Author Archives: Daniel

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E08 – Predictions for Murakami’s New Novel

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It’s the final podcast before publication of the new Murakami novel! I go over some Murakami vocabulary, predictions I have for the novel, and some comments about potential connections with Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Here are the links I mention:

  • Episode 1 of this season of the podcast, in which I go over everything I know about the novella, 街と、その不確かな壁.
  • My appearance on Translation Chat with Jenn O’Donnell about translation choices made in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the Word
  • Japan Times article examining Murakami’s language choices in Killing Commendatore
  • Murakami vocabulary:
    • うんざり – unzari – tedious, frustrated
    • 覆う – ōu – cover
    • やれやれ – yareyare – what the hell, oh brother
    • 備わっている – sonawatte iru – gifted with, endowed with, has/have (certain abilities)
    • 惹かれる – hikareru – drawn by, pulled by
    • 引き出し・抽斗 – hikidashi – drawer
    • 流れ – nagare – flow
    • 歪む – yugamu – distort/warp
    • 歪な – ibitsu – misshapen, distorted, warped

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E07 – Murakami Bibliography – 2006-2023

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This week is the third part of my look at Murakami’s complete bibliography. See my Google Sheet version of all this information and follow along with the podcast at this link: bit.ly/MurakamiBibliography

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E06 – Murakami Bibliography – 1988-2005

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This week is the second part of my look at Murakami’s complete bibliography. See my Google Sheet version of all this information and follow along with the podcast at this link: bit.ly/MurakamiBibliography

Here are the links I mention in the episode:

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E05 – Murakami Bibliography – 1979-1987

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This week on the podcast I’m taking a close look at Murakami’s complete bibliography for the first eight years of his career. See my Google Sheet version of all this information and follow along with the podcast at this link: bit.ly/MurakamiBibliography

And here are links that I mention separated out by year:

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E04 – Murakami Novel Power Rankings

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It’s finally time – here are my Murakami Novel Power Rankings! I spent the last two months re-reading Murakami’s novels, and I feel prepared to put them in order from least successful to most successful. Obviously this is a subjective exercise, but I would also argue that this is the correct order.

Even as recently as a year or two ago, I would have had my personal favorite Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at the top of the list, so regular readers may be surprised to learn that it is not. Take a listen to see where I ranked it.

One thing that became clear to me while re-reading these novels is that the central dynamic in Murakami’s writing is immediacy vs controlled narration. He often puts the reader in the driver seat with the narrator, following them around during routines or waiting long periods of time for something to happen. I’ve noticed this a lot in genre fiction, which I think may partially explain why Murakami has a ravenous following and why many readers love books like Kafka on the Shore, which I would argue over rely on immediacy to generate reader interest.

Many readers are looking for that kind of experience, of following around a character having weird experiences. But I think there’s an exhaustion in this technique, which even Murakami himself recognizes. He has the instinct to vary this, even in his earliest novels; in Pinball, 1973 he alternates between the immediacy of the Rat’s experience struggling with life with more controlled narration of his Boku narrator’s implied grief for the loss of Naoko. Kafka also gets this alternating treatment as well as Hard-boiled Wonderland, and in both cases one half of the narrator is steeped in immediacy while the other has more controlled narration.

Given that Murakami is likely delivering an extension of Hard-boiled Wonderland next month, it will be very interesting to see what choices he makes with immediacy in the book and whether he decides to vary the narration as he did in 1985.

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E03 – Murakami’s Origin Story

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This week, I take a look at Murakami’s famous origin story with the help of writer and translator Matt Schley. We looked at ten different accounts of the day that Murakami was inspired to become a writer:

Thanks again to Matt. Check out his translation of Soda Kazuhiro’s Why I Make Documentaries: On Observational Filmmaking available via Viaindustriae Publishing.

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E02 – The Murakami Season

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Well, I’ve had a week to mull over the title announcement for the new Murakami novel, and I’m still just as stunned as I was last week. Here’s the intro episode for this season of the podcast. Stay tuned for more!

And here’s the blog post I mention in the episode that includes the passage from Murakami’s supplementary commentary included with the Complete Works.

How to Japanese Podcast – S03E01 – Emergency Murakami Podcast

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We have the title for the new Murakami novel due out on April 13! It’s the same title as a 1980 novella that Murakami disavowed as a “failed work” but later rewrote as Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Here’s what we know about that novella, and here are my best guesses about what we could be getting next month.

SWET Event – Blogging, Podcasts, and Translation

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Last minute notice, but I’ll be participating in an event for SWET (Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators) this Saturday Japan time (Friday evening U.S. time). Really excited to talk about this topic, given that starting this website basically changed my life and set me on the path that guided me to my current career. Without it, I’m not sure what I would’ve ended up doing. It’s difficult to believe that I’ve been posting here for 15 years as of this month/next month. Here’s to 15 more.

Check out the link to the event here to register.

甘えたい

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A bit late, but 新年おめでとうございます！

The newsletter went out a couple weeks back, and I wrote a little about 甘える (amaeru), a word that is extremely difficult to define in English absent of context. Give it a read!

One additional 甘える wrinkle I wasn’t able to get to was 甘えたい. I think this is difficult for a couple reasons. First, when the speaker/convey of 甘える is the person who also wants to 甘える, then it can complicate the equation for who is doing what action to whom; in other words, sometimes it’s easier to understand when the speaker is talking about someone else doing the 甘える. It always takes a second for me to calculate who is doing what in any case, and 甘えたい　makes calculation more complicated.

Second, I think part of the reason 甘えたい feels complicated might be due to the fact that 甘える is, in general, a somewhat negative idea. It does have neutral nuance, as I think some of the examples in the newsletter show, but by and large the idea of being dependent on someone or trying to manipulate someone into acting a certain way is negative. So why would someone want to 甘える?

This is an interesting tweet I found:

I opted not to dig into it too deeply in the newsletter because I don’t really know the background of the account or exactly what this guy is implying about women here. Essentially he suggests that eldest sisters often want to 甘える, but don’t know how. A kind reading of this would be something along the lines of, “They want to be taken care of, but don’t know how to make themselves vulnerable to do so.”

I also found this example about “The many ways children say ‘I’m tired,’” which seems more clearly deserving of good faith analysis:

One of these ways is 甘えたい, which I think translates to “I want someone to take care of me.”

甘える is a complex verb, but going through the calculations each time to ensure that you’re understanding it is an important step. Eventually you’ll realize that you no longer need to do those calculations, but until that point, I know I at least plan to slow down as I approach this linguistic speed bump.