Author Archives: Daniel

Gerry Mulligan

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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. You can see the other entries in this year’s series here: Jurassic Sapporo.

Gerry Mulligan after he let his crew cut grow out. (From Wikipedia.) 

Thanks to Sgt. Tanuki, last week I discovered that I’ve been reading an edited version of Dance Dance Dance. His blog post about the novel details the long sections of Chapters 1 and 2 that were abridged in translation. As I mentioned in the post last week, it sounds awfully similar to some of the writing from “The Twins and the Sunken Continent,” and it also makes the section from last week make more sense because it establishes the “I’m from a different planet” theme earlier. I’m eager to check it out – finding old copies of DDD will be one of my projects the next time I’m in Japan.

What this means is that Murakami must have gone through the text in 1991 when he was compiling his Complete Works, compared his old version with Birnbaum’s translation (or at least noted which sections had been cut), and made some of the identical cuts himself. While the cuts make this year’s Murakami Fest not nearly as exciting as it could be (if I had the original text), it does mean that we learn something about Murakami’s choices – these are cuts that Murakami decided to keep despite their absence in the English translation.

So I think it’s telling that Murakami would keep a short aside about jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan.

In Chapter 7, Boku has asked the Dolphin Hotel receptionist out, and they meet at a basement bar a short cab ride away from the hotel. Here’s the section when Boku arrives:

I was met at the door with the warm sound of an old Gerry Mulligan Record.

I took a seat at the counter and listened to the solo over a nice, easy J&B-and-water. (38-39)

The Japanese, however, is slightly more extensive:

ドアを開けると程よい音量でジェリー・マリガンの古いレコードがかかっていた。マリガンがまだクルー・カットで、ボタンダウン・シャツを着てチェット・ベイカーとかボブ・ブルクマイヤーが入っていた頃のバンド。昔よく聴いた。アダム・アントなんていうのが出てくる前の時代の話だ。

アダム・アント。

なんていう下らない名前をつけるんだろう。

僕はカウンターに座って、ジェリー・マリガンの品の良いソロを聴きながら、J＆Bの水割りを時間をかけてゆっくりと飲んだ。(68)

Here’s my version:

I opened the door to an old Gerry Mulligan record playing at a pleasant volume. A record from back when Mulligan still had a crew cut and wore button-down shirts, back when Chet Baker and Bob Brookmeyer were in his band. I listened to it a lot a long time ago. Back in an era before someone like Adam Ant came on the scene.

Adam Ant.

Who would give themselves such a terrible name?

I sat at the counter and slowly enjoyed a J&B-and-water as I listened to the high quality solos of Gerry Mulligan.

This seems like an easy cut to make, and I imagine that Birnbaum made it because the Ant reference would soon be dated (if it wasn’t already?) and not because there’s anything wrong with Gerry Mulligan. It doesn’t surprise me that Murakami wanted to keep it; I do like that image of Mulligan in a crew cut and button-down shirt. (I wanted to use this photo in the post, but it’s not Creative Commons friendly.) It does, however, reek of old man frustration with change, and I guess that’s kind of what this book is about to a certain extent.

On a language note, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the tone and implications of なんていう下らない名前をつけるんだろう, so I may have translated a little freely. What do y’all think? Any suggestions?

So yeah, that’s all I’ve got, really…unless…what? You ARE interested in hearing an extended ramble about Gerry Mulligan? Awesome!

Gerry Mulligan is the greatest and most famous baritone saxophonist. NPR has an excellent profile of him in the Jazz Profiles series. (Also worth listening to are the two two-part Duke Ellington profiles, the Count Basie profile, and the Nat King Cole profile among others, if that’s your kind of thing.) If you haven’t listened to his music before, I recommend starting with some of the “Mulligan Meets” series. Mulligan Meets Monk, Mulligan Meets Ben Webster, and Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges are all top notch; easily accessible jazz that also makes great writing music because it isn’t too “hot” or complicated.

My favorite album, however, is “Something Borrowed, Something Blue,” which I’ve discovered is only available on LP…strange since I only have a digital copy of it. My guess is some jazz maniac uploaded it to teh torrentz site where I found it. If you can track this record down, I would highly recommend doing so. Mulligan plays alto, apparently, and the album starts with a superlative version of Bix Beiderbecke’s “Davenport Blues.” If I was stuck on a desert island with only one album, this might be the one I would take.

Table Talk in The Threepenny Review Fall 2012

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I have a piece of writing in the latest issue of The Threepenny Review, a Berkeley-based literary magazine. It’s a short, untitled nonfiction piece in the “Table Talk” section of the magazine, which in the past has featured Roberto Bolaño and Orhan Pamuk among others – pretty cool. It feels similar to “Talk of the Town” in the New Yorker.

I don’t think the writing style of the piece is all that different from some of the writing I do here, to be honest; there’s definitely less Japanese, but it’s still about Japan. Here’s a preview of the first paragraph as proof:

One Saturday in February 2006, I decided to go on a drive in search of cheap mikan. I’d stayed in to recover from a cold the night before and spent the morning cleaning my apartment and hanging my laundry from the curtain brackets. Outside the weather was remarkable. After a gray, blustery January during which we had several meters of snow, the sky was bright blue and clear, and the sun was strong enough to dry the roads. It was still too cold to hang clothes outside, and icy walls of snow padded the sides of the highways, but after spending over a week exclusively in my town—the small town of Nishiaizu, Fukushima Prefecture, where I was teaching English at elementary and junior high school—I was getting a little stir crazy, and cheap citrus fruit seemed to be a good excuse to get out of the house.

You can buy a copy online here or a digital copy (I think) here. If they ask, let ‘em know I sent you!

Murakami scholars might recognize the 3P editor Wendy Lesser as the author of the 2002 article “The Mysteries of Translation,” which compared Birnbaum and Rubin’s translation of “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” (a longer sneak preview of which is available here). 3P also reviewed 1Q84 this summer, but I felt that the author tried a little too hard to find the foreignness of Murakami, defining it as a “blandness” that needs to be appreciated. This 2001 look at his oeuvre in general is more on target.

Jurassic Sapporo

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Now begins the Fifth Annual How to Japanese Murakami Fest!

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and 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 four 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
Year Four: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line

This year, as mentioned on Twitter, I’ll be taking a close look at Dance Dance Dance. Jay Rubin has detailed exactly how he abridged the translation of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in his book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, but I don’t think anyone has looked closely at how Birnbaum adjusted his translation of DDD which, rumor has it, also had cuts for publication abroad.

Sadly, I was not able to finish reading the book, so I can’t speak for the translation as a whole; there may be major cuts later in the novel that I’m not aware of, but in the first third of the novel, I was surprised to find only minor compression. I say “minor,” but to translation purists, these may seem like egregious changes. Some amount to Birnbaum’s somewhat fast and loose translation style that created the perfect tone for Murakami’s boku narrator, but others are longer and clearly made for editorial rather than stylistic reasons.

The first major excision comes at the end of Chapter 4. Boku arrives in Sapporo and decides to walk to the Dolphin Hotel from the station. He stops in a coffee shop and feels intensely out of place and lonely. Here is how Birnbaum renders the section:

Of course, by the same token, I couldn’t really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I’d come to reclaim myself.

I paid the check and left. Then, without further thought, I headed for the hotel. (21)

In Japanese, however, you can see that Birnbaum has cut the majority of five paragraphs and reconstituted them using the underlined sentences below (Note: I’ve added the underlining):

もちろん東京のコーヒー・ハウスでそのような激しい孤独を感じることはない。僕はコーヒーを飲み、本を読み、ごく普通に時を過ごす。何故ならそれはとりたてて深く考えるまでもない日常生活の一部だから。

しかしこの札幌の街で、僕はまるで極地の島に一人で取り残されてしまったような激しい孤独を感じた。情景はいつもと同じだ。どこにでもある情景だ。でもその仮面を剝いでしまえば、この地面は僕の知っているどの場所にも通じていないのだ。僕はそう思った。似ている―でも違う。まるで別の惑星みたいだ。言語も服装も顔つきもみんな同じだけれど、何かが決定的に違う別の惑星。ある種の機能がまったく通用しない別の惑星―でもどの機能が通用してどの機能が通用しないかはひとつひとつ確かめてみるしかないのだ。そして何かひとつしくじれば、僕が別の惑星の人間だということはみんなにばれてしまう。みんなは立ち上がって僕を指さしなじることだろう。お前は違うと。お前は違うお前は違うお前は違う。

僕はコーヒーを飲みながらぼんやりとそんなことを考えていた。妄想だ。

でも僕が孤独であること―これは真実だった。僕は誰とも結びついていない。それが僕の問題なのだ。僕は僕を取り戻しつつある。でも僕は誰ともむすびついていない。

この前誰かを真剣に愛したのはいつのことだったろう？

ずっと昔だ。いつかの氷河期といつかの氷河期との間。とにかくずっと昔だ。歴史的過去。ジュラ紀とか、そういう種類の過去だ。そしてみんな消えてしまった。恐竜もマンモスもサーベル・タイガーも。宮下公園に打ち込まれたガス弾も。そして高度資本主義社会が訪れたのだ。そういう社会に僕はひとりぼっちで取り残されていた。

僕は勘定を払って外に出た。そして何も考えずにいるかホテルまでまっすぐ歩いた。(45-46)

Here is how my version reads:

Of course I’d never felt that intense loneliness at coffee shops in Tokyo. I had my coffee, read my book, and otherwise spent time there as normal: it was a part of my daily life that I never had to think that deeply about.

In Sapporo, however, I felt as intensely lonely as a man set adrift on an Arctic island. Everything around me was the same as always, the same stuff you’d find anywhere. But if you peeled back the mask, I felt like it didn’t connect with any of the places I was familiar with. It resembled it…but something was different. It was like a completely different planet. A planet where everything was the same – the language, the clothes, the way people looked – but something was decisively different. A planet where some sort of function completely failed to translate – but the only way to know which functions translated and which didn’t was to check them one by one. And if I somehow messed up one of them, everyone would know that I was from a different planet. Everyone would stand up, point me out, and tell me off: You’re different. You’re different, you’re different, you’re different.

That’s what I was thinking about while I had my coffee. A total delusion.

But I was lonely – that was a fact. My problem was that I wasn’t connected to anyone. I had to recover myself. But I wasn’t connected to anyone.

When was the last time I had really loved someone?

Long, long ago. Sometime between the last two ice ages. At any rate, long, long ago. In the historic past. During the Jurassic period, that kind of historic past. Everything was gone. The dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, and saber tooth tigers – all of them. The poison gas tear gas fired into Miyashita Park as well. Then this advanced capitalist society came to town, and I’d been left all alone among it.

I paid the check and went outside. Then I walked straight to the Dolphin Hotel without thinking about anything.

It’s pretty easy to understand why Birnbaum decided to cut these sections: Murakami is just thinking/rambling through his narrator here, developing the intense sense of loneliness by expounding through metaphor, a technique that he used at the end of “The Twins and the Sunken Continent,” in which the narrator imagines being sunk on Atlantis while the twins fly off on a floating continent. It doesn’t advance the plot, nor the character, and I doubt that he returns to the image later in the novel (although that’s something I’ll have to keep an eye out for as I continue reading), other than the link to “advanced capitalist society,” which plays out a little. Still, there’s something fun about reading these sections – they feel like automatic writing, which I’m sure is how Murakami is able to generate some of the awesome imagery, metaphor, and absurdity that he comes up with.

One small editorial note: Miyashita Park is a park in Shibuya, and judging from this blog post, it was the site of protests back in the early 70s. The park’s inclusion here feels isolated and out of place, and it’s probably another reason Birnbaum cut it.

And one embarrassing language note: I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that みんな can mean “everything” not just “everyone” as I insisted in the comments to this post back in 2009. After getting some more reading reps with the word, this has become more clear, and my apologies go out to DBP. Remember, folks: pride doesn’t pay if you want to learn the language. Get over it, and get used to it.

Cool Kanji – 爺 – Updated

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I think I probably knew this kanji before, but in its grandfatherly お爺さん form; on its own, the pronunciation is じじい (which I discovered thanks to furigana in the book I was reading), and it means dirty old man. For whatever reason, when I was reading I found it very cool that a single character had three syllables in the pronunciation.

It’s a cool kanji in its own right – the character for father (父) right above the verb “to take” (取) the somewhat rare character 耶 that means question or father, making the easy mnemonic “Take this, old dad guy man! *heaves rotten tomato*” “Dad?”

But the kanji led me into the rabbit hole that is the おじいさん entry on Wikipedia. Did you know that おじいさん can refer to twelve distinct individuals? These are:

1. 父の父
2. 母の父
3. 夫の父の父
4. 夫の母の父
5. 夫の父の祖父
6. 夫の母の祖父
7. 妻の父の父
8. 妻の母の父
9. 妻の父の祖父
10. 妻の母の祖父
11. 1～2と同年代以上の高齢の男性
12. 1.や2.や11.などに相当する男性が使う自称

In translation:

1. One’s father’s father
2. One’s mother’s father
3. One’s husband’s father’s father
4. One’s husband’s mother’s father
5. One’s husband’s father’s grandfather
6. One’s husband’s mother’s grandfather
7. One’s wife’s father’s father
8. One’s wife’s mother’s father
9. One’s wife’s father’s grandfather
10. One’s wife’s mother’s grandfather
11. An elderly man of equal age or older than 1-2
12. A self-applied name used by a man who fits 1, 2, or 11

Whew…deep breath. The article goes on to explain some of the nuances of the word, comparisons with Chinese, and the fact that it can be used as a first person pronoun by old dudes when talking to young kids like their grandchildren. I can’t wait to be that crazy older uncle type and get all 爺d up.

Update: Fixed teh character issues with teh kanjiz. Also fixed the errors in 2 and 6 as pointed out by Arline. And I totally forgot to mention that the Wikipedia article also mentions that when おじいさん refers to family members, the kanji are お祖父さん.

Cool Word – まったり

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I’ve got an article on the Japan Times Bilingual page today about the Japanese translation of Facebook. I highly recommend switching your language over to Japanese to improve your recognition of the various loanwords and compounds that get used on the site. And definitely make sure to go in and add your 姓 and 名 into the settings so that your Japanese friends and coworkers can track you down.

Ideally, though, you have loads of Japanese friends who are also using Facebook – this is by far the best use of the site. These Japanese friends should be updating their statuses and commenting on things at a regular pace. I have a few who do so, but even with the small number, I’ve learned a couple of awesome words. Notably, まったり. The best part about Facebook is that you are learning in context: words get defined by pictures and comments.

For example, a friend posted this picture:

With the following comment: 今日は天気悪いから好きなカフェでまったり。

I could immediately approximate the meaning of まったり – what else are you going to do on a rainy day at a cafe with nothing but a cup of coffee? – but a week or so later, another friend posted this status update:

家でまったりテレビ鑑賞。BS-TBSが誇る最強の低予算コンテンツ「吉田類の酒場放浪記」。
想像以上のヒットぶりに乗じて…

The status went on, but you get the idea from the first sentence where まったり is used to modify the verb 鑑賞 (かんしょう, view) – it means to chill the fuck out. You can either just chill the fuck out at a café because the weather is bad or you can chill the fuck out and watch TV. In the first case, the する after まったり is dropped, and in the second case it’s used as an adverb to modify 鑑賞.

The third syntax you can use is まったりした to modify a noun such as まったりした人, which reminds me of one of my favorite phrases from Cowboy Bebop: のんきなやつだな – that’s one chilled out bastard.

(And on a Facebook sidenote, I hope that the translation of “Like” to いいね！ effectively communicates to beginning students of the language that いい doesn’t simply mean good and that 好き doesn’t really mean “like.”)

Rite? Amirite?

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You’ll have to forgive me – this semester has been insane. Japanese is still happening, almost on an everyday basis, but often it’s in my dreams. I have been reading Dance Dance Dance in Japanese with the hopes of translating some of the abridged sections this upcoming September. But other than that, I’ve been teaching, reading, and writing English. Here’s a quick lame post so that I don’t skip February.

I wrote about でしょう a couple years ago and wasn’t able to give a really good example of the tone that I was trying to express. Well, I was watching my Twitter feed not too long ago and caught this interaction between New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi and Jean Snow of Neojaponisme:

Tabuchi’s でしょう I think accurately captures what I was trying to communicate – it’s almost along the lines of the tone of the English amirite? or rite?

To further impress this upon you, I have recorded my own versions of the various でしょう tones. Here is How to Japanese Podcast Ep 2, which is so short that it doesn’t even deserve a time index. Hope this is helpful.

おかげで vs. せいで

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After the last posts, I got an email from a friend reminding me that there was one more element of おかげ（さま）で that I needed to discuss before I could run it into the ground. Here’s the email:

E-mail from a colleague I’m in contact with made me think of your post recently. (Context: discussing her school closure due to SNOWMAGEDDON up in Seattle):

「明日も休校です。こんなに続けて休校になったのは本当に久しぶりです。お蔭で家でゆっくりと読書に耽ったり、好きなフランス語の勉強をしたり、ヨガをしたりしています。」

Sounds like she is have a pretty sweet snowcation. So, yes, おかげで has another usage, which is closer to the ので and で that I wrote about in the past – it’s explaining causality, in particular beneficial causality. Because of/“thanks to” the snow and the school closure, she’s been able to read and study French and do yoga and damn you for living in a cold climate! I want a snow day! In the sentence above, おかげで is used at the beginning of a sentence, but you could easily use it as a conjunction and mash the clauses together: 休校になったおかげで、久しぶりに読書した。

This is the way that I first learned おかげで, which is partially why I was confused when I heard it as an idiomatic greeting. I knew that someone was being thanked, and I may even have had a sense that the someone had been dropped (pronoun drop yo) and was an implied “you.” But “you” hadn’t done anything for me! So why was I supposed to be saying お陰様で元気です? Because that’s what they say. When used as an idiomatic greeting phrase, you don’t have to consider the “beneficial causality” as much.

There is an equal and opposite conjunction せいで which is used to explain negative causality. For example, 雪が降ったせいで、自動車事故が増えた。

Personally, I loved watching all the videos the last few days of Seattle drivers running into each other in the snow because that’s exactly what would happen in New Orleans. I, however, mastered snow driving in Fukushima. The best policy is just not to drive (as long as you have sufficient supplies of chocolate and beer).

More on お陰様で

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Durf sent along an interesting post about お陰様で on Japan Echo by a Japanese columnist. He notes that お陰様で has been used frequently in the areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami. The examples show how it’s really just an idiomatic greeting that can be used to acknowledge someone’s concern for your person. Most excellent. Start using it…now.

I was curious to see that the writer’s wife, a Kansai native, was unfamiliar with the term. My friend who just had a baby is from Sendai, but I can’t remember where my Japanese teacher is from. For the most part they tried to teach us 標準語 (ひょうじゅんご), so I’m tempted to say that お陰様で works in the capital as well.

Getting used to お陰様

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One of the best parts about my return to New Orleans is that I have not been sick as much as I was in Japan. My first winter in Fukushima I caught pneumonia. The second year I had the flu or something similar. The third year my nose completely closed up and I went on nasal steroids (which became an annual thing). I loved the healthcare system in Japan – the doctors were friendly and everything was really affordable – but it’s better not to get sick. I say this on a day in early January in New Orleans where it was overcast and rainy but still in the upper 70s: I had the air conditioner on. Two days ago I went for a jog along my normal jogging route in a sleeveless T. Life is good. I occasionally get a bit sickish, but my body has had fewer catastrophic failures than it did in Japan.

Part of this could be that I’m exercising more. My normal jogging route takes me along the Mississippi River, but back in November I was blocked by the train and ran back to Magazine Street rather than along “the Fly” (the park area in a batture along the river). This resulted in one of those 何かの縁 moments that life surprises you with every now and then. My Japanese conversation partner happened to be walking in the park with her mother and newborn son. I hadn’t seen her for about a month since she gave birth.

She said, おお、偶然だね。何している？ジョギング？ I replied, お久しぶりです。はい、ジョギング。おめでとうございます。 無事に生まれた？ (Or something like that. I was a little winded and surprised, so I’m sure my Japanese was crap.) Then she said one of the best get-used to it phrases in Japanese: お陰様で無事に生まれた。

I’m not sure if that’s the exact verb/verb form she used, but I want to focus on the お陰様で (おかげさまで). This is a great phrase. Forget about what it means. Let’s focus on some context.

My first encounter with this phrase was on the very first day of the second semester of my third year – so the first day of class after the New Year holiday. The teacher said, お元気ですか？ We began to reply 元気です and the teacher tilted her head to the side like we were making a mistake. No one could figure out what the mistake was was until she fed us the answer – お陰様で元気です。 I remember being baffled. I had no idea what it meant. I wish I could go back and shake myself and say, “It doesn’t matter what it means! It’s just what they say! Just say it! Say it all the time!”

Now the question becomes when do they say it. These two examples have at least one thing in common: a certain length of time has passed since the speakers last met. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen my teacher and about a month since I’d seen my friend. Things happened since the speakers met.

Now is there any similarity between these things? And here is where I give some background context: I’d given my friend a baby gift before she gave birth. And then she gave birth. So yes, some things happened. In the case of my teacher, not much happened. We had a week of vacation between exams and the start of the new semester. I’m going to say no, the things that happened are not similar. This is good. This shows us two different uses of the phrase.

In my teacher’s case, the お陰様で is used almost exclusively as a set 挨拶 (あいさつ). Get used to it, use お陰様で元気です all the time, especially after using しばらく or 久しぶり.

In my friend’s case, it’s used as a way to express thanks. Not that the baby blanket I gave her helped her give birth at all (at least I hope not…the hospital should have enough blankets), but I’d done something nice, and then she’d gone and done something successfully. お陰様で is a useful way to report an accomplishment and indirectly express thanks for the accomplishment. It’s also a very polite phrase. Simply say お陰様で and add whatever you accomplished. You passed a test? お陰様で合格 (ごうかく)しました！ You were accepted into the JET Program or some other job? お陰様で就職(しゅうしょく)しました！ Your friend fed you ramen when you were wasted and you didn’t get a hangover? お陰様で二日酔い(ふつかよい)になりませんでした！ This phrase has all sorts of great usages.

There are places on teh Internetz where you can read about the origin of the phrase, but it’s advisable to just get used to it. Or Google it and then get used to it.

2011: 1Q84 Goes Abroad

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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.)