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.

Murakami Fest continues, and we remain with Boku and the receptionist (whom we will later learn is named Yumiyoshi, a name that Boku doesn’t ask for until page 107, and even then she refuses to tell him – strange, but this is Murakami so we don’t ask too many questions). We remain in Chapter 7, a very long chapter indeed. So long that it required numerous cuts. We looked at a minor one last week. This week we look at three longer cuts.

After arriving at the bar, Boku sips on his J&B and water (coincidentally, the preferred drink of a certain investment banker from the 80s) until Yumiyoshi arrives. She’s tense from a long day at work but also from the mental preparation it’s taken to gear up to tell the story of her encounter with the Sheep Man on the sixteenth floor – the encounter was frightening. With that out of the way with, she and Boku continue on to more pleasant conversation about themselves. We learn that her family runs a ryokan in Asahikawa and that she worked in Tokyo at a hotel. Boku then remarks that that must be the reason why she looked like “the spirit of the hotel” when he first saw her. She shrugs it off and says she could never be that. Then we get these lines:

“I’m sure you can, if that’s what you want,” I smiled back.

She thought that over a while, then asked to hear my story. (49)

A quick cut away from her to Boku. In Japanese, however, the “thinking over” is much more drawn out:

「君なら、努力すればなれる」と僕は言って微笑んだ。「でも、ホテルには誰も留らないよ。それでいいの？みんなやってきてただ通り過ぎて行くだけだよ」

「そうね」と彼女は言った。「でも何かが留ると、怖いような気がするの。どうしてかしら？臆病なのかしら？みんながやってきて、そして去って行くの。でもそれでほっとするの。変よね、そんなのって。普通の女の子ってそんな風に思わないでしょう？普通の女の子って何か確かな物を求めている物なのよ。違う？でも私はそうじゃない。どうしてだろう？わからないわ」

「君は変じゃないと思う」と僕は言った。「まだ定まってないだけなんだ」

彼女は不思議そうに僕を見た。「ねえ、どうしてそんなことがあなたにわかるの？」

「どうしてだろう？」と僕は言った。「でも何となくわかるんだ」

彼女はしばらくそれについて考えていた。

「あなたの話をして」と彼女は言った。 (82)

My quick and dirty version:

“I’m sure you could, if you give it a shot,” I said with a smile. “But no one stays at a hotel forever. Would you be alright with that? Everyone arrives and then just passes straight through.”

“This is true,” she said. “But I feel like it’d be kind of scary if something actually stayed. I wonder why I feel that way? Maybe I’m just depressed chicken? Everyone arrives, and they leave. But it’s a relief. That’s strange, isn’t it? To think like that. Ordinary girls probably don’t think like that, right? Ordinary girls want something more definite, no? But I’m not like that. I dunno why.”

“I don’t think you’re strange,” I said. “It’s just that nothing’s been set for you yet.”

She looked at me strangely. “How do you know?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I can just tell.”

She thought about that for a second.

“Tell me about you,” she said.

First the language issues. You say 泊まる I say 留る; interesting decision to switch away from 泊まる which has been used earlier in the chapter. I translated as “stay forever,” although I’m sure there’s an option more nuanced than that. Not confident about my translation of 定まっていない, so I stayed pretty literal. Also not confident about the rendering of 臆病. Is she saying that she’s depressed? Or that “it’s a depressing thought,” it being the previous sentence?

Interesting section to cut. It doesn’t really add much, I don’t think, but it does play on typical Murakami themes, notably the “passing through” theme that Murakami mined in Wind-up Bird.

Boku goes on to give a rundown on his own life, emphasizing how pointless his current line of work is – he compares it to “shoveling snow”:

“Shoveling snow, huh?” she mused.

“Well, you know, cultural snow,” I said. (49)

And then there’s a space break. After the break, the translation picks up with, “We drank a lot.” In Japanese, however, there’s no space break. Just a continuation:

「雪かき」と彼女は言った。

「文化的雪かき」と僕は言った。

それから彼女は僕の離婚について知りたがった。

「僕が離婚しようと思って離婚したわけじゃない。彼女の方がある日突然出ていったんだ。男と一緒に」

「傷ついた？」

「そういう立場に立てば普通の人間なら誰でも多少傷つくんじゃないかな」

彼女はテーブルに頬杖をついて僕の目を見た。「ごめんなさい。変な訊きかたをして。でもあなたはどういうふうに傷つくのか、うまく想像できなかったの。あなたってどういう風に傷つくのかしら？傷つくとどうなるのかしら？」

「キース・ヘリングのバッジをコートにつけるようになる」

彼女は笑った。「それだけ？」

「僕が言いたいのは」と僕は言った。「そういうのって慢性化するってことなんだ。日常に飲み込まれて、どれが傷なのかわからなくなっちゃうんだ。でもそれはそこにある。傷というのはそういうものなんだ。これといって取り出して見せることのできるものじゃないし、見せることのできるものは、そんなの大した傷じゃない」

「あなたの言いたいことはすごくよくわかる」

「そう？」

「そうは見えないかもしれないけれど、私だっていろんなことで傷ついたのよ、ずいぶん」と彼女は小さな声で言った。「それでいろいろあって結局東京のホテルも辞めちゃったの。傷ついたの。辛かったし。私ってある種のことが上手く人並みに処理できないの」

「うん」と僕は言った。

「今でもまだ傷ついている。そのこと考えると今でも時々ふっと死んでしまいたくなる」

彼女はまた指輪を外して、またもとに戻した。それからブラディー・マリーを飲み、眼鏡をいじった。そしてにっこりと笑った。

僕らはけっこう酒を飲んでいた。 (83-84)

In translation:

“Shoveling snow,” she said.

“Shoveling cultural snow,” I said.

Then she wanted to know about my divorce.

“It wasn’t like I got divorced because I wanted to. One day she just up and left, with another guy.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Wouldn’t anyone feel pretty hurt in that position if they were a normal person?”

She put her chin on the table and looked me in the eyes. “I’m sorry. That was a strange way to ask. I just had trouble imagining how *you* hurt. What’s *your* pain like? What do you get like when you hurt?”

“I put a Keith Haring button on my coat.”

She laughed. “That’s it?”

“What I’m trying to say,” I said, “Is that it happens constantly. Everything gets caught up in the day to day and it’s impossible to tell what’s painful and what isn’t. But it’s in there. That’s what pain is. I can’t pull it out and say, ‘Voilà, here it is.’ Anything I could show you wouldn’t be all that painful.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“Yeah?”

“I might not look like it, but I’ve been hurt by a lot of things, really hurt,” she said in a soft voice. “A bunch of stuff happened and I ended up quitting the hotel in Tokyo. That hurt. It was tough. There are certain things that I’m just not able to process like other people.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“It still hurts. Even now when I think about those things sometimes I suddenly just want to die.”

She took off her ring again and again put it back on. Then she took a sip of her Bloody Mary and fidgeted her glasses. Finally she broke a smile.

We had a lot to drink.

Another interesting cut. I think this section goes mostly just because it can go. There’s nothing vital, but the discussion about pain/what it means to hurt is well penned, and it is interesting to see the beginning of the deeper connection between the two that Boku remarks upon in the next section as they drunkenly make their way into a taxi and on the way to her apartment. (“Maybe we really did have something in common, the two of us.” 50) And as they do, Boku gets the name of the magazine that ran an article about the suspicious history of the Dolphin Hotel (the alleged plot purpose for Yumiyoshi’s involvement).

Boku thinks about how he could probably sleep with Yumiyoshi, about what it means that he could probably sleep with her, she makes an excuse and says she lives with her sister, but then she reveals that to be false when he accompanies her to the door. Birnbaum creates a nice space break by turning Murakami’s dialogue into more witty repartee:

“It’s not true. Really, I live alone.”

“I know,” I said.

“A slow blush came over her. “How could you know?”

“Can’t say why, I just did,” I said.

“You’re impossible, you know that?”(51)

Space break, cut to the taxi driver waiting for Boku.

The Japanese reveals this to be the most questionable cut of the chapter:

「どうしてだろう？ただわかるんだよ」と僕は言った。

「あなたって嫌な人ね」と彼女は静かに言った。

「そうだな、そうかもしれない」と僕は言った。「でも最初に断ったように人の嫌がることはしないよ。何かにつけこんだりもしない。だから何も嘘なんかつくことはなかったんだ」

彼女はしばらく迷っていたが、やがてあきらめたように笑った。「そうね。嘘なんかつくことなかったのね」

「でも」と僕は言った。

「でも、とても自然についちゃったの。私も私なりに傷ついたのよ。さっきも言ったように。いろんなことがあって」

「僕だって傷ついている。キース・ヘリングのバッジだって胸につけてる」

彼女は笑った。「ねえ、少し中に入ってお茶でも飲んでいく？もう少しあなたと話がしたいわ」

僕は首を振った。「有り難う。僕も君と話がしたい。でも今日は帰るよ。どしてかはわからないけど、今日は帰った方がいいと思う。君と僕は一度にあまり沢山のことを話さない方がいいような気がする。どうしてだろう？」

彼女は看板の細かい字を読む時のような目つきでじっと僕を見ていた。

「うまく説明できない。でもそういう気がする」と僕は言った。「話すことが沢山ある時は少しずつ話すのがいちばんいいんだ。そう思う。あるいは間違っているかもしれないけれど」

彼女は僕の言ったことについて少し考えていた。それから考えるのをあきらめた。「おやすみなさい」と言って彼女は静かにドアを閉めた。

「ねえ」と僕は声をかけてみた。ドアが十五センチほど開いて、彼女が顔を見せた。「また近いうちに君を誘ってみていいかな」と僕は聞いてみた。

彼女はドアに手をかけたまま深くいきを吸いこんだ。「たぶん」と彼女は言った。そしてまたドアが閉まった。 (87-88)

In translation:

“I dunno why. I just do,” I said.

“You are a bastard,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, maybe so,” I said. “But I don’t hate women who say no, and I never take advantage of anyone. So there was nothing for you to lie about.”

She was confused for a moment but eventually smiled, like she’d given up. “Yeah. I didn’t have to lie.”

“*But*,” I said.

“But it just came out. I hurt like I hurt, as I mentioned earlier. Things happened.”

“I hurt too. I’ve got a Keith Haring button on my chest.”

She laughed. “Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea? I want to talk more.”

I shook my head. “Thanks. I’d like to talk as well, but tonight I’ll go back. I dunno why, but I think it’s best for me to go back tonight. I just feel like it’s best that you and I don’t say too much all at once. Wonder why that is?”

She stared at me with her eyes squinted like she was trying to read the find print on a sign.

“I can’t explain it. That’s just how I feel,” I said. “It’s always best to say things a little at a time when you’ve got a lot of things to talk about. That’s what I think. But I might be wrong.”

She thought about what I said for a second. Then she gave up thinking. “Good night,” she said and quietly closed the door.

“Hey,” I called out. The door opened a few inches, and she stuck her face out. “Is it alright if I ask you out again sometime soon?” I asked.

She took in a deep breath with her hand still on the door. “Maybe,” she said. Then the door shut again.

Whew. What a cut. This one makes more sense. Birnbaum’s decision to cut this section keeps Boku a more suspicious character, and cutting it doesn’t force him to alter the narrative elsewhere in the chapter. The original Japanese breaks the tension by letting us see exactly how nice a guy this Boku character actually is. Yet he refuses the offer and doesn’t press his luck, a true gentleman, now in search of the true answer to his existential dissatisfaction. This does make sense in the order of the Murakami canon; Boku is all growns up.

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.

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.

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.

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October tomorrow!, 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 series here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Boku has made his decision to leave the Town. He chooses to stay true to his dark dream, his dark mind – his shadow – rather than stay in the Town with kimi. This is the opposite of the result of Hard-boiled Wonderland, where he stays because he cannot “forsake the people and places and things I have created” (399). This shows the crucial difference between the Town in the two texts – in Hard-boiled Wonderland, the Town is clearly part of boku, but in “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall,” I think it’s actually kimi: Boku is unwilling to lose himself in another person, even if it means a blissful and sincere connection with another.

So he jumps.

And on the other side, here is what he has to say:

Lastly

Words die.

Every second words are dying. Words die in alleyways, in attics, in the wilderness, and in waiting rooms at stations with the collar on their coat still turned up.

What can I communicate to you? Everything disappears like hitting a light switch. Click – OFF. That’s the end.

I’ve buried too many things already.

I’ve buried sheep, cows, refrigerators, supermarkets, and words.

I don’t want to bury anything else.

But nonetheless, I must continue to speak. That’s the rule.

**

Long ago I chose the Town surrounded by the Wall, and in the end I abandoned it. I still don’t know whether or not it was the right thing to do.

I survive, and now I’m writing this. The stink of death still surrounds me. I sleep with dark dreams, and I wake with dark thoughts. The path I walk is dark, and it gets darker with each step I take.

Everything is being lost. It will continue to be lost. The songs that moved me long ago are gone, and the scenery that gently held me is gone, too. The silent darkness also blots out a huge number of endearing words.

But I have not a single regret.

I think of the Town surrounded by the Wall as I watch my shadow stretched out on the wall of my room (now with nothing to say) in the long, dark night. I think of the tall Wall, of you under the faint light bulbs in the Library, of the beasts and the sound of their hooves echoing on the streets, of the willows swaying in the wind, and of the chill winter wind that blows through the factory street empty of all people.

There’s nothing more I have to lose. That’s my only salvation. Like the wind I felt when I was sixteen, everything passes through my body. I did lose the Town, but my thoughts remain in the Town somewhere even now.

Forever…, you said. Forever. I won’t forget you, just as you won’t forget me. Thoughts of the riverside in summer, and thoughts of the bridge in winter when the wind blows.

Forever…

**

On a cloudy autumn evening, I suddenly hear the echo of the horn. The sound must make it to my ears through a gap somewhere in that uncertain Wall. Riding on the cold wind that blows down from the Northern Ridge.

This concludes Murakami Month 2010. Watch the Nobel Prize announcement tomorrow, and look for more translation next year.

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 series here: 1, 2, 3.

The illusion has ended, and boku and kimi are back in the archives of the Library. They walk outside, and he tells her what his decision is.

How much time has passed? When the last bit of light has disappeared and the original darkness returns to the archives, we leave without a word, turn off the Library’s lights, pass through the long hallway, and go outside.

It’s night and the wind has stopped; a strangely clear and quiet starry sky expands above our heads. Silently we walk the road along the river and as always stop at the middle of the Old Bridge to watch the river.

“When I met you… When I met your shadow, I was sixteen years old,” I say facing the dark surface of the water. “That year was a really mysterious year. I felt like everything just kept on leaving me behind. It was like everything just passed right through me… The first time I met you was at some party. Somebody’s birthday party maybe, something like that. I only spoke a couple words with you, but when I did, I felt like the world suddenly opened up right in front of my eyes.”

You take a few steps away from me and stare at the surface of the water just like me.

“And for months after that, I was thinking only about you. Every day was really tough…for those months until I built up enough courage to call you on the phone. Sometimes I felt like I could get anything I wanted, and other times I felt like I couldn’t get anywhere even with all the time in the world. Sometimes I had an incredible desire to sleep with you, and other times I was satisfied just watching you from afar… And as those months passed, in my mind you became a symbol of living. Or maybe of living on. I was living within that dream. I breathed, ate, and slept that dream. Do you understand those feelings?”

You nod slightly.

“Of course, these are just words to everyone. Maybe they don’t mean anything at all. But it’s just, I really wanted you to understand. Dreams, no matter what kind they are, are all dark in the end. If you say that it’s a dark mind, it’s a dark mind. Just mud that I made up in my head and sprinkled with gold dust. That kind of dream won’t take anyone anywhere. Just like the water that flows down into the pool, they just wander forever in dark subterranean channels with no destination.”

I cut off my words and look at the side of your face. You don’t move at all and keep your eyes fixed on the surface of the water. Only the murmur of the water hitting the rock of the sandbank surrounds us.

“I’ve lived with these thoughts for far too long. I also feel like they’ve only brought me suffering. But the thing is, I’ve gotten too old to get rid of these thoughts. Even if the long hallway I’m walking down has no exit, I think my real self can only be there. I couldn’t live with myself if I abandon my dark dream there, no matter how dark the dream is. I wouldn’t be the real me anymore if I cut myself off from it.

“As long as I’m with you like this in the Town, there’s nothing more I could want. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like this. I’m not anxious or depressed whatsoever. It would probably be like this forever. But even now, time continues to pass outside of the Town. Both the beasts and the shadows die. That won’t leave my mind like a stubborn stain on a shirt.”

Most of the water spills from my palms. Yet I mustn’t stop sharing.

“I’m going to leave the Town with my shadow. It’s going to be incredibly painful to leave you. I wanted to live with you in the Town forever.”

“Was the sixteen year old me that amazing?” you ask me, lifting your head.

“Absolutely. Like a dream.”

Then I hold you. I feel streams of hot tears on your cheeks.

“I’ll remember you forever,” you say. “Forever. That’s the only thing I can do for you.”

“Goodbye,” I say.

“Goodbye.”

**

I stare at the dark surface of the water even after she disappears off into the darkness at the end of the Old Bridge. And when a new sun sneaks a white color into the eastern sky, I return to the residences on the hill and slip into my empty bed.

Toward the end there are references to the very beginning of the story where boku talked about how words die. They spill through his hands as he attempts to hold them. The Town seems to represent a sort of ideal connection with a person. While it enables a satisfying relationship with kimi, it also threatens boku’s individuality. As he starts to describe his feelings, the narrative boku starts to show through, and we get hints of some other reality with birthday parties and phone calls. Boku has realized that he must go back to this reality, where kimi no longer exists, perhaps because she is dead. I’ve translated boku and his shadow’s escape from the Town here, and next week will be the postscript to the story.

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 series here: 1, 2.

It’s hard to pick the other passages to share – the story is long, and there are a number of parts that differ from Hard-boiled Wonderland. I think getting to the end is important, though, so I’ll fast forward through the central part of the tale, which unfolds mostly as it does in the novel – boku maps out the Wall a little, explores the dreams at the Library, starts a relationship with kimi (very different from the novel), meets up with his shadow which has begun to weaken, and realizes that he must help his shadow escape from the Town.

Before he does, he takes kimi into the archives of the Library and illuminates all the dreams. In the novel, this was to unravel the Librarian’s mind from all of the dreams. In “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall,” there’s a markedly different result:

All of the old dreams are awake.

“There’s no way, how can this…” you say in a daze. Yes, exactly. The old dreams have had all of their existence torn away from them. Words torn from their voices, light torn from their eyes, and dreams torn from their sleep.

“There’s no way.”

Or maybe we’re both seeing the same illusion in the deep darkness of the archives. But even if this is an illusion, it’s an illusion that the old dreams in the room have mustered their last bit of strength to unfurl for us.

I go with them down into a deep, hole that’s been dug in the ground. It’s a place where everything is ruined and everything is lost. The river has dried up, the hill has crumbled, and the light has stopped. The road I follow is surrounded on both sides by steep cliffs filled at the bottom with heavy water that gives off a rotten smell. There are no stars nor moon, and only a slight amount of dust-like light spills out from within the earth, causing the outlines of the surrounding scenery to just barely float up.

The thousands of old dreams stand in front of me and guide me through the surroundings. I walk slowly so as not to miss a step on the sheer road. I can see endless rows of troops marching in the opposite direction as me on a road on the opposite shore of a lake. They have no heads on their shoulders. They occasionally expel white breath from a gaping, black hole in the middle of their shoulders like they are breathing.

The old dreams continue on the straight road. As they proceed, the seasons change, years pass. Only the darkness remains the same. Several of the soldiers call out to me. They call out with gurgling sounds from the holes in their bodies.

I am all alone. I’ve lost sight of you. I yell out your name as I walk, but there is no reply. The only response is the mocking gurgling sound from the soldiers. The old dreams continue.

“Wait for me,” I yell. “I have to wait for her.”

The old dreams don’t answer and just continue their endless flashing. I can’t stop either. This is not my place. This is their country. My feet, heedless of my will, continue after the old dreams. All sorts of rubbish lines the side of the road. I recognize all of it. Several dozen dead cats with their fur all rigid staring into the void. Broken, faded toys buried in dried mud with their arms pointing up into the air. Old sports shirts that have had cigarette marks burned into them hanging from the branches of trees.

Time passes as I continue on the road. My eyes hollow, my hair falls out, and my teeth rot. Deep wrinkles appear all over my skin, and I have to convulse my entire body to take even one breath.

“Stop,” I yell. “Please, enough. Stop!”

But the old dreams still continue. Suddenly the road ends. When I realize it, I am standing on a deserted rocky scrag. No longer is there any water or soldiers in the area around me. It’s almost like I’m standing at the bottom of a deep well. The ceiling is infinitely high, and far above in that darkness overhead is a small white hole the size of a pinprick. It is the light of the sun.

Nothing in the world is as amazing as the light from the sun. Don’t you think?

Indeed, colonel. Indeed.

Tears spill from my eyes. The tears turn to salt crystals and fall to the ground, collecting on the scrag. At that point the old dreams lose their light one after another like they’ve burnt up. When they lose their light, they fall to the ground quietly like a feather. And when the last bit of light is sucked away into the air, the area is covered by a pitch black darkness. The white light in the ceiling is already gone. And everything ends.

I’m not exactly sure what this momentary transportation means. Perhaps that dreams, and the mind, continue on heedless of the casualties it leaves behind, even oneself. Murakami cut the passage for the novel. No need to worry – in next week’s installment, both boku and kimi survive the illusion and retreat to the banks of the river to talk.

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 series here: 1.

The boku narrator finishes reminiscing about his summer day spent with kimi’s shadow and invites the reader to go back to the Town (街に戻ろう) and experience it along with him. I translated these sections in present tense, partially as a nod to Alfred Birnbaum. Once you read it that way, it almost feels wrong to try and render it in past tense. Also, it does neatly solve the narrative problem – the story’s framing devices are translated in past tense (other than the invitation above), as they clearly look back on boku’s time spent in the Town, but the point of narration for the meat of the story (the parts in the Town) is much closer to the action, and it’s fun to feel the Town so immediately surrounding you as you read.

As with Hard-boiled Wonderland, the first thing described upon arrival are the beasts and their daily ritual as they walk through the Town and out of the Gate. After a few days boku finally visits the Library:

On the third day after my arrival in the Town, I push open the door of the Library. The door opens with a creak, and a hallway runs far into the depths within. The air is stale and dusty, and a few yellow light bulbs hang from the high ceiling. It smells like dried sweat. The light barely illuminates the hallway and is so dim that even my body is fuzzy, as though it will be sucked into some other place. Worn down cedar floorboards, plaster walls that seemed to have discolored to match the light of the light bulbs; the hallway continues forever, turning several times as it goes. The building must be deeper than it is wide. I feel like I’m descending into the earth.

I continue walking, and just when I start to feel like I won’t ever get anywhere but can’t go back, an entrance suddenly appears. A delicate door inlaid with polished glass. I turn the aged brass knob and open the door. Inside is a perfectly square room about five meters on all sides. There are no windows and no decorations. There is a modest wooden bench, and a rusted heater is set in the middle of the room with a kettle on top giving off white steam. Straight ahead is a circulation counter, and beyond that there is a door that appears to lead to the archives. Which means this must be the Library. I sit on the wooden bench and warm my hands while I wait for someone to come.

**

You come through the door in the back thirty minutes later.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I didn’t know that anyone was going to be coming.”

I smile but don’t know exactly why.

“As I’m sure you know, hardly anyone comes here ever since all the books went away.”

The kettle gives a rattle and purrs like a cat.

“Now, what were you here for?” you ask.

I’m looking for old dreams.

“Old dreams.” You look at me with an anxious smile on your face. Of course you don’t remember me. Because the things that connect us are nothing more than a few uncertain events that happened long, long ago in a shadow country.

“Yes, old dreams” is all I reply.

“I’m terribly sorry,” you say still smiling that smile. “But only the Prophet is allowed to touch the old dreams.”

Silently I remove my black glasses and show you my eyes. They are unmistakably the weak eyes of the Prophet. I was given them when I entered the Town.

“I see,” you say and glance downward. “Where shall we begin?”

“For now, I’d like to see a few.”

Nothing makes a sound in the circulation room, and the dust-like air has settled over the room. While you prepare the old dreams, I sit on the bench and casually watch you as I drink the kettle’s hot coffee from an enamel cup. You haven’t changed at all. You are just as you were that summer evening.

“Haven’t I met you somewhere?” I ask, trying to insinuate an answer.

You lift your head from an old notebook on the counter, stare at my face for a moment, and then shake your head.

“No, unfortunately not.” Your smile refuses to disappear. “But I’ve lived in the Town forever, so maybe we have met somewhere. It’s a very small Town after all.”

“But I just came to the Town three days ago.”

“Three days?” You shake your head in disbelief. “Well, you must be mistaken then. Because I’ve been in the Town since I was born.”

“My apologies,” I say, backing down. “Do you have a younger sister or a cousin that looks a lot like you?”

“No, I don’t,” you say blushing slightly and giving a shake of your head.

I drink my coffee silently.

The Library’s ceiling is high. And quiet as the bottom of the sea.

Parts of the description of the Library are similar, but much of it has been reworked. The biggest difference, of course, is that the reader knows who the Librarian is. Part of the greatness of Hard-boiled Wonderland is slowly getting to know the Librarian and realizing her connection with the other half of the novel. Here we know there is a connection between boku and kimi, but we’re still unsure of how it will play out in the Town.