Year 19 of Murakami Fest! Unbelievable. See previous entries on this page. This year I’m continuing my read through Murakami’s travel memoir Distant Drums. I would really like to be getting through it at a faster pace, but there’s so much else to do, so this yearly activity might be the only way I do.
The next chapter is titled “1988, A Blank Year” (1988年、空白の年), and Murakami explains that the year is blank because he’s drained after writing Dance Dance Dance. He stops writing the travel sketches that he’s been gradually accumulating over the course of his trip to recover, but because the book is a chronological account of his travels in Europe, he summarizes the period from April to October 1988.
It’s a really interesting period! He’s become a celebrity in Japan and is putting out his next big novel. He’s gone from selling 10,000 copies of his books to selling hundreds of thousands, and several million in the case of Norwegian Wood.
He returns to Japan to go over the proofs for DDD, to work on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to get his driver’s license because he’s planning to drive in Turkey that fall. While in Japan, Murakami feels isolated. Norwegian Wood is on the bestseller lists, and Kodansha headquarters is draped in green and red, inspired by the covers of the book. It’s impossible for him to gauge his readers, and he feels isolated and even hated, despite the fact that everything is coming up Murakami. He can’t even write, so he translates. He calls translation a 治療行為 (chiryō kōi, a therapeutic act).
He and his wife go to Hawaii to warm up for a month, and he later goes on a writing trip with a photographer and editor to Mt. Athos and to Turkey, but he notes that it isn’t until he translates Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age that he is really able to kick the chill from the Roman winter. He’s so inspired from the book, his translation of which doesn’t sell quite as well as he expects.
The whole chapter is pretty interesting. It’s not as scene-driven as the rest of the book, which is what makes it such strong writing, but it’s so interesting to get inside his mind at that point in time, so I think the piece that I’ll quote from is at the end that ties together translation with how he felt about being a writer:
この作品を訳したあとで、僕はもう一度小説を書きたいという気持ちになっていた。僕という人間の存在証明はおそらく生きながらえ、書きつづけるという行為そのものの中にあるのだと僕は思った。それが何かを失いつづけ、世界に憎まれつづけることを意味するとしても、僕はやはりそのようにして生きていくしかないのだ。それが僕という人間であり、それが僕の場所なのだ。 (355)
After I finished translating this book (The Nuclear Age), I felt like writing a novel again. I started to believe that my proof of existence might be located within the act of living and writing as long as I can. That’s the only way for me to live in the end, even if it means I’ll go on losing things and being hated. That is me as a person, and that is my place.
Murakami refers back to feeling lost on return to Japan. Of not having a “place” after returning from the road. He’s able to find himself in the work, and this is really just the beginning. I’d have to go through and count, but from this point in time onward, he does spend long periods of time outside of Japan. He goes to the U.S. a number of times, including when he was writing Wind-up Bird and some of his essay collections in the 90s, and then he’s back again in the 2000s.