Author Archives: Daniel

The Wind

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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interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1.

Well, if we’re going to be looking at Murakami, we might as well start at the beginning – the first page of his first novel. Technically it’s been published, but not in the States, so it still counts. I’ve read Birnbaum’s version, and the first line has always been kind of seared into my brain, so you’ll have to forgive me if mine is similar. Something just doesn’t sound right with “Perfect writing doesn’t exist.” I’ve taken this first page from Murakami’s Complete Works 1979~1989.

Listen to the Wind Sing

1

    “There’s no such thing as perfect writing. Just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
    When I was in university, a writer I met kind of randomly said that to me. It wasn’t until long afterwards that I finally understood the true meaning of those words, but it was still possible for me to take some small bit of comfort in them. In the fact that there’s no such thing as perfect writing.
    Nevertheless, whenever I got to the point where I was about to write something, I was always attacked by a sense of despair. That’s because the scope of things that I am able to write about is too limited. For example, even if I could write something about an elephant, I might not be able to write anything at all about an elephant keeper. Something like that.
    For eight years I’ve wrestled with that dilemma – eight years. That’s a long period of time.
    Of course, as long as you keep trying to learn from everything around you, getting older isn’t too hard. That’s the commonly held belief.
    I’ve tried my best to live that way ever since around the time I entered my twenties. And thanks to that, I’ve been deeply hurt, deceived, and misunderstood countless times by other people, and at the same time I’ve had many strange experiences. Lots of different people have run in to me and told me their stories, passing over me almost as though they were making noise crossing a bridge, and they’ve never come back. That whole time I kept my mouth tightly closed and didn’t tell them anything. That’s how I welcomed in the final year of my twenties.   

It’s impressive how representative this one page is of Murakami’s writing. There’s an elephant in there, a sense of sadness but also curiosity in the strangeness of life, and a hint at the importance of being a listener or a storyteller.

Elephant is, of course, 像 (ぞう), and elephant keeper is 像使い (ぞうつかい). Interesting when you think of 魔法使い (まほうつかい) – magician.
 

 

How to 祭り

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I spent the long weekend up in Nishiaizu taking part in the 野沢祭礼 – Nozawa Festival of Thanks, I guess. (As one elementary school teacher put it, “Thanks everyone very, very much.”) One of the new JETs asked what the name of the festival was, and no one seemed to know, but they collectively decided on 野沢祭礼, Nozawa being the area of town. It’s got something to do with the approaching fall harvest. One last festival before winter begins to tighten its grip.

We carried a mikoshi, which is a kind of portable shrine, I think. Most of the ones in town have a barrel of nihonshu on them. Unsure if they are full. They sure feel full.

Here’s the vocab you need to know:

担ぐ – かつぐ – to carry (a mikoshi)

わしょい！ – the chant when moving forward with the mikoshi, kind of like a “heave ho” type noise

もめ！ – imperative form of もむ, which means to toss about/up and down, used when rapidly lifting/throwing the mikoshi up and down (you can see this action in the beginning of the How to Japanese videos)

御台 – おんだい – not sure about the kanji, but the ondai are the two wooden supporters that hold up the mikoshi when everyone takes a break


Right on the effin shoulder.

How to Pasokon

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Another quick Friday post. I found this link detailing how to access macrons in OSX. Pretty useful for writing things like “Chūō.”

OSX also makes it incredibly easy to input Japanese. Just go to the International menu under Preferences, select the Input Menu tab, and check Kotoeri. You’ll see a US flag up near your clock now. Click on it, and you’ll have the option to switch into Japanese input.

Here’s a list of shortcuts:

Once you are in the Japanese input:

Shift + Ctrl + J switches into hiragana input.

Shift + Ctrl + K switches into katakana input.

Shift + Ctrl + ; switches into romaji input.

Apple Command + Spacebar will toggle back and forth between the two most recently used inputs.

Note: All that was for Tiger. Anyone know if anything changed in Leopard?

Boobs

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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 unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement.


 

Murakami (Do I even need to tell you which one?) lived in Europe for three years between 1986 and 1989. In addition to novels and short stories, he also wrote a lengthy set of travel writings called Tōi taiko (遠い太鼓, A Distant Drum).

During his travels he spent some time on a small Greek island, and the tourists there often sunbathed nude. Apparently only the local Greek men (he calls them "Zorba Greeks") went to the trouble of checking out the boobs. This resulted in a three-page discussion of nude sunbathing and the following moment of complete linguistic genius:

おっぱいを出すのも勝手なら、出されたおっぱいを見るのも勝手である。

(I was going to write the page number at the end of that line, but when I realized it was page 69, I thought I’d better explain what I was doing.)

The Japanese is so economical that translating it won’t be as great, but here it goes:

If it’s a person’s prerogative to reveal her boobs, then it’s also a person’s prerogative to look at revealed boobs

That kind of expresses what’s going on with the verb. 出す literally means “take out,” but I translated it as “reveal” in order to maintain the verb tenses and still have the sentence sound okay, although, now that I think about it, “taken-out boobs” is a pretty funny phrase.

The major difference between the English and the Japanese is that no people are explicitly involved in the Japanese sentence; all of the subjects are implied, and he uses the loaded word 勝手 (かって). "Prerogative" feels a little complicated, but I guess it does the job. 勝手 is often used as an adverb (勝手に〜) to mean "do ~ however I want" or "do ~ even though I’m thinking only of myself and not the Japanese collective spirit." One word that pops up in the dictionary is "arbitrary." So does "one’s own way" and "selfishness."

So yes, long story short, if you reveal your boobs, do not be surprised when people look at them.

 

Fingers

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I was fortunate to find a yoga teacher in the neighborhood where I live. She gives lessons out of an apartment just a five-minute walk from where I live – talk about convenient. Most of her students are older women, so the lessons aren’t that intense, but she does try and challenge us. Mostly it’s nice to sit and just focus for 90 minutes and also to meet some people in the neighborhood.

Like most instructors she does some of the pseudo-spiritual talk associated with yoga – prana, chakras, etc. Personally, I do believe in the power of the breath and breath control, but mostly as method of physical and mental fitness.

The best part of the lesson is corpse pose at the end. Just that total sense of relaxation, letting the body go into complete rest and having the brain focus on the breath. The teacher guides us into a nice meditative state by telling us to focus on different parts of the body starting with the toes and moving up the leg, the abdominal area, the chest and then the hands and arms. For some reason it’s super relaxing to lie completely still and move your concentration from body part to body part.

It’s also a useful vocabulary building exercise. I learned all the names for fingers and toes, so I thought I’d share them here:

親指（おやゆび）               thumb/big toe   
人差し指（ひとさしゆび）    index finger
中指（なかゆび）               middle finger
薬指（くすりゆび）            ring finger
小指（こゆび）                  pinky finger/little toe

Unlike English, those names are exactly the same for both fingers and toes, so there’s no difference between “big toe” and “thumb,” basically. Do the other toes even have names in English?

The most interestingly named finger is 薬指 – medicine finger. Wikipedia says this is because long ago, when medicines were all powdered, people used the ring finger to mix and apply different medicines. Apparently it also gets called 紅差し指 (because it is used to apply makeup?), 無名指 (finger with no name), 薬師指 (I guess the whole ‘mixing finger’ thing was institutionalized), and お姉さん指 (because girls don’t have wedding bands yet?).

TGIF, I guess

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Sorry, everyone. I need a Friday.

TGIF doesn’t really exist in Japan, but I think the closest phrase is 「やっと金曜日なんだ！」 with the appropriate emphasis applied. I tried to teach TGIF to JHS kids for years but never got them to memorize it until I said that phrase somewhat dramatically…to the dismay of the Japanese teacher I was working with.

号外 – ビール追加

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I neglected to mention Yokohama Cheers when I wrote my short post on beer. Cheers is just a short walk from the West Exit of Yokohama Station. It has to be the only beer bar in Japan with an Israeli chef who can make genuine hummus and falafel. They have some Rogue beers on tap as well as an amazing selection of Belgian beers. Definitely worth several trips.

お疲れ様

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お疲れ様 (おつかれさま) might be the ultimate “get used to it” phrase. I hear it all the time these days – when anyone returns to the office from an outing we say it to them, I say it to everyone before I leave work, I say it to the guy who empties the trash, I say it to someone if they are leaving.

I’ve started saying it a lot more than I used to, partly because I hear it so much. I did hear it in Nishiaizu, too – when I paid my bills, after I got back from elementary school, when I left school – but it gets used a lot more now.

I guess it literally means something like “You look tired,” but a more accurate translation is, “Thank you for your efforts,” which I learned from Kitakata Alan. That effectively expresses the idea that it is a set phrase used when someone completes something. If you look at the times when it is said, it is generally at the point where one activity ends and another begins. You can emphasize this by making it past tense – お疲れさまでした. If, on the other hand, people are still working (i.e. the activity has not reached completion), then you can say お疲れさまです.

Perhaps the best, most ritualized example of this is at elementary school. The kids all do the cleaning themselves after lunch. Sixth graders run groups of kids from all grade levels. All the groups line up and begin cleaning by collectively yelling, お願いします. They end the cleaning by saying, ご苦労様（くろうさま）でした, which is just a more casual way of saying お疲れさまでした. I would always air on the side of お疲れさま, since it is more formal.

Try not to think of the meaning too much. Focus on the situation when it is being said and then try to notice when a similar occasion arises, so that you can use it. And say it a lot, just kind of throw it out there sometimes.

Oyster Day!

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Note: I wrote most of this before Gustav was even close to New Orleans.

In America (New Orleans?), we say you should only eat oysters in months that have an ‘R’ in them. That doesn’t stop us from eating dozens when we watch the basketball playoffs at Cooter Browns. Or from ordering the Peacemaker at Domilise’s in the middle of the summer. The real places (Casamento’s), however, are closed when it’s hot and raw oysters are more dangerous than they usually are.

Oysters in Japan are more of a December to February type food, but to hell with it, I declare today Oyster Day! September is the first month with an ‘R’ in it after May, June, July and August (incredible how that works, eh?), and today is the first day of September, so let’s go get oysters!

There’s a famous tongue twister about oysters in Japanese: 隣の客は、よくカキ食う客。(となりのきゃくは、よくかきくうきゃく。Tonari no kyaku wa, yoku kaki kuu kyaku. Translating tongue twisters is one of the most useless linguistic exercises that you can perform, but to hell with it, it means, “The customer next to us is a customer that eats a lotta oysters.” I guess that last bit sounds pretty cool – “ Eat a lotta oysters.” Oh, and the kanji for oysters, used mostly by restaurants with discriminating taste, are 牡蠣.)

Someone taught me that one the first time I came to Japan. It must’ve been at that point where they had exhausted my, at the time limited, range of conversation topics and had nothing better to do than make me say funny stuff for their own amusement. Shame on them. Actually, I should really be thanking them.

When you’re first starting to study a language, tongue twisters are a great way to exercise the muscles in your mouth. The muscles you use to speak Japanese are different from the English muscles, and they need training just like your pecs and gluts. Even if you don’t understand the meaning, the pronunciation practice will help you down the line.

Revisiting tongue twisters is a good way to test your progress. I heard this oyster one again recently but this time understood what was being said. It was a strange sensation. The sounds were no longer just sounds; there were specific meanings tied to all of them, and it wasn’t even that hard to say.

I haven’t decided where I’m going yet, but I’m debating between a place near Tokyo Station and another near Shinagawa Station. The former sells itself as a “gumbo and oyster” restaurant, whereas the latter is more convenient but is more like a New York oyster bar. If you’re in Tokyo and want to get oysters, get in touch!