1Q84 Vol. 3 is out! I have my copy reserved at a bookstore in Oimachi that opens at 10am, so I’ll pick it up there and then head straight to Café du Monde in Ito Yokado, which has wireless. I won’t be live blogging (already thing of the past), but I will try to tweet when my fingers aren’t covered with powdered sugar. Follow me @howtojapanese.

Just a reminder that Wednesdays I’ll be posting in Japanese over at How to Engrish. Good reading practice. See if you can find my mistakes. (There are lots of them.)

Also, I thought I’d introduce two new literature/translation blogs by frequent How to Japonese commenters Will and G Dawg. Will is blogging over at Wednesday Afternoon Picnic. He’s been translating stories from 夜のくもざる, a great little collection of Murakami super-shorts several of which I’ve tried to translate myself. G Dawg just started Old G Dawg’s Labyrinth the other day with a close look at the first page of Almost Transparent Blue. I like the header graphic on his site – looks inspired by Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

I was at 有隣堂 today and noticed that they have started taking reservations for 1Q84 Book 3. The signs say that they expect it to sell out immediately. Here’s what my reservation slip looks like:

The price is 1995 yen, almost 200 yen more expensive than Book 1 and 2, which makes me wonder if, Egads!, this part is longer than the first two. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

No payment is necessary up front, so get to your closest 本屋 and 予約 a copy for yourself. The book will be released on April 16.

現在進行形 is the name of the tense (present progressive in English). You’re probably well familiar with this pattern. 食べています (tabete imasu). 飲んでいます (nonde imasu). Eating stuff. Drinking stuff. Doing stuff in general.

But I was reminded last week by 落ち着いている that you have to be careful with this pattern in Japanese because the same construction can be used as stative description depending on the verb. One of the best examples of this is the phrase 変わっている. This should not be translated as “is changing.” If something is 変わっている it means it is “in a changed state,” i.e. it is strange or weird. This is often used to describe quirky, unusual people.

You have to be vigilant not to fall into this traps. I recently had to pull myself out of one. In the Murakami story “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall,” there is a short introduction where the narrator meditates on the uncertainty and ineffectiveness of words:

語るべきものはあまりに多く、語り得るものはあまりに少ない。

おまけにことばは死ぬ。

一秒ごとにことばは死んでいく。路地で、屋根裏で、荒野で、そしで駅の待合室で、コートの襟を立てたまま、ことばは死んでいく。

お客さん、列車が来ましたよ！

そして次の瞬間、ことばは死んでいる。

I initially translated that last line as “And the next moment words are dying.” But it actually should be “And the next moment words are in the state of being dead”; in other words, “words are dead.” This passage is interesting because you have three different conjugations of the verb die: 死ぬ (shinu), 死んでいく (shinde iku), and 死んでいる (shinde iru). Here is the translation I ended up with:

There are too many things I want to say and too few things that I am able to say.

And to make matters worse, words die.

Every second words are dying. Words die in alleyways, in attics, in the wilderness, and in waiting rooms at stations with the collar on their coat turned up.

Excuse me, sir! The train is here!

And the next moment, words are dead.

I guess if you wanted to be more dramatic and read into it a little you could go with “Every second words are uttered and then go off to their death” for 死んでいく. Anyone have other ideas?

If you are trying to say “is changing” you should probably say 変化している (or possibly 変身している), or you could bust out some ところ action and say 変わっているところ.

Other frequently used examples are:
開いている。 It’s open.
閉まっている。 It’s closed.
冷えている。 It’s chilled (and ready to drink).

Maintain gerund vigilance.

Herta Müller wins 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

See you guys back here next year for Murakami-palooza 2010.

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October tomorrow (!), 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, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Murakami’s Complete Works is an interesting collection. It includes all of his main novels, most of his major short story collections, a few 書き下ろし “bonus tracks” type stories, and then other short works that he just happened to like. One of these is “A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heinekan Cans.” Murakami included it in Volume 8 of the collection which collects the stories from his collection The Second Bakery Attack (パン屋再襲撃). Without further ado, here is my translation:

A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans

When the zoo closed, people from the town put together some money and bought the elephant. The zoo was a crappy little zoo that surprised no one by going broke, and the elephant was old and worn out. He was so old and worn out that no other zoo would take him in. He didn’t look like he would live much longer, and no zoo could be asked to take in an elephant with one foot in the grave.

The zoo’s broker had no idea what to do and even pleaded with the town to take the elephant for free. “He’s old, so he doesn’t eat all that much. And he’s really tame. He’s not going to wake up the neighbors by trumpeting loudly. All he needs is a place to go. Quite a deal, being free and all,” said the broker.

After arguing for around a month, in the end the town council decided to take in the elephant. The looked all over the world, they said, and there wasn’t a single town that had its own elephant. Of course there are probably plenty of towns like that in India and Africa, but there were at least none in the northern hemisphere.

A farmer who had some land on a forested mountain provided a place for the elephant to live, and they relocated a run-down elementary school gymnasium to use as an elephant pen. Leftover school lunches provided plenty of food. A retired employee from the town offices became the elephant keeper and looked after him. The town did have quite a bit of money, so it was relatively easy to put together the appropriate funds.

And it wasn’t like the elephant was totally useless either.

The town assigned the elephant the job of crushing empty cans. First they made a concrete pipe in the shape of the elephant’s foot and then trained the elephant to stomp there when a whistle was blown. Every week on Friday the cans were collected from all over the town and hauled to the elephant’s pen by truck. Beer cans, soup cans, nori cans – they piled up all sorts of can in front of the elephant’s pen. The elephant keeper would dump three buckets worth of cans into the concrete pipe and blow the whistle. When the whistle sounded, the elephant stomped with one foot and crushed the cans, turning them into a single flat piece of metal.

I have no idea why the town thought up such a complicated way to get rid of the cans. If they did it all with a compressor, it’d be finished in no time. You don’t need an elephant to crush cans.

My guess is that the town wanted to create some sort of value for the elephant’s existence. That’s the only thing that comes to mind. Which is exactly why the town went out of its way to give it that somewhat unproductive job.

But the elephant and elephant keeper looked really happy when they were crushing cans. The elephant keeper blew the whistle and the elephant would immediately step into the pipe and flatten the cans.

Sometimes I forgot to throw out my cans on Friday, and whenever I did, I would take the cans to the elephant’s pen myself. Both the elephant and elephant keeper had nothing to do on Mondays and Tuesdays, so they would crush the cans especially for me. Once I drank a case of Heineken and had the elephant crush it for me. When the elephant keeper blew the whistle, twenty four Heineken cans became one brilliant green sheet. That green sheet sparkled under the May sun like the plains of Africa seen from above. (65-66)

Here’s what Murakami has to say about the story in his notes:

From what I can remember, I wrote “A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans” on a whim while I was drinking Heineken. As I’m sure you know, Heineken cans are a beautiful green color. I finished drinking one of them and then crushed it in my hand, and as I did, I thought, man, this would be even flatter and more beautiful if an elephant stepped on it. And that’s why I wanted to write this story, from what I remember. I’m not sure how good it is. (X)

Well, he liked it enough to include it in his Complete Works, which you can’t say about “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall.” My guess is that he needed to create some value of his own for the Complete Works and this small, yet-to-be-collected short story fit in thematically; he positions it write after “The Elephant Vanishes,” and now that I look at the order, I see that he added “The Bakery Attack” as a small bonus immediately after “The Second Bakery Attack.”

One note about the translation. In the Japanese, Murakami has his narrator drink 一ダース worth of beer – a dozen cans. I tried using that in the translation, but “a case” felt so much more natural in the English that I decided to go with that instead.

This concludes Murakami-palooza 2009. You can watch the announcement online here.

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, 2, 3, 4.

Murakami wrote Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985, but he had the original idea for the “End of the World” sections five years earlier when he wrote the novella (中編小説, literally “medium-length fiction”) “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” (街と、その不確かな壁, English translation of the title borrowed from Jay Rubin’s Music of Words). It was published in the September 1980 edition of Bungakukai.

In the story, an anonymous boku goes to a walled Town (街) in search of the second person kimi (君), the “true self” of a past love. He enters the Town as “the Prophet” (予言者, which Birnbaum translated as “Dreamreader”) and kimi is working in the Library as the librarian. Just as in the novel, boku has his shadow removed by the Gatekeeper when he enters the Town, and the shadow gets weaker and weaker over time. Boku is torn between his happiness in the Town with kimi and his shadow’s desire to escape from the Town’s eerie sense of perfection. Murakami makes very different choices at the end of the story, and I have translated a small portion that may be of interest to anyone who has read Hard-boiled Wonderland (and shouldn’t spoil the book for those who haven’t read it):

The Wall disappears.

“It’s over,” I say. “Want to go?”

“Sure.”

We take off our coats and shoes in the snow and then fasten our belts together.

“Don’t get separated. No matter what,” my shadow says. “If we get separated, it’s all over.”

I nod. The two sets of black coats and black shoes are a strange sight on the snow.

“There’s a chance I’m wrong,” my shadow blurts out. “I might have wrapped you up in this for my own convenience.”

“You think?”

“I suddenly had that thought after hearing you talk with the Wall.”

“Don’t get discouraged,” I say. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. If we make it out to land, let’s get to know each other again.”

We share a firm handshake with our belts attached. Then we take a deep breath and dive together headfirst into the pool, cold as ice.

The next instant I lose consciousness.

Murakami writes the story off as a failure, and it is definitely weak; grammatically he uses the same patterns over and over (notably ばかり and だけ), and there seems to be a lack of editing (on several occasions he lapses back to 彼女 instead of 君). But if you take into consideration that he wrote “The Town” between Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, it also looks like a young writer boldly expanding his range. Thematically it’s very different from Hard-boiled Wonderland. Murakami is more concerned here with the uncertain nature of language and how that affects human interaction, whereas in Hard-boiled Wonderland he focuses on society and the mind and how the two affect individual existence.

If you are a true Murakami nut and want something cool to read, I recommend ordering a copy from the National Diet Library.

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, 2, 3.

Last week I showed you a passage from a Birnbaum translation that had missing sentences. This week it’s Rubin’s turn to go under the magnifying glass. Here is a section of his official translation of Norwegian Wood:

Three old women were the only passengers on the Sunday morning streetcar. They all looked at me and my flowers. One of them gave me a smile. I smiled back. I sat in the last seat and watched the old houses passing close by the window. The streetcar almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the yard of another house, a little kid was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from someplace, and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The streetcar snaked its way through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on at stops along the way, but the three old women went on talking intently about something, huddled together face-to-face.

I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori’s map down a broad street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs. Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or repaired in spots, and it was those additions that tended to look far more shabby than the old buildings themselves.

The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the people who used to live here had become fed up with the cars and the filthy air and the noise and high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap apartments and company flats and hard-to-move shops and a few stubborn holdouts who clung to family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as if wrapped in a haze of exhaust gas.

Ten minutes’ walk down this street brought me to a corner gas station, where I turned right into a short block of shops, in the middle of which hung the sign for Kobayashi Bookstore. True, it was not a big store, but neither was it as small as Midori’s description had led me to imagine. It was just a typical neighborhood bookstore, the same kind I used to run to on the very day the boys’ magazines came out. A nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place. (Rubin, 64-65)

The final paragraph is the only one with missing lines, but I love this section of the book (partly because I love the neighborhood and the streetcar line) and wanted to give some of the development to the missing sentence. In the passage, the protagonist Toru makes his way to Midori’s family-run bookstore. She lives near Otsuka Station, a short ride on a streetcar (in reality the Arakawa Toden line that arcs northeast from Waseda through Otsuka and then down into Arakawa Ward) from Waseda University, the college Murakami attended and used as a model for the university in the novel. As Toru rides the streetcar to visit her he is assaulted by an array of sensory input. But Rubin leaves out the final sentence of the last paragraph, which in Japanese is:

どこの町にもこういう本屋があるのだ。(全作品, 98)

Norwegian Wood is one of the few works that has been translated into English by two different people, so we have the perfect opportunity to see two different sets of translation choices (by professionals, rather than my lousy efforts). In his translation for Kodansha International, Alfred Birnbaum renders this same section like this (I have bolded the additional sentence.):

The Sunday morning streetcar was passengerless except for a group of three old ladies, who sized up me and my narcissuses. One lady smiled at me. I smiled back and took a seat at the back to watch the old houses swing past. At times the streetcar practically scraped the eaves. Here a glimpse of ten potted tomato plants on a platform for hanging laundry, where a cat lay sunning itself, there children blowing soap bubbles in a back yard. Somewhere an Ayumi Ishida tune was playing. The smell of curry drifted by as the streetcar threaded an intimate course through the backstreet neighborhoods. A few more passengers boarded at stops en route, scarcely noticed by the old ladies, who huddled together, tirelessly chatting away.

I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori’s map down a singularly unremarkable main street. None of the shops along the way seemed to enjoy much turnover. All the stores were old and dark inside. The characters on some signs were not even legible any more. I could tell from the age and style of the buildings that this area hadn’t been bombed in the war. That’s why these shops were still there. Additions and partial repairs only made the buildings more dilapidated.

Most people had left the area to escape the cars and smog and noise and high rents, leaving behind only run-down apartments and company housing and businesses that proved difficult to uproot, or else locals who stubbornly stuck to their longtime residences and refused to move. A haze hung over the place, probably from car exhaust, making everything seem vaguely dingy.

A ten-minute walk down desolation row, I came to a corner gas station, where the map had me turn right into a small shopping street, and midway down that I made out the Kobayashi Book Shop sign. Not a very big bookstore, granted, but not quite as small as I’d imagined from Midori’s description. Your ordinary everyday neighborhood bookstore. The kind of bookstore I’d run to as a boy to buy that latest, anxiously awaited kiddy-zine the day it hit the stands. Somehow, just standing in front of the Kobayashi Book Shop made me feel nostalgic. Surely every town (町) must have a bookstore like this. (Birnbaum 1, 125-126)

The sentence is a throwaway detail, but it does include the Japanese 町, which I wrote about briefly after my thesis rewrite went up on Neojaponisme. In Murakami’s early work, the 街 (まち, machi) is a central theme. Machi literally means town, and Murakami uses it in his early novels to refer to the place where the narrator, the legendary boku, grew up. All of his past is tied up with the machi and it exerts a certain level of control over him because it is where all his memories come from. From Hear the Wind Sing to A Wild Sheep Chase, boku goes through a process of growth into adulthood and a separation from his hometown. He eventually forsakes it, cutting ties with the past and looking toward the future. Nothing is ever named, but the machi strongly resembles Kobe, Murakami’s own hometown.

In Norwegian Wood, both boku and the machi have names, and perhaps this is why Murakami chose 町 rather than the 街 as in his early works. Boku is Toru Watanabe, a student in Tokyo during the turbulent late-60s. Toru is not dissimilar from the old boku. He has the same tastes in music and literature and he spends his time reading novels and watching movies instead of participating in political demonstrations or study groups with activists who are caricatured throughout the novel. The machi in this novel is Kobe, also similar to the machi from the first three novels. Toru grew up there, but when his best friend Kizuki commits suicide he starts to feel a desire to leave. Toru says “I had to get away from Kobe at any cost,” and shortly after that notes “I just need to get away from this town (machi)” (Rubin 24-25). Toru “escapes” Kobe for Tokyo in the same way that the boku from Murakami’s first three novels escapes the anonymous machi for Tokyo.

Escaping to Tokyo also gives Toru the opportunity to establish his own emotional center to the world, a new place that will have new memories associated with it. But it isn’t that easy. The machi he finds after moving to Tokyo are divided, most notably by the two female protagonists. Rubin has noted how Naoko and Midori represent a dichotomy between life and death (Rubin, Music of Words 159). This is further represented by the “machi” they inhabit. Naoko, after a break down, flees from Tokyo to a regimented, sterile sanatorium deep in the hills of Kyoto. Midori’s machi is the opposite – although old and somewhat grimy, it is filled with different smells, sounds and flavors. It’s strongly connected to Toru’s own past (as well as Japan’s collective history), which might explain why he seems confused when talking to Midori at the end of the book; Toru’s process of self-discovery has lead him from his machi hometown to Tokyo, out to the isolation of Naoko’s sanatorium, back to the chaos of late-60s Tokyo, off wandering after Naoko’s death, and then after all of this he still doesn’t know where he is. Judging from the tone of the novel, his attempts to return to Midori and her familiar (nostalgic) machi must have been futile. Otherwise why write the book? The novel’s final, hopeless line 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。(全作品, 419)

12 hours on a plane. What better to do than translate some Murakami? I used a bit of my time to translate part of the Mainichi Shimbun’s new three-part interview with Murakami. I stopped right around where the spoilers started, so you can read safely:

Haruki Murakami Talks 1Q84 – Exclusive Interview 1 – “Book 3 by next summer”

In May the author Haruki Murakami released the full-length novel 1Q84 (Book 1, Book 2; Shinchosha, 1890 yen each), which has since become a huge talking-point. Murakami recently responded to the Mainichi Shimbun’s interview. The story features a layered plot that depicts “the struggle between individual and the system” set in Japan in the 1980s. For the first time, Murakami makes it clear that he is in the process of writing an additional third part. Mainichi asked his for his thoughts as a writer.

First of all “1985”

Currently both volumes of 1Q84 have gone through 18 printings and achieved million-seller status, with Book 1 selling 1,230,000 copies and Book 2 1,000,000 copies. There has been an extraordinary response, including, among other things, the publication of several books of commentary.

“I think that I have about 150,000 – 200,000 established readers for my novels. When it’s around that many, I get kind of a sense of how my work is being received. When it gets up to 500,000 or 1,000,000, it’s really hard to tell who is reading it and how they feel about it.”

The mysterious title is based on George Orwell’s novel 1984 (’49), but there is a secret story behind it.

“At first I was going to title it 1985. But while I was writing it, I talked with Michael Radford, the director of the movie version of Orwell’s work, and learned that the British writer Anthony Burgess was writing a book called 1985. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to change it to 1Q84, and when I finished writing, I searched around on the Internet and realized that Akira Asada had actually released a music cassette/book set under the same title. At that point the galley revisions were already underway, so I let Asada-san know. And so that’s how it eventually ended up like it did.”

It’s been three months since the publication. Can we ask what you think of the criticism you’ve received?

“I haven’t read any at all. I don’t ever read it, but I took special care this time since I’m writing Book 3. I want to be able to focus on writing from a fresh state of mind. I thought it would be totally finished when I completed 1 and 2. And that’s what I was thinking when I structured it on Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” – that it would be complete with two volumes. But after a little while, I started to feel like I had to write 3. I wondered how the rest of the story would unfold. As far as the timeframe, I’d like to put it out as quickly as possible, so I’m thinking next summer as a goal.”

Update:

Oops over here, too. Anthony Burgess died back in 1993, and his book 1985 was written back in 1978. You can go check the Japanese yourself and figure out what I did wrong. If you want to see another translation of the interview, check out this link.

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, 2.

It’s no secret that my favorite of Murakami’s novels is Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I’ve also made it pretty clear that Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round is my favorite short-story collection and, in my opinion, the turning point of his early career. I found Hard-boiled in a small New Orleans bookstore called Beaucoup Books in the summer of 1999. Sadly it closed after Katrina. Dead Heat I bought at a used bookstore near Waseda University at some point in 2003. I took it with me on a month-long trip to Southeast Asia in February 2004, determined to spend my free time reading Japanese if I was going to be traveling outside of Japan. It was the first Japanese book I ever slogged through. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to spend the next year writing my senior thesis about it.

As I started to research the collection, it came as a surprise to discover that both Hard-boiled and Dead Heat were published in 1985; Hard-boiled in June and Dead Heat in October. Murakami actually serialized the Dead Heat stories under the title “A View of the Town” from ’83 to ’84, but a year later he added the story “Lederhosen” along with a substantial introduction for the hardback collected edition. The central image of the introduction is the dead heat on a merry-go-round: life never gets us anywhere – life in modern society is strange, and man is helpless for the most part. At least that’s the way Murakami claimed to feel after recounting the allegedly true (and later admittedly fictional) stories in the collection. The best we can hope for is to share our own strange stories with each other and develop a sense of empathy.

I dug it. Still do. So you can imagine how excited I was when on March 6th 2005, at the height of thesis madness, I discovered this passage from Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of Hard-boiled that links the two works:

She rolled down her panty hose as a bluesy Ray Charles came on with Georgia on My Mind. I closed my eyes, put both feet up on the table and swizzled the minutes around in my head like the ice in a drink. Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time. The clothes on the floor, the music, the conversation. Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows. Like a dead heat on the merry-go-round. No one pulls ahead, no one gets left behind. You always get to the same spot.

“It seems so long ago,” I said, my eyes still shut.

“Of course, silly,” she said mysteriously, taking the glass from my hand and undoing the buttons of my shirt. Slowly, deliberately, as if stringing green beans.

“How’d you know?”

“I just know,” she said. She put her lips to my bare chest. Her long hair swept over my stomach. Eyes closed, I gave my body over to sensation. I thought about the suzuki, I though about the nail clippers, I thought about the snail on the cleaners’ front stoop. I opened my eyes and drew her to me, reaching around behind to undo the hook of her brassiere. There was no hook.

“Up front,” she prompted.

Things do evolve after all. (364)

Whoa, I thought. There’s the “dead heat” image, right there on page 364. I quickly busted out my Japanese copy to see what exactly was going on:

彼女がパンティー・ストッキングをくるくると丸めるように脱いでいるところで曲はレイ・チャールスの『ジョージア・オン・マイ・マインド』にかわった。私は目を閉じて両脚をテーブルの上に載せ、オン・ザ・ロックのグラスの中で氷をまわすみたいに、頭の中で時間をまわしてみた。何もかもがずっと昔に一度起こったことみたいだった。脱ぐ服とバックグランド・ミュージックと科白が少しずつ変化しているだけだ。でもそんな違いになんてたいした意味はない。ぐるぐるとまわっていつも同じところにたどりつくのだ。それはまるでメリー・ゴー・ラウンドの馬に乗ってデッド・ヒートをやっているようなものなのだ。誰も抜かないし、誰にも抜かれないし、同じところにしかたどりつかない。

「何もかも昔に起こったみたいだ」と私は目を閉じたまま言った。

「もちろんよ」と彼女は言った。そして私の手からグラスをとり、シャツのボタンをいんげんの筋をとるときのようにひとつずつゆっくりと外していった。

「どうしてわかる？」

「知ってるからよ」と彼女は言った。そして私の裸の胸に唇をつけた。彼女の長い髪が私の腹の上にかかっていた。「みんな昔に一度起こったことなのよ。ただぐるぐるとまわっているだけ。そうでしょ？」

私は目を閉じたまま彼女の唇と髪の感覚に体をまかせた。私はすずきのことを考え、爪切りのことを考え、洗濯屋の店先の縁台にいたかたつむりのことを考えた。世界は数多くの示唆に充ちているのだ。

私は目を開けて彼女をそっと抱き寄せ、ブラジャーのホックを外すために手を背中にまわした。ホックはなかった。

「前よ」と彼女は言った。

世界はたしかに進化しているのだ。（下、279-280）

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. There are sentences missing! And not just any sentences. The single most important sentence in the entire book had been left out. I opened a new document and started to translate, sending it to another Murakami otaku shortly thereafter. I give you that translation unedited with the caveat that I produced this four years ago, so you must be gentle. It’s not bad, but there are definitely things I would change now. It does represent the Japanese sentence structure relatively effectively. I have bolded the sentences that are not included in the published translation:

Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” was playing as she took off her stockings, rolling them up into balls. I closed my eyes, put both legs on the table and tumbled time inside my head the same way I was swirling my whiskey on the rocks. It was like anything and everything had happened once before long ago. The discarded clothes, the background music, our whole conversation…it all kept changing little by little. But there wasn’t really any meaning to the changes. Everything spins around and around but always arrives at the same point. Like a dead heat on a merry-go-round. No one wins, no one loses, and you always end up in the same place.

“It feels like anything and everything happened a long time ago,” I said with my eyes closed.

“Of course,” she said. Then she took the glass from my hand and slowly undid the buttons of my shirt, one by one, as if she was podding string beans.

“How do you know?”

“‘Cause I know,” she said. Then she put her lips to my bare chest. Her long hair draped over my stomach. “We all happened one time long ago. We’re just spinning around and around. Right?”

I kept my eyes closed and let the sensations of her hair and lips run through my body. I thought about the sea bass, I thought about the nail clippers, I thought about the snail on the bench in front of the Laundromat. The world is full of little tricks.

I opened my eyes, gently pressed her against my body and circled my hand around her back to undo the hook on her bra. There was no hook.

“In front,” she said.

The world is definitely evolving.

The first and last of the bolded sentences are neither here nor there, but those three in the middle are critical. At this point in the novel, Murakami has spent several hundred pages setting up his two narrators – watashi and boku in the Japanese – and slowly, subtly developing the connection between the two. We know that the narrator of the End of the World is basically the internal presence of the narrator of the Hard-boiled Wonderland of near-future Tokyo. Certain things – paperclips, songs – are able to cross the barrier between the two worlds and make it into the narrator’s subconsciousness. Both of them are involved with librarians, but it’s never clear if the Wall of the End of the World precludes any true interaction between Self and Other.

This passage provides the answer. The narrator, facing his own death in a matter of days, takes a moment to enjoy the array of sensual input that surrounds him – booze, music, the touch of his girlfriend. He thinks of a “dead heat on a merry-go-round,” a representation of how reality feels to him, and then, without any prompting at all, the girlfriend says exactly what he was thinking to himself: we’re just spinning around and around. It would be easy to write this off as coincidence, but I prefer to read it as Murakami making the statement that there can be real connection between people; the librarian picks the line straight out of his head because they are so closely, so genuinely connected.

I have no idea whether Birnbaum or his editor made the choice to cut these lines, so I can’t really fault him, especially not after the incredible poetry of his translation – notably the line “Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows.” Brilliant. To be fair, next week I’ll highlight a missing sentence from a Rubin translation.