Category Archives: Murakami

Metaphors

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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: More Drawers, Phone Calls.

We’re looking at Book 2 again on page 336, and this time the note to myself is “world is a big model room – nice.” Let’s check it out:

Aomame slowly looked around the inside of the room again. This is like a model room, she thought. It was clean, had a sense of uniformity, and all the necessary items had been arranged. However, it was cold and lacked any individuality – it was just an imitation. Dying in a place like this probably wouldn’t be a very pleasant way to die. But even with a nicer backdrop, was there really such thing as a pleasant way to die? As she considered this, Aomame realized that the world in which we live is itself something like a giant model room in the end. We come in, take a seat, have some tea, watch the scenery outside the window, and when the time comes we say our thanks and leave. All of the furniture inside is nothing more than makeshift knock-offs. Even the moon shining through the window could be an imitation made of paper.

I can’t remember who I had this conversation with – possibly a translator friend – but I remember talking with someone about Murakami, and that person remarked that the strongest part of Murakami’s writing is his metaphors. He can write damn good metaphors. This one appealed to me when I first read it, and I still think it’s pretty good. It has that ever-present Murakami theme that reality isn’t much more than a place where we eat, live, shit, and fuck before we die. やれやれ.

The passage also refers to the “It’s Only a Paper Moon” epigraph. I can’t remember if he refers to it this specifically anywhere earlier in the novel, but the moon is important throughout the book.

One interesting language note: Murakami mentions that he wrote the book entirely in third person – his first one – but he still has lines like this: もし私がこんなところで死ぬことになるとしたら、それはあまり心愉しい死に方とは言えないだろう. (Which I rendered above as “Dying in a place like this probably wouldn’t be a very pleasant way to die.”) I’m not certain, but I feel like Murakami uses the 私 to show that this is being filtered through Aomame’s consciousness, so I guess it equates to something like free indirect speech in English? It’s first person kind of, but it’s actually third person. The goal is to make it feel like that initial “she thought” (彼女は思った) covers the entire paragraph, which is why I translated it as Aomame might think it to herself in English rather than using the “If I” that you might normally use. Anyone have thoughts on this?

I was also curious about tense. It jumps to present in the “As she considered this” sentence. Does that seem to work?

One last note – papier-mâché is はりぼて in Japanese. The Google Images search makes this pretty clear. The word gets used twice in the passage above. The first usage is just はりぼて, but the second is 紙で作られたはりぼて, which would seem redundant unless there’s another meaning for the word, and Yahoo Dictionary notes the other meaning is metaphorical, so I went with “imitation.”

Phone Calls

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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: More Drawers.

Okay, let me set the scene: I’m listening to Zoot Sims, I’ve had a beer (and hell I’ll have another – it’s Murakami Fest and I don’t have class tomorrow), the cats have been fed, and now it’s time to translate a nugget of 1Q84.

Today’s nugget comes courtesy of Book 2 page 125, above which I wrote the note “random phone calls → WUBC & Yoru no kumozaru.” Let’s see what the page has to say – we’re in Chapter 6, so we’re following Tengo, whom you should be familiar with from “Town of Cats”:

The telephone rang just after nine on Tuesday night. Tengo was reading a book while listening to music – his favorite time of the day. He read as much as he wanted before he went to sleep, and when he got tired, he fell asleep right where he was.

It was the first telephone ring he had heard in a while, and it seemed to have a sort of ominous echo. It wasn’t a call from Komatsu. Phone calls from Komatsu had a different sort of ring. For a moment, Tengo wasn’t sure whether he should pick up the phone or not. He let it ring five times. Then he lifted the needle on the record player and picked up the phone. It might have been his girlfriend calling.

“Is this the residence of Tengo Kawana?” a man said. The voice was that of a middle-aged man, deep and soft. It was an unfamiliar voice.

“This is he,” Tengo said cautiously.

“I’m sorry for calling so late at night. My name is Yasuda,” the man said. His voice was very neutral. Neither friendly nor hostile. Neither businesslike nor intimate.

Yasuda? Tengo couldn’t remember anyone by the name of Yasuda.

“I’ve called because there’s something I need to tell you,” the person said. And then he paused for a brief moment, like he was inserting a bookmark into the pages of a book.

And that’s all you get. Otherwise I would spoiler, and spoiler is no fun.

This passage illustrates Murakami’s near obsession with phone calls as well as 1Q84’s unfortunate reliance on phone calls to drive the plot. As noted in my note above, Murakami began his magnum opus Wind-up Bird Chronicle (WUBC) with a random phone call (which also happened on a Tuesday!), and he used it in a number of stories in Yoru no kumozaru, a collection of short-shorts, notably “Eel,” which features May Kasahara, another character from Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Something about that ability of the telephone to connect people in two completely different places seems to fascinate Murakami, and he uses it often to show how individuals often occupy two entirely different “worlds,” whether they realize it or not. Magically, the telephone can connect these worlds and bring people together, enabling them to communicate in ways they could not before.

Now that I think about it, Norwegian Wood ends with a telephone call between Toru and Midori. I’ve always thought that Rubin’s translation of that final line was interesting. He creatively invokes death:

Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.

Whereas Birnbaum does not:

I held onto the line to Midori from there in the middle of nowhere.

The Japanese is:

僕はどこでもない場所のまん中から緑を呼びつづけていた。

Birnbaum’s translation feels a little awkward. I still haven’t read his translation all the way through, but there were a number of places that made me wonder if the final text had been edited by a non-native speaker.

Okay, I’m rambling now, but you get the idea – phones are powerful symbols in Murakami’s fiction, and 1Q84 continues this trend.

More Drawers

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Now begins the Fourth Annual How to Japonese Murakami Fest!

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.

For those of you who don’t know how this works, check out the past three 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

I thought I’d start with something recent. Murakami serialized another set of essays in AnAn over the past year, and the collected edition, Murakami Radio 2, came out in July. In the introduction to the collection, Murakami continues his recent obsession with the drawer metaphor for writing:

Novelists need lots of drawers inside their heads when they write novels. Little episodes, specific knowledge, vague memories, a personal worldview (or something along those lines) – all these come in handy quite often when writing novels. But if I go and dump all of that material into essays, I’m not able to use it in novels very well. So I’m stingy (as it were) and secret it away into drawers. However, when I finish a novel, there are always a couple drawers I didn’t end up using, and some of those can sometimes make good material for essays.

Drawer is 抽斗, which Murakami mentioned in his interview with Monkey Business before the publication of 1Q84. I noticed it a couple of times in 1Q84, and Matt over at No-Sword examined the origins of the character.

He goes on to compare the collection of essays to “oolong tea made by beer companies” – it’s not his main business, so he’s able to relax a bit (肩の力を抜いて) and write off the cuff.

This is quickly apparent, as the essays are all really short, have no connecting theme, and often start quite lightly with questions for the first sentence: Do you like to drive? Hello, runners – how are you doing? Are you the kind of person that angers quickly? Did you know there are some socks where the left and right are shaped differently? Do you read Dazai Osamu? Have you been to Ireland? Do you know about seal oil?

It’s really a shame that he doesn’t publish this material online – they feel much more like blog posts than essays (as he calls them), and he does have a history of publishing material online. Also, then it would have been free and not 1700 yen.

Speaking of writing off the cuff, for free, and on the Internet – that’s what I do! I’ve been busy with the start of classes and unable to prep my translations this year, so starting next week, I’ll be posting short translations that I pick randomly from 1Q84, an excerpt of which was just published in The New Yorker as the short story “Town of Cats” (arguably the best section of the book). I took notes, so hopefully I’ll be able to find some interesting passages. And if they suck, just remember it was all free.

Cool Passive Phrase – やられた！

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I have an article in The Japan Times today, this time about the passive tense in Japanese. After introducing a couple of phrases that helped me understand how the passive tense works in Japanese, I discuss Murakami’s amazing sentence from his Mediterranean travel diary, which I examined during Murakami-palooza 2008. My translations then and now are slightly different. What do you think? The new one is a bit smoother.

I also talk about the awesome phrase やられた！ as an example. I highly recommend using this exclamatory phrase as frequently as possible. It will earn laughs, especially in situations where you aren’t really that やられたd.

If, however, this happens:

Then you have truly been やられたd. That image is one of the results of a Google Images search for やられた.

“The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Lastly

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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.

“The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Saying Goodbye

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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 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.

“The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Old Dreams

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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 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.

“The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – The Library

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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 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.

“The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs

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Year number three of Murakami Nobel Prize Watch on How to Japonese begins…now.

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.

The past two years I’ve posted a smorgasbord of Murakami translation from across his catalog. (See Year One [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and Year Two [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].) This year, I’d like to focus and spread out a longer piece over the entire month. Thus, I’ll be clipping out some of my favorite scenes from a story titled “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall.”

As I’ve written previously, “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” was the rough draft of sorts for Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was published as a novella in the September, 1980 edition of Bungakukai. In commentary included with his Complete Works, Murakami calls it a failed story, but there are actually a lot of very nice scenes, and it was the story where he invented the Town and its herds of golden-fleeced unicorns, so how terrible can it be, right?

I’ve already written a little about the beginning of the story as well as the end. This week’s scene comes from the beginning before the boku narrator gets to the Town but after he’s damned his own ability to relate words effectively to another person:

You told me about the Town.

At dusk one summer night when we were eighteen, we walked toward the upper reaches of the river, smelling the sweet smell of grass as we went. Not that we had a particular destination in mind – we were just walking upstream. We climbed countless weirs on the rapids and watched the fish in clear pools. We must’ve been on our way back from the swimming pool because we were both barefoot. The clear, cold water washed our ankles, and the fine sand at the bottom of the river brushed softly against our feet like new cotton.

You had your yellow heeled sandals in a veneer shoulder bag and walked several steps ahead of me from sandbar to sandbar. Small seeds of grass stuck to your wet legs like pellets of light, and the last rays of afternoon sunlight made shadows shake on the surface of the river.

When you got tired of walking, you sat down in the summer grass and looked up at the sky. In the silence, the dim darkness began to enclose our bodies.

It felt strange. Almost as though your body and my mind were linked by thousands and thousands of invisible threads. Every blink of your eye, every faint movement of your lips was enough to make my mind tremble.

We didn’t have names. We were only thoughts above the grass by the riverside in the summer when we were eighteen. Neither you, nor I had names. The river, too, had no name. That was the rule. Above us, stars began to twinkle. The stars also had no names. We lay down on the grass in a world without names.

“The Town is surrounded by a tall wall,” you said. “It’s not a very big town, but it’s not small enough to suffocate you.”

And this is how the Town came to have a wall.

As you continued to tell the story, the Town came to have a river and three bridges, a bell tower and a Library, and then an abandoned foundry and a set of run-down apartment buildings.

In the faint light of the summer evening, we sat still and looked down at the Town. Our shoulders rested against each other.

The the real me lives in the Town surrounded by a wall, you said. But it took me eighteen years to find the Town. And to find the real me…

“What is the real you doing in the Town?”

“Working in the Library,” you said proudly. “Work there is from six in the evening to eleven.”

“Would I be able to meet the real you if I went there?”

“Yes, of course. As long as you can find the Town. And then…”

That was when you clammed up and blushed. But I could feel the words that you hadn’t put into words.

And then, you’d have to really want me. Those were your words. I held you. But what I held on that summer evening was no more than your shadow.

The tone in the Japanese is sad and slow and fantastic. It feels almost like reality, but not quite; like a boku in objective reality is walking along a real river with a real girl and the interaction with her is so intense that it becomes abstracted into this metaphor of a Town that he must enter in order to discover the real kimi. The woman in the story is referred to consistently in second person except for a few instances where the narrator lapses into kanojo, which I think was probably accidental.

The hardest word to translate in this passage was 流砂止めの滝 (りゅうさどめのたき), which seems to literally translation as “landslide prevention waterfalls.” Googling the phrase really only turn up the story, so it’s hard to know exactly what Murakami was referring to, but a friend helped me find the English word “weir,” which I think is what he’s talking about. A Google Images search of “weir” turns up photos of small waterfall-like dams (weirs) that you often see in Japan. (The long, wide rivers in Kyoto come to mind.)

Emergency Rinks – 1Q84 Book 3 Review, Tachiyomi Apps, Beer Gardens

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Qwick! Emergency Rink Time!

“Unresolved mystery from the mind of Murakami”

This is my review of 1Q84 Book 3. It was tough to review this volume without providing some semblance of plot summary for the first two books, so avoid it if you are waiting for a spoiler-free English translation. Although, to be honest, one thing I’ve realized from reading 1Q84 is that Murakami’s fiction is process-based and not plot-based. You’re not reading to figure out what happens; you’re reading to experience the action of the novel along with the protagonist. So spoilers shouldn’t matter all that much. This is also why I think Murakami is weak when writing in third-person: he depends so heavily on tying a reader’s feelings to a single character (easy to do in first person) to make the process feel more immediate that he can’t write complex third-person fiction. The flip flopping of chapters is kind of a weak way to mix up the point of view. At least in other novels where he used the technique he was telling different stories. Ugg. Depressing. SHORT STORIES. WRITE SOME SHORT STORIES.

“Big (only) in Japan? Rooftop beer gardens”

A little extension on the linguistic aspect of this article. Japanese commenters on various websites note that “beer gardens” are ビアガーデン rather than ビールガーデン because it’s closer to the English pronunciation of the word “beer,” but that begs the question why beer isn’t always pronounced like that. One possible answer is that ビア is one syllable shorter, making the longer compound “beer garden” one syllable more efficient and easier to say. It also prevents there from being two awkward long vowels that result with ビールガーデン.

“Tachiyomi: Do it on your device”

I can’t believe that this app hasn’t existed until now. I think the only excuse is probably the rights for the magazines themselves. Although, the real secret is that most people tachiyomi comic monthlies – not magazines – so it’s easier to read the “whole” issue. I bet they target the current episode of the stories they follow and then just skim the rest of the issue.