Now begins the Fourth Annual How to Japonese Murakami Fest!

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.

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).

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T-minus two weeks and counting until the release of Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84! To commemorate the occasion, I’ll pick up a copy of the book on Friday the 29th and then liveblog it all weekend. For those of you who don’t read any Japanese, maybe this will give you a little taste of the reading experience. You’ll probably have to wait a couple years for the translation. I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum: this will mostly be an exercise in extreme Murakami fanboy-ism.