I have a piece up on Neojaponisme today about the reception of the English translation of 1Q84 abroad. Murakami has been divisively cool in the U.S. ever since The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was published in 1997 and lauded in The Hipster’s Handbook (which gets it all so so wrong! Hard-boiled Wonderland a dud?!); his popularity was always treated like that of a well-respected indie band: he was critically respected to a great degree, and even if people didn’t “dig,” they understood why he was so popular and maybe even quietly fumed that they couldn’t join the bandwagon. Some probably even invented reasons to dislike him and practiced delivering them in front of their mirrors.

The tides have turned. The great critical organ has been rent divisive. I didn’t follow the response to Kafka on the Shore or afterdark all that closely, but I don’t think it was as divided as the response to 1Q84 has been. I remember being baffled by Updike’s response to Kafka (“Japanese spiritual tact”? WTF, mate?), but a lot of people (other than Jay Rubin) seem honestly to have enjoyed Kafka. I actually liked afterdark. Neither of those novels were as heavily anticipated as 1Q84, though.

One thing we’ve learned is that Murakami has aged like a motherfucker, and I don’t think he has much more to say that isn’t fueled by the books he reads or researches. His first two novels and Norwegian Wood all take his own experience as the seed for the concepts he addresses – coming of age, love, loss, the death of the student movement in Japan. Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, while somewhat researched, still deal with concepts that Murakami seems invested in and able to grasp firmly in his noggin – results of Japan’s economic development, ghosts of the early 20th century push for modernization and results of the war. And Hard-boiled Wonderland deals almost strictly with memory, making it one of his more focused works. (Notice that I didn’t mention Wind-up Bird. Let’s just ignore that one. La la la la la, I can’t hear you…)

1Q84 would make sense if it were a novel about cults or religion, since that is something that Murakami knows a good bit about thanks to Underground, but it isn’t a novel about cults or the cult mindset. It’s something different altogether, and with the text that he gives us, it’s impossible to know what that something is. Good and evil are not black and white? Love conquers all? He’s trying awfully hard to say something, something very serious, but it becomes clear that anytime Murakami introduces a new Concept (and they do feel awfully heavy, which is why I capitalized the C) into his novels, he ends up citing it with some sort of book the protagonist has read. This gets tiresome very quickly and doesn’t feel organic like with his older works.

And as noted in the piece, Murakami’s playful tone is completely absent from this book. All that’s left is unintentional humor like the lesbian sex scene quoted in the post and this give and take between Aomame and the evil (or is he?!) badguy of the book, “Leader”:

“All right, then,” Aomame said. “There is no firm basis. Nothing has been proved. I can’t understand all the details. But still, it seems I have to accept your offer. In keeping with your wishes, I will obliterate you from this world. I will give you a painless, instantaneous death so that Tengo can go on living.”

“This means that you will agree to my bargain, then?”

“Yes. We have a bargain.”

“You will probably die as a result, you know,” the man said. “You will be chased down and punished. And the punishment may be terrible. They are fanatics.”

“I don’t care.”

“Because you have love.”

Aomame nodded.

The man said, “ ‘Without love, it’s a honky-tonk parade.’ Like in the song.”

I’ve been reading through the Japanese version of Dance Dance Dance recently, 2-3 pages a day which I follow with an equivalent amount of the English translation. I’m only about 20% through the novel, and while it does show some of the same weaknesses as 1Q84 (terrible pacing, repetition of weird actions intended to express character traits, lack of direction), Murakami feels in control of the Concepts of the book. He’s able to play with them in a way that’s funny and critical at the same time.

The boku narrator of Dance Dance Dance senses that something is fishy about the newly developed Dolphin Hotel, and one of the employees mentions an investigative report published in a weekly magazine. Boku tracks down the article, which details the real estate gymnastics that had to be performed to get the property and build the new hotel. After going through it with the reader, this is boku’s response:

The reporter had devoted a lot of energy to following the paper trail. Still, despite his outcry—or rather, all the more because of his outcry—the article curiously lacked punch. A rallying cry it wasn’t. The guy just didn’t seem to realize: Nothing about this was suspect. It was a natural state of affairs. Ordinary, the order of the day, common knowledge. Which is why nobody cared. If huge capital interests obtained information illegally and bought up propery, forced a few political decisions, then clinched the deal by having yakuza extort a little shoe store here, maybe beat up the owner of some small-time, end-of-the-line hotel there, so what? That’s life, man. The sand of time keeps running from under our feet. We’re no longer standing where we once stood.

The reporter had done everything he could. The article was well researched, full of righteous indignation, and hopelessly untrendy.

Unfortunately I think the same could be said about the Concepts that Murakami is addressing in 1Q84 – nobody cares (not really), and they are untrendy.

(Art courtesy of Ian Lynam and Neojaponisme.)

I spent about a month preparing material for my liveblog of 1Q84 when it was released in 2009. I had bits of translation from his works, pieces of interviews I’d translated, write-ups about the beer I was drinking, and other fun links. I’ve got none of that this time! As with Murakami Fest 2011, my liveblog of the English translation will be fast and loose…and hopefully not too boring. (On a side note, this past year I’ve noticed that English professors love using that term “fast and loose.”)

Comment away. Check me out on Twitter to see action updates when I leave the computer. I’ll start with the same caveat with which I began my liveblog of the original: What we’re doing doesn’t make sense, but we’re not doing it because it makes sense. Continue after the break for liveblog madness all weekend.

Friday

7:54 Good morning, New Orleans! Good morning, World! I’m breakfasted and my language processing centers are functioning at full capacity. I’m gonna hop in the shower. While you’re waiting, check out the WWOZ morning set, which today is a raucous set of brass band music. Usually it’s a jazzier set that Murakami would approve of.

8:25 Starting to read!

8:28 The first line: “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast.” My rendering of it two years ago: “The taxi radio was playing an FM classical music program.” And the Japanese: タクシーのラジオは、FM放送のクラシック音楽番組を流していた。

8:36 Rubin makes a nice addition on page 4 to clear up the pronunciation of Aomame’s name:

“Aomame” was her real name. Her grandfather on her father’s side came from some little mountain town or village in Fukushima Prefecture, where there were supposedly a number of people who bore the name, written with exactly the same characters as the word for “green peas” and pronounced with the same four syllables, “Ah-oh-mah-meh.”

And the Japanese:

青豆というのは彼女の本名である。父方の祖父は福島県の出身で、その山の中の小さな町だか村だかには、青豆という姓をもった人々が実際に何人かいるということだった。

I’ve bolded the addition above. Without that added information, it would be impossible for English readers to have the same concept of the character (even though “green peas” doesn’t really have anything to do with the character at all…I don’t think…). Footnotes would be unwieldy. I wonder how necessary the pronunciation information is. Although, judging by a nonfiction workshop class where I submitted a piece with a few Japanese words, regular Americans (even educated ones) can’t pronounce Japanese at all.

8:47 Continuing with the bean-isms, here’s a great example of a translator smoothing out something into English:

ときどき間違えて「枝豆さん」と呼ぶ人もいた。「空豆さん」といわれることもある。

This is literally something like:

Sometimes people mistakenly called her “Edamame-san.” At times she was also called “Soramame-san.”

Rubin combines these and the next sentence into a single sentence in the translation:

Some people would get the name of the plant wrong and call her “Edamame” or “Soramame,” whereopon she would gently correct them: “No, I’m not soybeans or fava beans, just green peas.”

The translation gets around the choppy nature of the original sentences. I wonder if someone reading the Japanese would find it to flow in the way the English does.

9:01 Awesome translation of ふと思う on page 7: “Aomame found herself thinking of…” What a great way to put it.

9:17 Page 11: OK, good. Aomame’s face is just as weird in English as it was in Japanese…I wasn’t just misreading stuff. Such a strange passage about her contorting her face.

9:24 Done with Chapter 1! In Japanese the first chapter took me 2.5 hours while liveblogging. In English, just one hour. This is how things are supposed to be.

Chapter 1 felt heavy handed, especially the ominous remarks from the taxi driver. Blah.

9:37 And the first line of Chapter 2: “Tengo’s first memory dated from the time he was one and a half.” My rendering from the liveblog: “Tengo’s first memory was from when he was one and a half.” And the Japanese: 天吾の最初の記憶は一歳半のときのものだ。

ASPIRING STUDENTS OF THE LANGUAGE SHOULD NOTE: The translation is rendered in past tense even though the Japanese is in the “present” tense. In the words of my first year text book Japanese: The Spoken Language: “Finished versus unfinished is the significant contrast in Japanese, whereas English speakers tend to think in terms of three time distinctions: past, present, and future.” This is something I’m still wrapping my brain around.

9:49 Sidenote: 1Q84, the book, smells really nice.

9:53 Tengo’s sweats during his “attacks” are reminiscent of the character in the short story “Baseball Field” (野球場) from the collection Dead-Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. Come to think of it, the characters themselves might even be a little similar. This will require further research.

10:03 Long section added or reordered on page 16 to get an earlier explanation of Fuka-Eri’s name, very similar to the Aomame section but longer and in conversation between Tengo and Komatsu.

10:06 Page 17. Komatsu: “I never read these new writer prize submissions from beginning to end. I even reread some parts of this one. Let’s just say the planets were in perfect alignment.”

Nice use of italics in translation, and Murakami is setting up his intergalactic planetary theme early. Not sure I noticed that in Japanese.

10:09 Whoa! Just noticed that Shimbashi Station makes an appearance in that Beastie Boys video I just linked. Check out 00:58 and you can see the mural thingie on the wall above the stairway that heads down to the Yokosuka Line tracks/Ginza Line transfer exit.

10:11 “Komatsu set his cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed the side of his nose with the middle finger of his right hand.”

I’ve known a few foreigners who have mistaken this for an impolite gesture, but there’s no concept of shooting the bird in Japan. This should be proof of that; Komatsu is not flicking off Tengo because he’s a tool.

10:16 Jay Rubin droppin’ slang on page 17: “The members of the selection committee would faint–or more likely have a shit fit.” In Japanese: 選考委員の先生方はひっくり返っちゃうぜ。怒り出すかもしれない。

10:20 Great example of DON’T LISTEN TO THE 外来語: Rubin translates 「俺はこの作品については、ちょっとした別のアイディアを持っているんだ」 as “I’ve got something else in mind for this story.”

10:27 Page 18: “First of all, look at this style. No amount of work is going to make it any better. It’s never going to happen. And the reason it’s never going to happen is that the writer herself doesn’t give a damn about style: she shows absolutely no intention of wanting to write well, of wanting to improve her writing.”

No comment.

10:32 I’m really curious to know whether Komatsu as a character is based on Murakami’s own interactions with editors. He must be – I’m sure Murakami naturally incorporates aspects of known individuals into his characters, but I wonder whether Komatsu is based on someone specific.

10:52 Rubin adds one small line “Every writer’s dream!” on page 23 to give a little bit more explanation for the Akutagawa Prize. Fits in pretty nicely.

10:55 Ha: 図体はでかいが、 “You may be built like a lumberjack, but…”

11:01 Page 26 – this is where Murakami introduces Fuka-Eri’s real name in the Japanese version. So the translation was adjusted to have it make more sense in the English.

11:04 Done with Chapter 2. Same thoughts as with the Japanese version – Chapter 2 moves far more quickly than Chapter 1. Why are Aomame’s chapters so slow?!

11:05 Just realized the American version of the translation doesn’t have a chapter index at the beginning. Annoying. This was also true for the Wind-up Bird translation. This is why I picked up a UK version of the paperback in Thailand back in 2004. It wasn’t especially cheap, but the index made it worth it.

11:12 Sinfonietta combined with a lesbian sex scene feels like it can only be one of two things: either incredibly serious or a total joke. Not sure this one works in Murakami’s favor.

11:17 Longest emergency stairwell ever.

11:28 Overly complicated assassination scene? Check.

11:41 Done with Chapter 3. My big problem with this chapter, and so much of Aomame’s storyline (and Murakami’s works really), is that they make use of surprise rather than suspense. I hadn’t considered this before hearing about Hitchcock’s definition of the two on NPR the other day. Here’s how he defines them:

Four men is [sic] sitting at a table playing poker. The scene is rather boring. Suddenly, after 15 minutes, we hear a big bang – it turnes out there was a bomb under the table. This is called surprise as it isn’t what we expected would happen.
If we watch the same scene again with the important difference that we have seen the bomb being placed under the table and the timer set to 11 AM, and we can see a watch in the background, the same scene becomes very intense and almost unbearable – we are sitting there hoping the timer will fail, the game is interrupted or the hero leaves the table in time, before the blast. This is called suspense.

Aomame being an assassin is surprising and tense at times, but not the most delicately crafted suspense ever written.

11:54 Lunchtime and Chapter 4. When I return: Beer.

12:39 Gulp.

Lunch was ate. Onward.

12:56 Done with Chapter 5. We’ve met Fuka-Eri and her pneumatic breasts. We’ve learned about Tengo’s love of math and older women. We’re moving right along.

13:04 Thanks for the comments so far. There is (rightfully) some concern about spoilers, so I’ll just take this moment to note that I will be spoiling. Now, shhh…Aomame’s about to bed a bald guy.

13:35 Done with Chapter 5. It took me all of Friday to finish the first five chapters in Japanese, so I’m doing well. English is clearly my native language. Chapter 5 is seriously weak. Aomame sleeps with a bald guy, so we learn about her sexual tastes, and her furor when trying to get them satisfied. Her approach at the bar felt forced, as did the conversation about the change in police uniforms and guns. Ugg.

13:42 Well, maybe a beer will improve things. It might not make the book any better, but maybe I won’t notice as much. A spoon full of sugar, as it were…

This one was predictable. The book begins with Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta and Aomame imagining the winds blowing across the plains of Bohemia, so of course I picked up a six-pack of Pilsner Urquell, the original Czech pilsner. This is one of the great beers in the world. Supposedly the flavor of the beer has changed slightly since 1992 when the brewery replaced its massive oak fermentors with steel fermentors. Still tastes pretty damn good to me. Get you some.

14:30 Bullying (in Japanese いじめ) becomes a topic on page 71. Interesting because Japanese bullying is so different from my (American?) conception; whereas in the U.S. I think of stealing lunch money and being physically abusive, in Japan it’s much more a psychological game: “hiding things, not speaking to the child, or doing nasty imitations of her.”

I’ve occasionally wondered if bullying wasn’t a subtle topic in Norwegian Wood. Watanabe makes fun of his roommate Kamikaze, the stuttering, right-wing geography student, and often uses him as a way to get laughs with other characters in the book – notably Naoko on their walks across the city. Not exactly bullying, but not the sweetest way to charm a girlfriend either.

14:36 Here’s another example of a particularly 1Q84-y weakness of Murakami’s. Tengo is talking on the phone with his girlfriend about bullying, and then we have this passage:

This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

So Tengo knows what he’s thinking about. The narrator knows what he’s thinking about, maybe. But the reader doesn’t. This frustrated me a little. Why not just give the event, even just a vague summary of it?

14:51 On to Chapter 7.

15:28 Gotta give Murakami one thing: He’s great at creating atmosphere. The translation in Chapter 7 of the butterfly-filled hothouse at the Willow House is pretty nice, and I think I have a better sense of it through the translation. Another thing I’ve realized is that Murakami might be more on the fence about Aomame’s profession than I initially thought. The way the old dowager comes across in English feels, to me, much less certain than what I could tell from the Japanese.

15:42 Done with Chapter 7. The biggest weakness of the novel rears its ugly head in this chapter. Aomame is discovering that she’s in a different version of reality – some things (specifically police officer uniforms and weapons) are not normal. She constantly tries to insinuate questions to get answers rather than straight up asking someone if the world has changed. For example, she asks Tamaru about when police weapons changed, and when he surprises her with an answer, we get this passage:

Aomame nodded without changing her expression. She had absolutely no recollection of such an event [massive gun fight between radical group and police], but all she could do now was play along with him.

Why does she have to play along? Why can’t she just ask him? The stakes are never explained. I feel like Murakami does this a lot – he assumes that characters’ actions are limited when they might not be – in his longer fiction, but here it feels especially egregious.

I’m going to continue reading but will head off to Avenue Pub soon for the New Orleans release of beers from Stillwater Artisan Ales. Follow me on my field trip on Twitter. I’ll be back later tonight (and tomorrow…and Sunday…) with more thoughts.

23:08 Back! Finished Chapter 8 but didn’t get a chance to read much more. I had a fun encounter with a taxi driver and his loud music on the way home, but he wasn’t listening to classical music - he was blasting classic R&B and recommended I check out Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait,” which I plan to do as soon as I can. Until then, Chapter 9…

23:32 One note about Chapter 8. There’s a tiny section on page 99 that seems taken from Air Chrysalis, the book that Fuka-Eri wrote. The section just floats in the middle of the chapter almost meaninglessly. It’s almost as though someone copy and pasted it there by accident. I remember being confused by the Japanese as well.

23:43 Rubin has been translating Aomame’s trademark 顔を歪める as “scowl.”

23:47 As the newest New York Times review puts it, “You can’t swing a cat in his novels…without banging into an analogy.” And they’re starting to get a little tiresome.

Saturday

00:02 One thing the translation has made clear is that Murakami really isn’t comfortable in third person. Huge portions of the novel are rendered in the first person thoughts of Aomame and Tengo, and in the English translation these are marked in italics, which makes them stand out more than they do in the Japanese original.

00:12 Awesome translation of the section in Chapter 9 where Aomame names the alternate universe. My translation two years ago was:  “1Q84 – that’s what I’ll call this new world, decided Aomame. Q is the Q from ‘question mark.’ That which creates a question.”

The original Japanese is 1Q84—私はこの新しい世界をそのように呼ぶことにしよう、青豆はそう決めた。Qはquestion markのQだ。疑問を背負ったもの。

And Rubin’s great version is: “1Q84–that’s what I’ll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for “question mark.” A world that bears a question.”

00:24 It’s hard to take this book seriously when there are lines like this on page 111: “Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”

00:51 There have been a number of “stocking feet” usages. A couple in Aomame’s section, which make sense (because she was wearing stockings), but one just now in Chapter 10. Tengo and Fuka-Eri are out on the far western edge of Tokyo to visit her home. When they enter, we get this sentence: “The glossy wooden floor of the corridor felt cool against stocking feet as they walked down it to the large reception room.” The Japanese is 磨き上げられたひやりとした廊下を歩いて応接室に入った。”Stocking feet” feels just a little off to me.

1:01 OK, even though there’s only a single entendre when I say the characters aren’t making sense now, it still means it’s definitely time to go to bed. I’ll be up in 7 hours or so for more reading and commentary. Alright translation!

7:37 Morning! I’m reading.

7:40 Ebisuno-sensei, which is being translated as “Professor Ebisuno,” enters on page 115, and when he does, there is this sentence: “His back was as straight as if it had a steel rod in it, and he kept his chin pulled in smartly.” The chin line threw me a little, but as a translation it seems totally fine: The original is 顎がぐいと後ろに引かれている。 Perhaps a little over-specific as description. I had a hard time imagining it. I also wondered what it meant, but when I searched the Web for “chin pulled in,” I found this site about “face body language.” Apparently a pulled in chin means someone is afraid?

This jives with an earlier passage where Aomame enters the Willow House in Chapter 7: “Knowing that the security cameras were on her, she walked straight down the path, her back as erect as a fashion model’s, chin pulled back.”

7:56 In Chapter 10 there’s an instance of 惹かれる, one of the words I mentioned in my Neojaponisme review of the book. This isn’t the first instance, but this is the first one I’ve remembered to check against the translation. The Japanese is 『空気さなぎ』という作品に強く心を惹かれているからです。 In English, “And my only reason [for agreeing to revise Fuka-Eri's writing] is that I’m so strongly drawn to Air Chrysalis.”

8:47 I finished Chapter 10, which was the hugely long back story of Sakigake and Akebono, two leftist radical groups. I think I’m going to do something perhaps ill-advised. I’m going to jump forward to Book 3. Reading all weekend would be the equivalent of academic suicide for me right now, so I’m just going to read today, I think, and I want to be able to check out Phillip Gabriel’s translation as well. Let’s see how this goes. I may backtrack later.

9:07 Book 3, Chapter 1 is the first point with Ushikawa as the point of view. I didn’t really notice anything major about the translation. It all reads really smoothly, and as is apparent from this great interview in The Atlantic with Phillip Gabriel, a lot of work went into making sure the two sections fit well together.

On a side note, it’s refreshing to note that even professors of Japanese literature who translate famous novels still have to write the pronunciation of words in the margins. The interview has a scan of one of the pages of Book 3, and Gabriel’s notes can be seen. He’s written “dasei – inertia, momentum” above the character 惰性的. Then it looks like he writes some notes about possible translations, notably “force of habit,” which plays on the idea of inertia.

Ha. I just opened up my copy of Book 3 to page 321 and I have だせい inertia written in the margin. The sentence comes from Chapter 16, and it reads しかしそこには天吾の姿も、深田絵里子の姿もなかった。背を丸めた人々が、新しい一日の中に惰性的に足を踏み出して行く光景が見えるだけだ。 Let’s see what Gabriel did with the translation. I just found it on page 770 after the space break. Ushikawa is in an apartment building watching people enter and exit: “Tengo and Fuka-Eri, though, were not among them. Instead it was more hunched-over people, carried by force of habit into the new day.” Very cool.

10:49 Finished through Chapter 3 of Book 3. Fast forwarding has messed with my brain a little bit. I had to flip through some other sections of the book to reacquaint myself with it, and in doing so I made the terrible discovery that the マザ/ドウタ nonsense has been translated as maza and dohta…which I guess makes sense? Blah. I thought it was mother and daughter, just rendered into katakana as receiver/perceiver were. Who knows. I won’t get the full sense of this until I go back and finish reading Books 1 and 2, but suffice it to say any attempt to explain/building a universe around these comes way too late.

And in the beginning of Book 3, nothing is happening. Still looking for translation bits to point out, but first, a nap.

12:17 In Book 3 Chapter 4 Ushikawa starts investigating the dowager’s house, and a real estate agent compares it to kakekomidera. Gabriel adds a bit of explanation here: “I don’t know much about it now, but it seems to be used for battered women, kind of like those kakekomidera, temples in the old days that sheltered wives running away from abusive husbands.” The bolded section was added.

On a side note, I think this is the first place in the novel where we get the dowager’s name – Ogata. This is page 631, by the way.

12:49 Frustrating Chapter 4 – all that happens is Ushikawa researches the dowager and learns a bunch of information the reader already knows: the dowager’s daughter probably committed suicide because she was being abused, the dowager then turned her apartment into a safe house for abuse victims, and she hired Aomame to do something (kill people). Pace = so slow. We have to watch all the gears turn in Ushikawa’s head before we can move on.

13:35 Chapter 5 – the appearance of the angry NHK collection man. I think we’re supposed to assume that this is the spirit of Tengo’s father reaching out from his comatose state to try and ruin everything in Tengo’s life. Thanks, dad. I’m curious to see how well Murakami makes the connection, but my initial thoughts from the Japanese version were that it wasn’t done well. In Book 1 Chapter 9, too, there’s a kind of red herring about an NHK collection man who stabs someone with a knife while on the job – Aomame discovers this while researching at the ward library. But it happens in 1981, and the collection man is far younger than Tengo’s father, so it’s difficult to tell what the purpose of the incident is. Murakami does make it clear that the crazed NHK man is something new to the 1Q84 world – it hadn’t happened in plain old 1984.

14:24 Chapter 6 – Tengo still reading to his father. There’s a long passage excerpted from Out of Africa, which seems to be just a throwaway reference. Tengo goes out for yakiniku with the nurses. For whatever reason, I felt like this scene happened earlier in the novel. Not sure why. Macbeth also gets a shout out at the end of this chapter, the three nurses compared to the ominous witches.

Ugg. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of bad fiction… I’m taking a break to check out the New Orleans Book Fair. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to knock out another chapter or two and then wrap up everything so I can get some work done this evening and tomorrow.

16:56 Reading again. At the bookfair I ran into a classmate who is also reading 1Q84, and he seemed a little disappointed with the book so far. He’s read Book 1. We laughed at the taxi driver from Chapter 1. Aghh. I’m so depressed. Opening an Urquell.

17:37 Book 3 Chapter 7 is another research chapter. Ushikawa is researching Aomame, and the payoff is that he realizes they went to the same elementary school. This will not end well for Ushikawa, trust me. I really feel like out of all of Murakami’s characters, Ushikawa really got the short end of the stick. He’s a miserable bastard from start to his unpleasant finish.

19:13 Woops. Fell asleep on the couch. Just ate dinner and am about to finish Chapter 8 and call it a weekend. We’re with Aomame in her safe house apartment and the NHK man is back. After knocking for a while and reading her thoughts, Aomame does this: “Aomame grimaced.” This is slightly different from the “scowl” that Rubin used at times, but I wasn’t paying complete attention. The Japanese is: 青豆は思わず大きく顔をしかめる。

This is almost identical to the phrasing Murakami used earlier in the novel, and Gabriel seems to have said “Screw you, Murakami, we’re going simple in English.” A closer translation might be the “scowled hugely” as Rubin termed it at one point and possibly even “without thinking” or “unconsciously” on the front of that. “Aomame unconsciously scowled hugely.”

19:19 Again note the “present” tense of the verb “grimace” above. Because the action isn’t “finished” there is no use of the perfective tense. I think this is right…

19:34 Done with Book 3 Chapter 9. Aomame drops the bomb on Tamaru that she wants a pregnancy test. This is another example of Murakami’s reliance on surprise. Despite the fact that the chapter is in her POV, we get no thoughts about the fact that she might be pregnant until she asks him for the test. The dreams earlier in the chapter might constitute some foreshadowing, but not much.

This concludes the liveblog!

Although my criticisms of the novel may seem jovial in nature, this has not been a pleasant process for me. I really did have big expectations for this book, and I was disappointed by the original two years ago. The translation has only thrown the weaknesses into starker contrast for me. Much of the novel feels like an unedited first draft: it’s rife with repetition, there is no logic (not that Murakami ever needed it before, but there isn’t even internal logic here), and Murakami relies on overly complicated and concocted devices to drive the plot (which slows the novel down). Murakami has been accused of these in the past, basically ever since Dance Dance Dance. Part of the process of being a Murakami fan is, I believe, coming to terms with his many weaknesses. Well, I can see them now. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think about him in the same light again. I’m going to have to find some of his older short fiction to read so I can forget about 1Q84.

I’m reminded of a line from “The Twins and the Sunken Continent”: “When something is lost, the only certainty we have is not when we lost it, but when we realized we lost it.” I’m not sure when Murakami lost his magic but 1Q84 is the point where I realized he lost it.

I’ll be the first sounding the horn when he puts out something new. I just hope that it’s much shorter and much much stronger.

Podcast Contents:
1. Intro (0.00)
2. 景気を付けて (1.11)
3. Plugging the liveblog (5.37)

How to Japanese – Ep1 景気を付けて by howtojapanese

And yes, I will be liveblogging my reading of the English translation of 1Q84 this weekend. I liveblogged my reading of the original Japanese novel (at least the first few hundred pages of the first book) when it came out in 2009, and it was a lot of fun. I may not be the first to read the translation, and I definitely won’t be the last to read it, but I sure as hell will be the best to read it.

The little shamisen/violin thingie I stole for the section break sound in the podcast comes from Estradasphere‘s song “Those Who Know…” which refers to the most excellent Japanese saying 知る人ぞ知る – those who know know…motherfucker. I’m on the lookout for some sort of sound that will evoke Japan and be usable under Creative Commons licensing or whatnot. Any ideas? Anyone willing to lend some catchy shamisen or shakuhachi notes? Bueller? Tanaka?

Tomorrow is the announcement! Murakami started at 16/1 moved to 8/1 and now is in second place at 6/1 behind Bob Dylan. (If Bob wins, I hope Sgt. Tanuki writes something epic about it.) This year Murakami’s chances are as good as they’ve ever been.

For this year’s final entry, I figured I’d go simple. I began my liveblog of 1Q84 with the very first sentence of the novel, so this week I’ll translate the very last sentence of Book 3. Translating any more than that will spoiler.

Here it is:

Until, in the light of a new sun that had just risen, [the moon] quickly lost the intense shine it had at night and turned into just a gray cutout hanging in the sky.

As you can see, he ends with the same metaphor that begins Book 1 in an epigraph – “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” I don’t really have much to say about this other than that it again mirrors the ending of “The Twins and the Sunken Continent.” There, too, he uses a new foreign environment (a sea bed) as a metaphor for how life will proceed. In 1Q84, the new world will be different; its moon may lack the shine from the night, but the passage still feels hopeful. Not completely negative at least. And that’s about all I can add without saying too much about the plot.

In terms of the translation, the definite/indefinite article before “new sun” forces a translator to make interesting decisions. The Japanese is: それが昇ったばかりの新しい太陽に照らされて、夜の深い輝きを急速に失い、空にかかったただの灰色の切り抜きに変わってすまうまで。 I went with “a” to imply that it’s a brand new day. Using “the” would feel more like rebirth of an old sun, which is also a nice image. I’ll be very curious to see how Phillip Gabriel renders this line. I wonder if he’ll leave it as a fragment or connect it with the previous sentence. If I have the energy/effort/time, I’ll try to go back through these posts and compare my versions with the official translation. Should be fun.

Hooray for Murakami Fest! I’m running out of ideas for Murakami translation themes, so you’ll have to give me your thoughts about what I should do next year. I have a couple of things I’ve been working on, but nothing set in stone yet. I’m pretty happy with the way this year turned out, even though it was all off the cuff.

As promised, this week I want to take a look at Book 3. One of the interesting/strange things that Murakami does with Book 3 is to add an additional narrative perspective – the book suddenly starts with a chapter from the point of view of Ushikawa, a creepy messenger/errand boy for the cult in the novel.

The name Ushikawa might be familiar. I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner (as in, when I was writing one of my two reviews of the novel), but Ushikawa was also a character in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. He sneaks into Toru Okada’s house in Chapter 13 of Book 3, he makes another house call in 16, and in 19 they talk on the phone.

And that’s the last we see of him for the entire novel.

He’s nothing more than a device that Murakami uses to advance the plot: he delivers a threatening message from Noboru Wataya – cut ties with “the Hanging House,” the residence where Cinnamon and Nutmeg are set up – which gradually becomes less and less threatening until eventually he just helps Toru get in touch with Kumiko via computer and disappears. We get long blocks of dialog that show what a poor bastard he is, but as best I can tell, he doesn’t really serve any other purpose in the novel.

He’s described similarly in both novels – disheveled, bald, an uncanny ability to track down information, clearly a lackey for someone powerful – but he doesn’t appear to be the exact same character. Just the same trope.

In 1Q84, too, Ushikawa is one sad bastard. In Book 2, he’s again used mostly as a plot device, but because he’s the narrative point of view in Book 3, we get extended information about how sad his life is in Book 3, so much so that I even started to feel bad for him – of all Murakami’s characters, he seems to get a raw deal.

And Murakami seems to revel in making him more and more miserable. I noted one passage in particular on 202. Ushikawa is riding around Tokyo on trains, hunting down information about Tengo and Aomame, and as he does, he’s thinking through the different possible connections in his head (connections that we as readers have known for hundreds of pages). Here’s the part just before a space break:

Ushikawa thought about this the entire time he was on the train from Ichikawa to Tsudanuma. He grimaced and sighed and stared off into space, probably without even realizing it. The primary school student sitting across from him was watching him with a strange look on her face. Out of embarrassment he smiled and rubbed the top of his lopsided bald head with his palm. However, that just seemed to scare the girl. She stood up all of the sudden right before Nishifunabashi Station and quickly ran off somewhere.

I felt like this was a bit overkill. We know he’s ugly. We know he’s a sad bastard. Does he really have to frighten primary school kids? Oh well. I guess that’s Ushikawa for ya.

One little language nugget of note: “lopsided” is いびつ in Japanese, and it appears over and over again in the novel. It’s one of those words that Murakami fixates on and uses a lot like 胡散臭い, 具わっている, and 惹かれる. He uses it a lot to describe the new moon that appears in the 1Q84 alternate reality: the new moon is smaller and more lopsided. I probably would have used a word like warped or irregular, but a teaser from Knopf shows that Rubin went with lopsided, which is a far superior choice. So I borrowed that for this week’s translation.

More of 1Q84 Book 2 this week. I’m not quite sure why I’m stuck in Book 2. I promise to check out Book 3 next week.

The big Murakami news of late was that a school in New Jersey decided to ban Norwegian Wood because it has naughty bits. The naughty bits were distorted by parents playing the telephone game: lesbian sex became lesbian statutory rape. This is ironic because it’s exactly what happens in the book – a thirteen-year-old girl tricks the neighbors into believing that Reiko abused her when it was actually the girl who took advantage of thirty-one-year-old Reiko. Reiko snaps from the pressure, divorces her husband, and ends up in the mental hospital with Naoko.

So this week, rather than picking a random section based on the notes I took above the pages, I sought out the naughty bits of 1Q84. The bits I found aren’t the naughtiest, I don’t think, but they do a nice job of obfuscating other important plot details, so there will be no spoiler. Book 2, page 242:

Aomame said, “You’ve raped countless young girls. Girls who were barely ten years old.”

“You’re right,” the man said. “By conventional wisdom, that’s how it would be taken. Judging by the laws of the world, I am a sinner. I had physical relations with girls who hadn’t yet reached maturity. Even though it wasn’t what I wanted.”

Aomame just sighed deeply. She didn’t know how to suppress the intense convection of emotions running through her body. Her face distorted, and her right and left hand seemed to be demanding something different entirely.

Yes, dude. Baby raping. Rereading this section reminded me exactly how weird and tedious this book can get at times. This section is getting toward the final quarter of the book. We’re seeing the encounter we’ve been waiting 750 pages to see. And now there’s a long-ass discussion of morality to draw the whole thing out and ruin any sense of movement. If you were wondering why baby raping comes into discussion at all, it seems to be an example of how there is no absolute good or evil in the world – it’s constantly shifting, and things that were good can soon become evil and vice versa. This happens to be exactly what Dostoevsky was trying to portray in The Brothers Karamazov, apparently. Conveniently, both of the characters in this scene have read the book, so they can discuss it at length.

Not that any of this will matter to some people. They’ll just hear the baby raping part and put on their lynching shoes. I’m not sure I have the interpretive abilities to stop them. I’m very curious to read the translation and see the reaction to this part of the novel.

On a side note, Aomame is constantly scrunching up her face. In this case, the Japanese is 彼女の顔が歪められ, the first clause in that last sentence. Her face is described pretty horrifically in the beginning of the book. I’m interested to see how Rubin handles this in English. I can’t say anything about her hands because that would spoiler, but I promise the last clause makes sense in the original.

We’re looking at Book 2 again on page 336, and this time the note to myself is “world is a big model room – nice.” Let’s check it out:

Aomame slowly looked around the inside of the room again. This is like a model room, she thought. It was clean, had a sense of uniformity, and all the necessary items had been arranged. However, it was cold and lacked any individuality – it was just an imitation. Dying in a place like this probably wouldn’t be a very pleasant way to die. But even with a nicer backdrop, was there really such thing as a pleasant way to die? As she considered this, Aomame realized that the world in which we live is itself something like a giant model room in the end. We come in, take a seat, have some tea, watch the scenery outside the window, and when the time comes we say our thanks and leave. All of the furniture inside is nothing more than makeshift knock-offs. Even the moon shining through the window could be an imitation made of paper.

I can’t remember who I had this conversation with – possibly a translator friend – but I remember talking with someone about Murakami, and that person remarked that the strongest part of Murakami’s writing is his metaphors. He can write damn good metaphors. This one appealed to me when I first read it, and I still think it’s pretty good. It has that ever-present Murakami theme that reality isn’t much more than a place where we eat, live, shit, and fuck before we die. やれやれ.

The passage also refers to the “It’s Only a Paper Moon” epigraph. I can’t remember if he refers to it this specifically anywhere earlier in the novel, but the moon is important throughout the book.

One interesting language note: Murakami mentions that he wrote the book entirely in third person – his first one – but he still has lines like this: もし私がこんなところで死ぬことになるとしたら、それはあまり心愉しい死に方とは言えないだろう. (Which I rendered above as “Dying in a place like this probably wouldn’t be a very pleasant way to die.”) I’m not certain, but I feel like Murakami uses the 私 to show that this is being filtered through Aomame’s consciousness, so I guess it equates to something like free indirect speech in English? It’s first person kind of, but it’s actually third person. The goal is to make it feel like that initial “she thought” (彼女は思った) covers the entire paragraph, which is why I translated it as Aomame might think it to herself in English rather than using the “If I” that you might normally use. Anyone have thoughts on this?

I was also curious about tense. It jumps to present in the “As she considered this” sentence. Does that seem to work?

One last note – papier-mâché is はりぼて in Japanese. The Google Images search makes this pretty clear. The word gets used twice in the passage above. The first usage is just はりぼて, but the second is 紙で作られたはりぼて, which would seem redundant unless there’s another meaning for the word, and Yahoo Dictionary notes the other meaning is metaphorical, so I went with “imitation.”

Okay, let me set the scene: I’m listening to Zoot Sims, I’ve had a beer (and hell I’ll have another – it’s Murakami Fest and I don’t have class tomorrow), the cats have been fed, and now it’s time to translate a nugget of 1Q84.

Today’s nugget comes courtesy of Book 2 page 125, above which I wrote the note “random phone calls → WUBC & Yoru no kumozaru.” Let’s see what the page has to say – we’re in Chapter 6, so we’re following Tengo, whom you should be familiar with from “Town of Cats”:

The telephone rang just after nine on Tuesday night. Tengo was reading a book while listening to music – his favorite time of the day. He read as much as he wanted before he went to sleep, and when he got tired, he fell asleep right where he was.

It was the first telephone ring he had heard in a while, and it seemed to have a sort of ominous echo. It wasn’t a call from Komatsu. Phone calls from Komatsu had a different sort of ring. For a moment, Tengo wasn’t sure whether he should pick up the phone or not. He let it ring five times. Then he lifted the needle on the record player and picked up the phone. It might have been his girlfriend calling.

“Is this the residence of Tengo Kawana?” a man said. The voice was that of a middle-aged man, deep and soft. It was an unfamiliar voice.

“This is he,” Tengo said cautiously.

“I’m sorry for calling so late at night. My name is Yasuda,” the man said. His voice was very neutral. Neither friendly nor hostile. Neither businesslike nor intimate.

Yasuda? Tengo couldn’t remember anyone by the name of Yasuda.

“I’ve called because there’s something I need to tell you,” the person said. And then he paused for a brief moment, like he was inserting a bookmark into the pages of a book.

And that’s all you get. Otherwise I would spoiler, and spoiler is no fun.

This passage illustrates Murakami’s near obsession with phone calls as well as 1Q84’s unfortunate reliance on phone calls to drive the plot. As noted in my note above, Murakami began his magnum opus Wind-up Bird Chronicle (WUBC) with a random phone call (which also happened on a Tuesday!), and he used it in a number of stories in Yoru no kumozaru, a collection of short-shorts, notably “Eel,” which features May Kasahara, another character from Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Something about that ability of the telephone to connect people in two completely different places seems to fascinate Murakami, and he uses it often to show how individuals often occupy two entirely different “worlds,” whether they realize it or not. Magically, the telephone can connect these worlds and bring people together, enabling them to communicate in ways they could not before.

Now that I think about it, Norwegian Wood ends with a telephone call between Toru and Midori. I’ve always thought that Rubin’s translation of that final line was interesting. He creatively invokes death:

Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.

Whereas Birnbaum does not:

I held onto the line to Midori from there in the middle of nowhere.

The Japanese is:

僕はどこでもない場所のまん中から緑を呼びつづけていた。

Birnbaum’s translation feels a little awkward. I still haven’t read his translation all the way through, but there were a number of places that made me wonder if the final text had been edited by a non-native speaker.

Okay, I’m rambling now, but you get the idea – phones are powerful symbols in Murakami’s fiction, and 1Q84 continues this trend.

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 Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement.

For those of you who don’t know how this works, check out the past three years:
Year One: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year Two: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year Three: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly

I thought I’d start with something recent. Murakami serialized another set of essays in AnAn over the past year, and the collected edition, Murakami Radio 2, came out in July. In the introduction to the collection, Murakami continues his recent obsession with the drawer metaphor for writing:

Novelists need lots of drawers inside their heads when they write novels. Little episodes, specific knowledge, vague memories, a personal worldview (or something along those lines) – all these come in handy quite often when writing novels. But if I go and dump all of that material into essays, I’m not able to use it in novels very well. So I’m stingy (as it were) and secret it away into drawers. However, when I finish a novel, there are always a couple drawers I didn’t end up using, and some of those can sometimes make good material for essays.

Drawer is 抽斗, which Murakami mentioned in his interview with Monkey Business before the publication of 1Q84. I noticed it a couple of times in 1Q84, and Matt over at No-Sword examined the origins of the character.

He goes on to compare the collection of essays to “oolong tea made by beer companies” – it’s not his main business, so he’s able to relax a bit (肩の力を抜いて) and write off the cuff.

This is quickly apparent, as the essays are all really short, have no connecting theme, and often start quite lightly with questions for the first sentence: Do you like to drive? Hello, runners – how are you doing? Are you the kind of person that angers quickly? Did you know there are some socks where the left and right are shaped differently? Do you read Dazai Osamu? Have you been to Ireland? Do you know about seal oil?

It’s really a shame that he doesn’t publish this material online – they feel much more like blog posts than essays (as he calls them), and he does have a history of publishing material online. Also, then it would have been free and not 1700 yen.

Speaking of writing off the cuff, for free, and on the Internet – that’s what I do! I’ve been busy with the start of classes and unable to prep my translations this year, so starting next week, I’ll be posting short translations that I pick randomly from 1Q84, an excerpt of which was just published in The New Yorker as the short story “Town of Cats” (arguably the best section of the book). I took notes, so hopefully I’ll be able to find some interesting passages. And if they suck, just remember it was all free.

I have an article in The Japan Times today, this time about the passive tense in Japanese. After introducing a couple of phrases that helped me understand how the passive tense works in Japanese, I discuss Murakami’s amazing sentence from his Mediterranean travel diary, which I examined during Murakami-palooza 2008. My translations then and now are slightly different. What do you think? The new one is a bit smoother.

I also talk about the awesome phrase やられた！ as an example. I highly recommend using this exclamatory phrase as frequently as possible. It will earn laughs, especially in situations where you aren’t really that やられたd.

If, however, this happens:

Then you have truly been やられたd. That image is one of the results of a Google Images search for やられた.