere around 8000 words or so. The prize isn’t that much money (30,000 yen), but the winner will get published, it’s a great way to promote Japanese literature, and it would be good goal to set if you are an upper-level intermediate student or lower-level advanced student.

Definitely plan on tossing my hat in the ring. I picked up the book of stories last week and have only paged through the contest story, but it looks like a neat little book of travel stories set in Europe. Fun!

Another interesting liveblog-induced post, this time from Matt at No-Sword. He’s got the info on 抽斗. He notes that Soseki used different varieties of the word within the text of his book Michikusa. Sometimes I wonder about 変換 choices even in more recent stuff. Could just be lazy editors?

During my third year of college, my Japanese literature professor invited me to cheer on Haruki Murakami at the Boston Marathon with his departmental literature class, a class I’d taken the year before. The small group of us went in a few cars over to Heartbreak Hill, the brutal rising slope towards the end of the marathon course. We got there and watched the runners pass by, numbers and names written on their arms and shirts, as they trudged, walked and ran through the last few miles of the race. Murakami eventually approached, we cheered, and he ran off with a confused look on his face – it was a great day.

In the car on our way to the race, the professor said something that I’ve kept somewhere in my head for a long time now – six years to be exact. He said, “What we’re doing doesn’t make sense, but we’re not doing it because it makes sense.” This seems like an appropriate time for them to come floating back to me – what I’m about to do doesn’t make sense, but I’m not doing it because it makes sense.

I will be doing it well, though. I’m equipped with a nice Islay single-malt, a choice selection of beer, and a rainy weekend giving me the perfect excuse to sit inside and read. For food, I have some snacks to tide me over, but I’ll go knock off the local McDonald’s for some bread later tonight. Yes we パン!

So sit back, relax, give your whisky a swirl, and check after the break for 1Q84 liveblog madness all weekend (or until my eyeballs fall out).

(more…)

What’s that book he’s got there…

Hmm…

Ohh…

Yes, the street date has been broken for 1Q84. (Do we call it “one kew eight four” or “q-teen eighty four” in English?) I saw a tweet about a possible early release and decided to drop by the closest bookstore after work. Sure enough, there were copies of Book 1 sitting next to the other new hardbacks. They didn’t have Book 2, which is probably fine since I won’t be needing it for another month or so.

Immediate first impressions:

- It was expensive. 1800 yen, or just about $18. Do hardcovers in the US cost $36?

- It’s massive. 554 pages to be exact. I believe Book 2 puts the combined length at over 1000 pages.

- It probably features chapters with alternating stories. I’ve really only read through the index, but this is made clear by some kanji after the chapter numbers. Can’t confirm this because I haven’t read anything yet. Also haven’t looked up the kanji.

- The chapter titles are Pynchon/Fariña-esque. Also similar to Wind-up Bird. They’re more phrase-like than noun-like. At one point they also refer to “readers” (読者), although this could very well be readers within the book and not me and you.

- It takes place between April and June. The months (4月ー6月) are on the cover. I believe Book 2 has a different set of months.

- It looks more dense than his past books. Big blocky paragraphs. Not so much dialogue and short phrasing as in old works.

- It smells like a book.

I read the first sentence already. It’s going to be hard for me to stop myself from reading the rest until Friday, but that’s what I’ll do. After I wake up and have breakfast, I’ll dive right in. See you Friday morning.

I got the day off on Friday, so barring extreme personal injury, the 1Q84 liveblog will start at approximately 7 AM JST.

Murakami had a couple interesting things to say in an interview in the Spring volume of the Japanese magazine monkey business (translations are my own):

When I write a new novel, I say to myself, “This time, I’ll try doing this or this differently,” and establish several specific assignments for myself in terms of techniques, and for Norwegian Wood that [having scenes with three people talking] was one of the assignments. (33)

Afterdark clearly had some new techniques. It will be fun to see what he does this time. He drops a few hints about the “comprehensive novel” (borrowing Rubin’s translation of 総合小説), which he seems to imply is forthcoming and not the soon-to-be released (*fanboy squeal*) 1Q84:

So I’ve given that kind of novel the designation “comprehensive novel” as a kind of temporary name. People have all sorts of concepts for the designation comprehensive novel, so it’s easy to be mistaken, but what I think of as a “comprehensive novel” is basically one that’s long…and heavy. (laughs) And it’s a novel where all sorts of people, from remarkable people to normal people, appear one after the other, and many different perspectives are overlapped organically. Something like that. If you do that, then naturally, you won’t be able to write it in the first person. So when I mentioned earlier that if you look in at the big picture, my fiction has shifted from first-person to third-person, that’s what I was talking about. And in the end, that’s [towards a comprehensive novel] where I want to be heading.

Lots of different stories appear and intertwine into one, and there’s a certain type of sordidness, strangeness, seriousness, a chaos-like condition that can’t be compressed into one, all of that with a world view as a backdrop. When all those conflicting factors pile up into something like a melting pot, that’s the comprehensive novel I think of. And pretty soon I’ll be over 60, so I might not be able to get there as quickly as Dostoyevsky [who wrote The Brothers Karamazov at 59], but I think I’d like to gradually produce my own kind of comprehensive novel.

But it’s really hard work. And now, I’ve been writing a new full-length novel continuously for the last two years – I started writing it right on Christmas two years ago – so for that whole time, I was getting up every day at some time between 2 and 4 in the morning and writing for four or five hours. During that period, I did take time off for vacation, but I think it was only about 10 to 20 days. Sitting there in front of my desk everyday for four to five hours straight, that was pretty tough. (56-57)

Two more days to kill.

I just got this as a comment on the old Blogsome version of this blog. Pretty interesting stuff:

The following is a fragment that has been removed from Wikipedia’s page, but it is worth thinking about and posting somewhere.

The Internet is rife with speculation as to the possible meaning of the title, with various theories including a pun on [[George Orwell]]’s [[Nineteen Eighty-Four]], a belief supported by the Murakami scholar Shojo Fujii, who claims that it is to be understood as “I am Q”, from [[Lu Xun]]’s novella [[The True Story of Ah Q]], to a claim that it has to do with the chromosomal location of [[acetylcholinesterase]] in humans and rat’s, on chromosome 1 (which is inaccurate; chromosomal locations are not designated quite this way.). This reference would suggest that the book has some reference to the [[Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway|Aum Shinrikyo gas attack]], which used [[sarin]] gas, which targets this critical enzyme.

However, the [[Protein Data Bank]] [[X-ray crystallography|protein crystal structure]] identifier for mouse acetylcholinesterase is labeled 1Q84, suggesting that this lattermost interpretation bears some credence. This is further supported by cover images[[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://virtualsushi.livejournal.com/]] Retrieved on May 20, 2009 which bear the dates 1985 (the year of the founding of the [[Aum Shinrikyo]] cult), 1994 (the year of the [[Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway|Aum Shinrikyo gas attack]]), 2002 (whose meaning is unclear, perhaps the date of a survey suggesting that the public still does not trust the [[Aum Shinrikyo|Aleph]] group, and 2009 (perhaps the date of publication?).

Some nice informed speculation there, but I think the bit about the dates is digging too deep. It’s not on the cover, but on the publisher’s site – here. If you click on the date, it takes you to a page promoting the novel Murakami published in that year. Shinchōsha is basically using the new novel to promote their old ones. Here is the page of my predictions for the novel.