With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Murakami wrote Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985, but he had the original idea for the “End of the World” sections five years earlier when he wrote the novella (中編小説, literally “medium-length fiction”) “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” (街と、その不確かな壁, English translation of the title borrowed from Jay Rubin’s Music of Words). It was published in the September 1980 edition of Bungakukai.

In the story, an anonymous boku goes to a walled Town (街) in search of the second person kimi (君), the “true self” of a past love. He enters the Town as “the Prophet” (予言者, which Birnbaum translated as “Dreamreader”) and kimi is working in the Library as the librarian. Just as in the novel, boku has his shadow removed by the Gatekeeper when he enters the Town, and the shadow gets weaker and weaker over time. Boku is torn between his happiness in the Town with kimi and his shadow’s desire to escape from the Town’s eerie sense of perfection. Murakami makes very different choices at the end of the story, and I have translated a small portion that may be of interest to anyone who has read Hard-boiled Wonderland (and shouldn’t spoil the book for those who haven’t read it):

The Wall disappears.

“It’s over,” I say. “Want to go?”

“Sure.”

We take off our coats and shoes in the snow and then fasten our belts together.

“Don’t get separated. No matter what,” my shadow says. “If we get separated, it’s all over.”

I nod. The two sets of black coats and black shoes are a strange sight on the snow.

“There’s a chance I’m wrong,” my shadow blurts out. “I might have wrapped you up in this for my own convenience.”

“You think?”

“I suddenly had that thought after hearing you talk with the Wall.”

“Don’t get discouraged,” I say. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. If we make it out to land, let’s get to know each other again.”

We share a firm handshake with our belts attached. Then we take a deep breath and dive together headfirst into the pool, cold as ice.

The next instant I lose consciousness.

Murakami writes the story off as a failure, and it is definitely weak; grammatically he uses the same patterns over and over (notably ばかり and だけ), and there seems to be a lack of editing (on several occasions he lapses back to 彼女 instead of 君). But if you take into consideration that he wrote “The Town” between Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, it also looks like a young writer boldly expanding his range. Thematically it’s very different from Hard-boiled Wonderland. Murakami is more concerned here with the uncertain nature of language and how that affects human interaction, whereas in Hard-boiled Wonderland he focuses on society and the mind and how the two affect individual existence.

If you are a true Murakami nut and want something cool to read, I recommend ordering a copy from the National Diet Library.

12 hours on a plane. What better to do than translate some Murakami? I used a bit of my time to translate part of the Mainichi Shimbun’s new three-part interview with Murakami. I stopped right around where the spoilers started, so you can read safely:

Haruki Murakami Talks 1Q84 – Exclusive Interview 1 – “Book 3 by next summer”

In May the author Haruki Murakami released the full-length novel 1Q84 (Book 1, Book 2; Shinchosha, 1890 yen each), which has since become a huge talking-point. Murakami recently responded to the Mainichi Shimbun’s interview. The story features a layered plot that depicts “the struggle between individual and the system” set in Japan in the 1980s. For the first time, Murakami makes it clear that he is in the process of writing an additional third part. Mainichi asked his for his thoughts as a writer.

First of all “1985”

Currently both volumes of 1Q84 have gone through 18 printings and achieved million-seller status, with Book 1 selling 1,230,000 copies and Book 2 1,000,000 copies. There has been an extraordinary response, including, among other things, the publication of several books of commentary.

“I think that I have about 150,000 – 200,000 established readers for my novels. When it’s around that many, I get kind of a sense of how my work is being received. When it gets up to 500,000 or 1,000,000, it’s really hard to tell who is reading it and how they feel about it.”

The mysterious title is based on George Orwell’s novel 1984 (’49), but there is a secret story behind it.

“At first I was going to title it 1985. But while I was writing it, I talked with Michael Radford, the director of the movie version of Orwell’s work, and learned that the British writer Anthony Burgess was writing a book called 1985. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to change it to 1Q84, and when I finished writing, I searched around on the Internet and realized that Akira Asada had actually released a music cassette/book set under the same title. At that point the galley revisions were already underway, so I let Asada-san know. And so that’s how it eventually ended up like it did.”

It’s been three months since the publication. Can we ask what you think of the criticism you’ve received?

“I haven’t read any at all. I don’t ever read it, but I took special care this time since I’m writing Book 3. I want to be able to focus on writing from a fresh state of mind. I thought it would be totally finished when I completed 1 and 2. And that’s what I was thinking when I structured it on Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” – that it would be complete with two volumes. But after a little while, I started to feel like I had to write 3. I wondered how the rest of the story would unfold. As far as the timeframe, I’d like to put it out as quickly as possible, so I’m thinking next summer as a goal.”

Update:

Oops over here, too. Anthony Burgess died back in 1993, and his book 1985 was written back in 1978. You can go check the Japanese yourself and figure out what I did wrong. If you want to see another translation of the interview, check out this link.

With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement. You can see the other entries in this series here: 1, 2.

It’s no secret that my favorite of Murakami’s novels is Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I’ve also made it pretty clear that Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round is my favorite short-story collection and, in my opinion, the turning point of his early career. I found Hard-boiled in a small New Orleans bookstore called Beaucoup Books in the summer of 1999. Sadly it closed after Katrina. Dead Heat I bought at a used bookstore near Waseda University at some point in 2003. I took it with me on a month-long trip to Southeast Asia in February 2004, determined to spend my free time reading Japanese if I was going to be traveling outside of Japan. It was the first Japanese book I ever slogged through. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to spend the next year writing my senior thesis about it.

As I started to research the collection, it came as a surprise to discover that both Hard-boiled and Dead Heat were published in 1985; Hard-boiled in June and Dead Heat in October. Murakami actually serialized the Dead Heat stories under the title “A View of the Town” from ’83 to ’84, but a year later he added the story “Lederhosen” along with a substantial introduction for the hardback collected edition. The central image of the introduction is the dead heat on a merry-go-round: life never gets us anywhere – life in modern society is strange, and man is helpless for the most part. At least that’s the way Murakami claimed to feel after recounting the allegedly true (and later admittedly fictional) stories in the collection. The best we can hope for is to share our own strange stories with each other and develop a sense of empathy.

I dug it. Still do. So you can imagine how excited I was when on March 6th 2005, at the height of thesis madness, I discovered this passage from Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of Hard-boiled that links the two works:

She rolled down her panty hose as a bluesy Ray Charles came on with Georgia on My Mind. I closed my eyes, put both feet up on the table and swizzled the minutes around in my head like the ice in a drink. Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time. The clothes on the floor, the music, the conversation. Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows. Like a dead heat on the merry-go-round. No one pulls ahead, no one gets left behind. You always get to the same spot.

“It seems so long ago,” I said, my eyes still shut.

“Of course, silly,” she said mysteriously, taking the glass from my hand and undoing the buttons of my shirt. Slowly, deliberately, as if stringing green beans.

“How’d you know?”

“I just know,” she said. She put her lips to my bare chest. Her long hair swept over my stomach. Eyes closed, I gave my body over to sensation. I thought about the suzuki, I though about the nail clippers, I thought about the snail on the cleaners’ front stoop. I opened my eyes and drew her to me, reaching around behind to undo the hook of her brassiere. There was no hook.

“Up front,” she prompted.

Things do evolve after all. (364)

Whoa, I thought. There’s the “dead heat” image, right there on page 364. I quickly busted out my Japanese copy to see what exactly was going on:

彼女がパンティー・ストッキングをくるくると丸めるように脱いでいるところで曲はレイ・チャールスの『ジョージア・オン・マイ・マインド』にかわった。私は目を閉じて両脚をテーブルの上に載せ、オン・ザ・ロックのグラスの中で氷をまわすみたいに、頭の中で時間をまわしてみた。何もかもがずっと昔に一度起こったことみたいだった。脱ぐ服とバックグランド・ミュージックと科白が少しずつ変化しているだけだ。でもそんな違いになんてたいした意味はない。ぐるぐるとまわっていつも同じところにたどりつくのだ。それはまるでメリー・ゴー・ラウンドの馬に乗ってデッド・ヒートをやっているようなものなのだ。誰も抜かないし、誰にも抜かれないし、同じところにしかたどりつかない。

「何もかも昔に起こったみたいだ」と私は目を閉じたまま言った。

「もちろんよ」と彼女は言った。そして私の手からグラスをとり、シャツのボタンをいんげんの筋をとるときのようにひとつずつゆっくりと外していった。

「どうしてわかる？」

「知ってるからよ」と彼女は言った。そして私の裸の胸に唇をつけた。彼女の長い髪が私の腹の上にかかっていた。「みんな昔に一度起こったことなのよ。ただぐるぐるとまわっているだけ。そうでしょ？」

私は目を閉じたまま彼女の唇と髪の感覚に体をまかせた。私はすずきのことを考え、爪切りのことを考え、洗濯屋の店先の縁台にいたかたつむりのことを考えた。世界は数多くの示唆に充ちているのだ。

私は目を開けて彼女をそっと抱き寄せ、ブラジャーのホックを外すために手を背中にまわした。ホックはなかった。

「前よ」と彼女は言った。

世界はたしかに進化しているのだ。（下、279-280）

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. There are sentences missing! And not just any sentences. The single most important sentence in the entire book had been left out. I opened a new document and started to translate, sending it to another Murakami otaku shortly thereafter. I give you that translation unedited with the caveat that I produced this four years ago, so you must be gentle. It’s not bad, but there are definitely things I would change now. It does represent the Japanese sentence structure relatively effectively. I have bolded the sentences that are not included in the published translation:

Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” was playing as she took off her stockings, rolling them up into balls. I closed my eyes, put both legs on the table and tumbled time inside my head the same way I was swirling my whiskey on the rocks. It was like anything and everything had happened once before long ago. The discarded clothes, the background music, our whole conversation…it all kept changing little by little. But there wasn’t really any meaning to the changes. Everything spins around and around but always arrives at the same point. Like a dead heat on a merry-go-round. No one wins, no one loses, and you always end up in the same place.

“It feels like anything and everything happened a long time ago,” I said with my eyes closed.

“Of course,” she said. Then she took the glass from my hand and slowly undid the buttons of my shirt, one by one, as if she was podding string beans.

“How do you know?”

“‘Cause I know,” she said. Then she put her lips to my bare chest. Her long hair draped over my stomach. “We all happened one time long ago. We’re just spinning around and around. Right?”

I kept my eyes closed and let the sensations of her hair and lips run through my body. I thought about the sea bass, I thought about the nail clippers, I thought about the snail on the bench in front of the Laundromat. The world is full of little tricks.

I opened my eyes, gently pressed her against my body and circled my hand around her back to undo the hook on her bra. There was no hook.

“In front,” she said.

The world is definitely evolving.

The first and last of the bolded sentences are neither here nor there, but those three in the middle are critical. At this point in the novel, Murakami has spent several hundred pages setting up his two narrators – watashi and boku in the Japanese – and slowly, subtly developing the connection between the two. We know that the narrator of the End of the World is basically the internal presence of the narrator of the Hard-boiled Wonderland of near-future Tokyo. Certain things – paperclips, songs – are able to cross the barrier between the two worlds and make it into the narrator’s subconsciousness. Both of them are involved with librarians, but it’s never clear if the Wall of the End of the World precludes any true interaction between Self and Other.

This passage provides the answer. The narrator, facing his own death in a matter of days, takes a moment to enjoy the array of sensual input that surrounds him – booze, music, the touch of his girlfriend. He thinks of a “dead heat on a merry-go-round,” a representation of how reality feels to him, and then, without any prompting at all, the girlfriend says exactly what he was thinking to himself: we’re just spinning around and around. It would be easy to write this off as coincidence, but I prefer to read it as Murakami making the statement that there can be real connection between people; the librarian picks the line straight out of his head because they are so closely, so genuinely connected.

I have no idea whether Birnbaum or his editor made the choice to cut these lines, so I can’t really fault him, especially not after the incredible poetry of his translation – notably the line “Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows.” Brilliant. To be fair, next week I’ll highlight a missing sentence from a Rubin translation.

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

People often equate Haruki Murakami’s boku narrator with the author himself. Boku has great taste in music, is always hanging out with attractive, quirky women, drinks nice whiskey and tons of coffee, and is really laid back. But in the end, while he might share some traits with Murakami, boku is a fictional character.

Readers who are looking for Murakami’s own personal voice don’t have to look too far (as long as they can read Japanese). In the late 90s he answered reader questions on his website. These have since been collected and published with the title 『「そうだ、村上さんに聞いてみよう」と世間の人々が村上春樹にとりあえずぶっつける282大疑問に果たして村上さんはちゃんと答えられるのか？』, which Jay Rubin has translated as “That’s it! Let’s Ask Murakami!” Say the People and They Try Flinging 282 Questions at Haruki Murakami, But Can Murakami Really Find Decent Answers to Them All?

The questions are fairly random in subject matter and tone, ranging from serious to playful. Many of them ask about his writing. Some of the best ones are the strange ones, one of which I’ve translated for this week:

Big Question 42
Do you put condoms in the refrigerator?
At 3:56 PM, 97.8.5

I’m sorry to ask this all of the sudden, but are condoms something that should be kept in the refrigerator? (I’m housesitting for a male friend, and I found some in the butter tray when I was cleaning the fridge.) Japanese teacher living in Los Angeles, U.S.A.

It must be one of the following:

① They feel good when they’re cold.
② He can get them when somebody says, hey, bring me some more wine.
③ He couldn’t think of anywhere else to keep them.
④ He eats them on toast.
(40-41)

Well, my 1Q84 review is online. I can’t say enough about the guys at Néojaponisme. They did a fantastic job helping me turn my thoughts on 1Q84 into a cohesive article. Major props to Matt over at No-sword.

This is as good a time as any to give a postmortem on my 1Q84 predictions and add a few thoughts about the book. Some very vague spoiler-ish type material is included, but nothing too critical; still, read at your own risk.

Prediction 1: It’s going to be a monster.

Verdict: Yes

This was a gimme prediction. I needed one to guarantee I didn’t embarrass myself with a bagel. At 1055 pages it’s gigantic, but we all knew that going in; that was one of the few things Murakami DID reveal about the novel. Ben Dooley at The Millions noted that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is longer, but only when you take into account Wind-up Bird’s belated third volume. It still only edges out 1Q84 by a meager 100 pages or so. If Murakami adds a third volume to 1Q84, it will easily crush Wind-up Bird.

That said, unless Murakami adds a 700 page third volume with 20 new characters and lots of action, Wind-up Bird will still feel longer. There are more characters and more things happen. And there are no coddamn “Little People” in Wind-up Bird (this will make more sense in a few years). 「ほうほう」と俺が言う。

Prediction 2: He will not re-work a previous short story or novel.

Verdict: Yes

Alright! I’m really happy I got this right, but as mentioned in the prediction, I was hoping he would incorporate something old. Using old material forces him to edit and refine. He’s had a lot of success with that technique (Hard-boiled Wonderland, Norwegian Wood, Wind-up Bird, Sputnik Sweetheart), perhaps because it’s the only form of editing he’s getting. In a college class, I once heard a professor compare the relationship between author and editor in Japan to one of sensei and student – the editor accepts the manuscript from the writer and thanks him deeply before taking it straight to the press.

And this book feels like it could lose some weight. If, say, it had been edited down into one volume, then he could have written a kick-ass second volume to wrap things up. But he takes his sweet time, dragging six months of calendar time in the novel out over 1000 pages.

Prediction 3: World War II will be a theme.

Verdict: No

What a terrible call. The answer was sitting there right in that section of the article I quoted, but I didn’t realize it. Murakami does not use WWII as a theme, but he does use religious cults as a theme. Yes, there is one section in the novel where WWII is mentioned, but it’s brief, not fully connected to other sections of the novel, and there is nothing about the brutality of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific. More about the cult topic below.

Prediction 4: It’s going to be great.

Verdict: No

Well, points to me for being optimistic, but this is not one of Murakami’s better works. I think it’s clear from the beginning of my review that Murakami’s best year was 1985. That five-year period from ’82 to ’87 (A Wild Sheep Chase to Norwegian Wood) is just incredible, and ’85 is, in retrospect, the peak. For whatever reason, his post-Norwegian Wood novels have been all over the place, including Wind-up Bird. That’s one thing 1Q84 did to me – it has changed my opinion of Wind-up Bird. I remember enjoying it the two times I read it, but looking back at it through this most recent novel, it seems more like an unstable collage of randomness, not unlike Kafka on the Shore. In all three novels, there are discussions of WWII that don’t really fit in with the rest of the novel. Wind-up Bird is the strongest of the three, but it’s nowhere close to Hard-boiled Wonderland in terms of construction. Murakami’s technique seems to be much stronger on a smaller scale, like afterdark or A Wild Sheep Chase. Hard-boiled Wonderland seems to be an exception since he had to revise an old work and admittedly rewrote the ending after his wife didn’t like it. (Rubin mentions this on page 115 of his book, referring to the supplement to the Complete Works).

Prediction 5: There will be a flush of short stories later this year.

Verdict: Unknown

We’ll have to wait and see what he produces next, but I imagine that he’s already at work on something. He’s a machine.

Prediction 6ish: The Aum attack will be a theme.

Verdict: Kind of.

After seeing Dmitri Kovalenin’s livejournal and his commenter’s research showing that 1Q84 is some kind of weird gene-thing, I brought up the fact that the Aum attack could be a topic. Well, cults definitely take up a good part of Book 1, but not for the reason we thought – sarin gas has nothing to do with the book. So I’m giving myself half a point here. It seems like Murakami tries to address the cult mindset, combine that with the idea of a similarly powerful groupthink situation, and the fuck everything up with some weird fucking moral quandary (that involves baby-raping, no less). (Yes, baby-raping. Well, more like statutory “rape.” But that can be our little secret until the translation comes out.)

The cult theme, however, gets dropped for the most part in Book 2, so I guess this should really only be a quarter of a point, which means…

2.25/5 = EPIC FAIL! (Although I could end up 3.25/6 depending on how his short stories pan out.) Oh well. It was fun. It pains me even to think it, but Murakami may be losing a step. But hey hey hey, don’t think about that, let’s look at one of his old short stories!

“The Twins and the Sunken Continent” is a great little short story. It was almost unreal to sink back into that same mellow tone courtesy of Murakami’s infamous boku. I started reading the story a year and a half ago but didn’t get around to finishing it until earlier this year. Some bloggy blog blog type thoughts:

– There’s this amazing scene where boku has returned to his office after seeing the photo of the twins. The place is a mess, but before he starts cleaning he chills out with a cup of coffee that he is forced to stir with a pen because the spoons are dirty. Such a simple scene, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the story, I think because the physical mess of the office mirrors his mental confusion, and he just kind of sits with it for a few moments, quietly enjoying a cup of coffee, before he begins to pick up the pieces.

– I’ve always been jealous of how Murakami narrators can just throw down their cups of coffee. The boku here has one at a cafe, and then two more, maybe three, in short order back at the office. And if he was visiting a client, you can bet that they probably served him a cup, too! Hard-boiled Wonderland has that great scene where he drinks a thermos of coffee and eats sandwiches with the old scientist. I start twitching after two cups and then go into an extreme crash an hour or two later, which is why I normally drink coffee in the afternoons, tea in the morning. Sometimes I wish I could drink coffee like boku, but maybe it’s healthier that I can’t.

– I find it very interesting that Murakami decided to write about his old boku after writing Hard-boiled Wonderland. As mentioned in the article, he wanted to go back and see the character again (along with the Sheep Man) after finishing Norwegian Wood (which resulted in Dance Dance Dance). “The Twins and the Sunken Continent” shows that it wasn’t just a one time thing. For the first 10 years of his career, it was a pattern that mirrors the way he goes from long novels to short stories.

– Loss is the main theme that this story shares with 1Q84. It’s kind of spooky how similar the language is. In both case he’s using 失われている. It’s a stranger choice of words in 1Q84, and I think Murakami uses it purposefully to stand out. It will be very interesting to see how it gets translated. In “The Twins,” it’s much more natural.

– Also interesting that Murakami uses the Sun and the Moon as his poles of reality in “The Twins.” In 1Q84, there is a very similar metaphor at play, and a change in the poles signifies a drastic change in reality.

– The dream discussion sequence is also classic Murakami – a character desperately trying to use language to explain something that is totally unreal but vital. If you look back through his works, I’m willing to bet that every single one uses storytelling in this way somehow. This is probably why he’s so much stronger in the first person – Murakami, I think, has strong doubts about the ability of language to accurately describe reality, or unreality, but that struggle is interesting, and it’s something that almost all of us have experienced at some point.

– There’s also an interesting music connection that I failed to mention in the review. In 1Q84, Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” comes up, and actually the novel itself is structured in the same way – two volumes of twenty-four. (Someone far smarter than I am will explain what this means. A scary thing to think about is the fact that there are actually 96 pieces of music in “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – both prelude and fugue for each major and minor key. Is Murakami going to write another 1000 pages?) In “The Twins,” boku puts on a piece of lute music by Bach as he cleans his office.

– Reading this story, I got the feeling that the twins weren’t real people. They seem much closer to Murakami’s poor aunt from the story “A Poor-Aunt Story” – a physical representation of an emotional state, one that is different for everyone. Rubin argues that the poor aunt stands for “everything unpleasant that we push out of our minds by subtly suggesting things we ought to know but have managed to suppress” (Rubin 60). (There must be some long German word that has the exact same meaning. Anyone? Bueller?) The twins, then, represent an idealized past, one that is lost and can never be reclaimed. Life with the twins was easy – boku had a pleasant life at home uncomplicated by sex; simply compassion and warmth. The twins with another man look different because to that man the situation that makes him feel the same as boku did is different. The two of them feel the same emotion, but they require different input for them to get to that emotion. The twins are the physical representation of that emotion.

On second thought, they could also represent a point in life where one is finally comfortable being alone (but lonely) in the world, assuming that the twins weren’t real people and that boku was living alone. This may require further more sober contemplation.

とりあえず、以上です。

(Graphic courtesy of Ian Lynam and Neojaponisme.)

What’s that book he’s got there…

Hmm…

Ohh…

Yes, the street date has been broken for 1Q84. (Do we call it “one kew eight four” or “q-teen eighty four” in English?) I saw a tweet about a possible early release and decided to drop by the closest bookstore after work. Sure enough, there were copies of Book 1 sitting next to the other new hardbacks. They didn’t have Book 2, which is probably fine since I won’t be needing it for another month or so.

Immediate first impressions:

– It was expensive. 1800 yen, or just about $18. Do hardcovers in the US cost $36?

– It’s massive. 554 pages to be exact. I believe Book 2 puts the combined length at over 1000 pages.

– It probably features chapters with alternating stories. I’ve really only read through the index, but this is made clear by some kanji after the chapter numbers. Can’t confirm this because I haven’t read anything yet. Also haven’t looked up the kanji.

– The chapter titles are Pynchon/Fariña-esque. Also similar to Wind-up Bird. They’re more phrase-like than noun-like. At one point they also refer to “readers” (読者), although this could very well be readers within the book and not me and you.

– It takes place between April and June. The months (4月ー6月) are on the cover. I believe Book 2 has a different set of months.

– It looks more dense than his past books. Big blocky paragraphs. Not so much dialogue and short phrasing as in old works.

– It smells like a book.

I read the first sentence already. It’s going to be hard for me to stop myself from reading the rest until Friday, but that’s what I’ll do. After I wake up and have breakfast, I’ll dive right in. See you Friday morning.