Category Archives: Murakami

“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.

Updates 2010/07/08

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A couple of updates to old posts. If I added them to the actual posts at this point, no one would notice, so I thought I’d make a separate post.

“Project Management Lingo – 改行”

In the comments Arline reminded me of one of the commands that can be used to count characters in Microsoft Excel and Open Office. “=len(target cell)” will count all of the characters in the target cell. Note that this is all the characters regardless of line breaks. If you’re working with material that has line breaks within cells, then the easiest way might be to open up a separate file, do the translation line by line counting the characters with =len, and then pasting the final result back into the cells of the original file.

“Underrated Phrase – そうですね”

Check out the final Collabo-Ramen video! Did you notice the way that Komuro-san was answering my questions? For each of the two questions I included in the video, she begins her response with そうですね. Note the tone that she uses – this is exactly what I was referring to in the Japan Times article. Using this そうですね when responding to questions will make your Japanese sound much more natural.

“Who will feed the Haruki Murakami fans online?”

Since I wrote this post about Murakami’s/Murakami’s publisher’s Internetal ineptitude, I noticed that my Facebook profile was devoid of Murakami. That’s strange, I thought, I could’ve sworn I had him as one of the two authors I like under the “Books” section of my profile. (The other being Barbara Tuchman. “The Zimmerman Telegram” was a weird combination of all my interests/ethnicities – intrigue between U.S., Mexico, Japan and Germany. My father’s family is Mexican-American, and my father’s mother’s family were Germans who immigrated to Mexico.) I searched for Murakami on Facebook, and sure enough, the unofficial page had been deleted. There is now an official page run by Knopf, AND it’s being updated frequently. This has all happened in the past week and a half, however, so we’ll have to wait and see if it gets properly maintained or ignored like the Random House site.

Ret’s Rink – Mixi, Free Rent, King’s Quest, Murakami

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Time for another round-up of what I’ve been writing for Japan Pulse.

“Mixi helps users socialize with new apps”

It took Facebook a while to break into Japan, but when it did, Mixi was slow to react. It looks like they are starting to get the idea. Every time I log in (which has been somewhat infrequent), I see new features and designs. The good news is that it hasn’t changed too much – it’s still a great place to interact with real, live Nihonjin. I put up messages on a couple New Orleans communities and got a reply from a Japanese couple that will be moving from France to New Orleans in July. My brain thirsts for 会話.

“Pulse Rate: ‘Free rent’ pricing aims to fill up empty apartments”

When I moved back home, I was worried it would be tough to find material for Pulse. I shouldn’t have worried – if you give to the Internet, it will give back to you. I keep the Google Keywords feed in my RSS reader and try to take a look at them every now and then. I’m convinced that TV plays a huge part in driving the ebb and flow of keyword searches (and also trends in Japan), but this was the first time I was able to prove it. I found a website describing how the term “free rent” appeared on Gacchiri Academy. Several hours later, it was at the top of the keyword search. I was able to find the official site, which has the segment almost line by line, and figure out what the deal was. Perhaps the inflexibility with rent pricing will eventually lead to the abolishment of all key money. I’m sure everyone would appreciate that.

“Big (Only) in Japan? ‘Greensleeves’”

King’s Quest! I played this back in the day on my dad’s Amiga…or maybe it was the Commodore? I can’t remember. I do remember being frustrated by the game. My dad copied it from a friend, so we didn’t have any of the manuals or anything – I had no idea what to do. My brothers and I just walked the character around, pulling carrots out of the ground, leading the goat around and falling into wells. I also remember the music – Greensleeves is the name of the tune. It was a surprise to encounter it so often in Japan.

This post was a little weak to be honest – it was fun to highlight the phenomenon (which, surprisingly, no one on the blogosphere has done yet), but I wish I could have dug a little deeper and figured out exactly WHY Greensleeves gets used as hold music. There must be someone who knows.

“Who will feed the Haruki Murakami fans online?”

Man, someone at Random House needs to be fired. Who decided that their author websites need embedded music? First of all, check out Murakami’s official English site. Yeah, the music is kind of spooky and cool…for the first five minutes or so. In the words of Mitch Hedberg, it’s like pancakes – all exciting at first, but by the end you’re fuckin’ sick of ‘em. At least Cormac McCarthy’s site doesn’t autoload the music. But, yeah, it also has music. It’s easy to excuse these guys for being born outside of the Internet generation, but come on! Their editors or publishers clearly haven’t thought this through. Maybe the editors and publishers are all old dudes, too? Oh well. William Gibson gets it. Steven Hall (granted he’s young) gets it. Their blogs take a hit when they are writing, but it’s awesome to read their posts when they do write them. Gibson had a stretch earlier this year just after he finished his latest novel where he answered a ton of reader questions about the way he writes. Very interesting stuff. The lesson is this – learn how to own your identity on the Internet. You don’t have to be a Zuckerbergian and tweet what you had for breakfast, but you should know how you’re being represented

So, yeah, hire me to do the News section on the Murakami site? I know I could do better than what they currently have. The release of 1Q84 in Japanese deserved a mention as did all the announcements about the translation release schedule and whatnot. Random House is asleep at the wheel. Inexcusable.

I’m curious to know exactly how much Murakami has to do with the Japanese 1Q84 site. Some of the posts are focused only on the people in the publishing section. Strange that Murakami would be so controlling about keeping plot details under wraps and then let other folks post freely on the official site for his book.

This user-submitted illustration of the Little People walking into someone’s mouth was my favorite. Too bad that wasn’t the reason he called the book 1Q84.

Reading Theory – Notes Increase Retention

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When I read Books 1 and 2 of 1Q84, I stormed through them, reading an average of 55 pages a day. I then promptly fell ill and did not venture far beyond the edges of my futon for the next week. (Belated apologies to some of the commenters who commented on that first post – I stopped responding once I got sick.) When I went to write my review of the book, I had a hard time remembering what had happened and an even more difficult time locating passages I wanted to quote. Doh.

For Book 3, I’m reading at a much more leisurely pace. I’m only on page 348 but have been reading for nearly three weeks, which comes to 16 pages a day. One reason I’ve been reading more slowly is that I’ve been writing more notes. Take a look:

I’m using a technique a graduate student recommended to me when I was writing my senior thesis. At the time I was complaining that it felt like Japanese was going in through my eyes and straight out the back of my head – I didn’t feel like I was retaining anything. He suggested writing little notes above paragraphs to summarize the content. They don’t have to be extensive or detailed, but even a little summary of what is happening can help you 1) make sure you are paying attention while you read, 2) make sure you are understanding what you read and 3) find passages later when you are flipping back through.

If you find an important passage or important line, you can write something more detailed. Fortunately I did that for Book 1 and 2, so I had some things to talk about in my review. For Book 3, I’ve been notating it far more extensively, so it should be much easier for me to remember later and write about.

Ret’s Rink – 1Q84, Beer vs. Mutant Beer, Shibuya Station Pub Crawl, Facebook Page

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Well, for various reasons I canceled my Europe trip. I’m bummed out about it, but it might be for the best – I’m moving back to the U.S. at the end of May to go to graduate school, and the extra time in Japan will enable me to say my goodbyes properly and to round up five years’ worth of belongings. I’m confident that I’ll get to Europe soon, maybe as soon as June or July.

How to Japonese will continue now and post-repatriation, but posting will be light until the beginning of June. Hopefully once a week. Today I’m just passing on some links with a bit of additional information.

“The knock-on effect of Murakami’s “1Q84” series”

This is my post on Japan Pulse about 1Q84 Book 3. I went to lunch in Yokohama Thursday and stopped in a bookstore after eating. The book hadn’t been released yet, but the displays were already stocked with 1Q84-related material. His complete 文庫本 back catalog, his translations, books mentioned in 1Q84. Pretty impressive. Murakami has made it easy with his prolific name-dropping. I’m about 120 pages in, and so far not much has happened, but the names keep coming. Since I wrote the article, he has started quoting extensive passages from Isak Deneson’s Out of Africa.

“Major beer companies diet excessively while craft brewers beef up”

I also wrote about the beer scene after being inspired by the Yokohama Spring Beer Party. It was on Sunday, April 11, as was the Japan Craft Beer Selection 2010 hosted by Popeye at the Bunkyo Kumin Center. The two events couldn’t be more different. I attended the Beer Selection last year, and the goal of the six and half hour event was to carefully judge all Japanese craft beers. Or at least all the beers entered in the competition. It starts with a lecture on how to judge beer, then continues to a practice tasting, after which the 100 or so participants undertake blind taste tests by style and fill out cards rating each beer’s bitterness, maltiness, aroma, mouthfeel and more. Last year they announced the winners on the spot, but this year beers that are selected continue on to the final round, which will be held on May 16th at Popeye.

The Yokohama Spring Beer Party, on the other hand, was a relaxed, picnic atmosphere. There were over two dozen beers, and it was all-you-can-drink for 2000 yen – quite a deal. Later in the afternoon there was even an impromptu 記念写真 with nearly all 500 participants along the Yokohama harbor. Several brewers were there, as were the staff from many of the Kanto-area bars. The contrast of the events, to me, showed that good beer is starting to go mainstream as well as otaku (it’s probably been otaku for a while now, actually). Very cool to see the frequency and variety of different beer events available in Japan.

Now if only we can get the tax laws changed. Seriously, someone should do something about this.

“The great Shibuya Station beer-lover’s pub crawl”

I also have a pub crawl review on CNNGo Tokyo. Five great beers from five great bars in Shibuya. I made a video of the crawl, which you can see here:

Shibuya Station Circumnavigation Great Beer Pub Crawl from Daniel Morales on Vimeo.

And finally, I made a Facebook page for How to Japonese, so feel free to follow the feed over there.

号外 – Reminder

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Just a reminder that Wednesdays I’ll be posting in Japanese over at How to Engrish. Good reading practice. See if you can find my mistakes. (There are lots of them.)

Also, I thought I’d introduce two new literature/translation blogs by frequent How to Japonese commenters Will and G Dawg. Will is blogging over at Wednesday Afternoon Picnic. He’s been translating stories from 夜のくもざる, a great little collection of Murakami super-shorts several of which I’ve tried to translate myself. G Dawg just started Old G Dawg’s Labyrinth the other day with a close look at the first page of Almost Transparent Blue. I like the header graphic on his site – looks inspired by Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

号外 – 1Q84 Part 3 Reserved

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I was at 有隣堂 today and noticed that they have started taking reservations for 1Q84 Book 3. The signs say that they expect it to sell out immediately. Here’s what my reservation slip looks like:

The price is 1995 yen, almost 200 yen more expensive than Book 1 and 2, which makes me wonder if, Egads!, this part is longer than the first two. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

No payment is necessary up front, so get to your closest 本屋 and 予約 a copy for yourself. The book will be released on April 16.