Category Archives: Murakami

The Wind

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interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement.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

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

Listen to the Wind Sing

1

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

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

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

 

Boobs

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With the goal of stirring up even more interest in Murakami between now and mid-October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, I will post a small piece of unpublished Murakami translation once a week from now until the announcement.


 

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

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

おっぱいを出すのも勝手なら、出されたおっぱいを見るのも勝手である。

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A まち is a 町 is a 街

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I did a rewrite of my senior thesis and it has been published on Neojaponisme, a Japanese culture web journal. I wrote about the Haruki Murakami short story collection Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round (『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』). Before it was a collection, it was serialized under the title Views of the City (『街の眺め』).

While I used the word “city” in the translation of that set of stories, the actual word is 街, which is pronounced まち and is loosely related to the other まち, 町.

町 can either be either a town (e.g. 西会津町) or a neighborhood within a city or ward (e.g. 門前仲町). It’s a geographic and bureaucratic term.

街 is used in 商店街 (しょうてんがい, shopping arcade), 繁華街 (はんかがい, downtown/entertainment district/center of town), and 住宅街 (じゅうたくがい, residential area). It refers to a less well-defined portion of geographical space but definitely a piece of the city. (China Bonus!: In Chinese it means street.) It can also be used to talk about a town in the broad sense, but unlike 町, it is never named.

Murakami uses 街 in nearly all of his novels between 1979 and 1983, always referring to the unnamed (*cough* Kobe *cough*) hometown of his unnamed boku narrator. Murakami contrasts this hometown with Tokyo, where the narrator has gone off to college; Tokyo is where he lives now, but all his memories and emotions are tied to the 街. Murakami takes this comparison to its most extreme limit in his book Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in which he contrasts an ultra-modern Tokyo with a pre-modern, industrial town, the 街, in alternating chapters.

In Views of the City, however, Tokyo is the only 街 to be found. It feels like a casual reference to a familiar place. For example, you could say, “This is my part of town,” even in reference to a big city. It also shows how 街 is the "town" from the phrase "town and country."

While 街 is often used to refer to big cities, this is the first time Murakami uses the term in reference to Tokyo. It is also his first collection of realistic stories. The change in usage of this term mirrors the way Murakami turns his vision from the interior thoughts of his anonymous first-person narrator to the lives of people around him in Tokyo.