Distant Drumming

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Daniel

Year One: Boobs, The Wind, Baseball, Lederhosen, Eels, Monkeys, and Doves
Year Two: Hotel Lobby Oysters, Condoms, Spinning Around and Around, 街・町, The Town and Its Uncertain Wall, A Short Piece on the Elephant that Crushes Heineken Cans
Year Three: “The Town and Its Uncertain Wall” – Words and Weirs, The Library, Old Dreams, Saying Goodbye, Lastly
Year Four: More Drawers, Phone Calls, Metaphors, Eight-year-olds, dude, Ushikawa, Last Line
Year Five: Jurassic Sapporo, Gerry Mulligan, All Growns Up, Dance, Mountain Climbing
Year Six: Sex With Fat Women, Coffee With the Colonel, The Librarian, Old Man, Watermelons
Year Seven: Warmth, Rebirth, Wasteland, Hard-ons, Seventeen, Embrace
Year Eight: Pigeon, Edits, Magazines, Awkwardness, Back Issues
Year Nine: Water, Snæfellsnes, Cannonball

spetses

Apologies for skipping last week! I’ll make up for the delay with a massive post this week.

This week I’m looking at one last essay in Murakami’s 2015 collection of travel essays. The essay is titled 「懐かしいふたつの島で」(On two nostalgic islands), and it was originally written in 2011. I’m about half way through the collection, and this is the best one so far.

This is partially due to the fact that reading this essay makes me nostalgic. Murakami visited the two Greek islands Spetses and Mykonos during his three-year sojourn to Europe from 1986-1989, and in this essay he goes back to see them. He wrote about his initial trip in the book 『遠い太鼓』 (A Distant Drum), which I read half of at some point years ago. There are a few scenes I can still remember from the book—the “Zorba” Greeks from the beach; Murakami and his wife walking through one of the towns, low on cash because he forgot to go to the bank before the weekend; Murakami running the original Marathon course; Murakami running in Sicily and being chased by wild dogs.

It’s a great book, one that I really need to finish, one that deserves a full translation into English. (PICK ME! PICK ME!)

So I’ve picked a few of my favorite sections, starting with the introduction:

今から二十四年ほど前のことになるが、ギリシャの島に住んでいた。スペッツェス島とミコノス島。「住んでいた」といってもせいぜい合わせて三ヶ月くらいのことだけど、僕にとっては初めての「外国で暮らす」体験だったし、それはずいぶん印象深い体験になった。ノートに日々の記録をつけ、あとになって『遠い太鼓』という旅行記の中にそれをまとめた。

その後も何度かギリシャに行くことはあったけれど、それらの島をもう一度訪れたことはなかった。だから今回はそのとき以来の「再訪」ということになる。「ピルグリメイジ（巡礼）」という英語の表現がある。そこまで言うのはいささか大げさかもしれないが、要するにおおよそ四半世紀昔の自分の足跡を辿ることになるわけで、懐かしいといえばたしかに懐かしい。とくにミコノス島は小説『ノルウェイの森』を書き始めた場所だったので、僕の中にはそれなりの思いのようなものがある。

１９８６年９月にローマに着いて、その初秋の美しい光の中で一ヶ月間ほどを過ごし、それからアテネに行き、ピレエフス港から船でスペッツェス島に渡った。イタリアに本格的に住み始める前に、ギリシャで数ヶ月を送りたかった。１０月も半ば、ギリシャの観光シーズンは既に終わって、働き疲れたギリシャ人たちがホテルやレストランや土産屋の店仕舞いを始める頃だ。この時期になると、いくらギリシャとはいえけっこう寒くなってくるし、天候もだんだん悪くなる。曇りの日が多くなり、冷ややかな風が吹き、雨もよく降るようになる。クルーズ船で夏の陽光溢れるエーゲ海の島を訪れたことのある人は、秋が深まったときそこがどれほどひっそりとした場所に（ある時には陰鬱なまでの場所に）なり得るかを知ったら、きっとびっくりするに違いない。

どうしてそんあ魅力的とは言いがたい季節を選んで我々（というのは僕と奥さんのことだが）がギリシャの島に住むようになったのか？まずだいいちに生活費が安かったから。高物価・高家賃のハイシーズンの時期に、ギリシャの島で何ヶ月か暮らせるような経済的余裕は、当時の我々にはなかった。それから天候のよくないオフシーズンの島は、静かに仕事をするのに向いているということもあった。夏場のギリシャはいささか騒がしすぎる。僕は日本で仕事をすることに当時疲れていて（それにはまあ、一口で言えないいろいろな理由があったのだが）、外国に出て面倒な雑事を逃れ、ひっそり仕事に集中したかった。できれば腰を据えて、長い小説も書きたかった。だから日本を離れて、しばらくのあいだヨーロッパに住むことに決めたのだ。 (85-86)

Nearly 24 years ago now, I was living on Greek islands. Spetses and Mykonos. “Was living” was only about three months total combined, but it was my first time “living abroad” and it turned into a very memorable experience. Every day I kept records in my notebook, and afterward I put them all together into the travelogue Tōi Taiko (A Distant Drum).

I had the chance to go to Greece a number of times thereafter, but I never visited those islands again. So this was my first “return” since then. English has the expression “pilgrimage.” Using that term might be a slight exaggeration, but I followed my steps from a quarter century in the past, so it’s safe to say it was nostalgic. Mykonos especially has a kind of affection within me because it is where I started writing Norwegian Wood.

I arrived in Rome in September 1986 and spent a month in the beautiful light of early autumn before going to Athens and then crossing over to Spetses by boat from Piraeus. I wanted to spend a few months in Greece before settling down in Italy. By mid-October, the Greek tourist season was over, and the exhausted Greeks had started to close up their hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops. Around this time of year it’s cold despite the fact that it’s Greece, and the weather gradually gets worse. Cloudy days grew in number, cold winds blew in, and it started to rain often. Anyone who has taken a cruise ship through the islands of the sunny Aegean Sea of summer would be surprised to know how quiet (and at times even melancholy) a place it can become once autumn sets in.

Why did we (my wife and I) choose such a difficult-to-appreciate season to live on a Greek island? First, the cost of living was cheap. At the time, we didn’t have the economic leeway to live for several months on a Greek island during the high season with its expensive prices and rents. Also, the off season and its bad weather was quiet and suited for getting work done. Greece in summer can be too rowdy. I’d gotten tired of working in Japan (there were a lot of different reasons for this that I can’t explain in a single phrase), and I wanted to go to a foreign country to escape the bothersome everyday and focus quietly on work. If possible, I wanted to settle down and write a long novel. So I left Japan and decided to live in Europe for a little while.

One thing to note: Murakami arrived in September 1986, and Norwegian Wood was published in September 1987. That’s a pretty impressive turnaround. It’s even more impressive because we know he killed the first month in Athens! He didn’t start writing until he arrived in Spetses:

敷地の中を少し見てまわってもかまわないでしょうか？昔しばらくここに住んでいたもので。僕が管理人のおばあさんにそう訊くと、「いいよ、どうぞ好きなだけごらんなさい」という返事が返ってきた。

当時僕らが暮らしていたユニットは、外から見る限りそのままだった。何ひとつ変わってはいない。１９番のユニット。白い漆喰の壁と、青く塗られた柱。そこで僕は『ノルウェイの森』の最初の数章を書いた。とても寒かったことを記憶している。１２月、クリスマスの少し前のことだった。部屋には小さな電気ストーブひとつしかなかった。分厚いセーターを着て、震えながら原稿を書いた。当時はまだワープロを使っていなかったから、大学ノートにボールぺんでこりこり字を書いていた。窓の外には石ころだらけのうらぶれた野原があり、そこで羊の小さな群れが黙々と草を食べていた。僕の目にはあまりおいしそうな草には見えなかったが、羊たちはそれでいちおう満足しているようだった。

書くのに疲れると手を休め、頭を上げ、そんな羊たちの姿をぼんやり眺めた。ガラス窓の向うに見えるその風景を、今でもよく覚えている。壁に沿って大きなキョウチクトウが生えていた。オリーブの木もあった。窓から眺めた野原は当時のままうらぶれて残っていたが、なぜか羊たちの姿はなかった。

当時は朝から昼間にかけて小説を書き、夕方になると散歩がてら街に出て、バーでワインかビールを軽く飲むことにしていた。詰めて仕事をしたあとでは、何かそういう気分転換が必要だった。だからいろんなバーに行った。「ミコノス・バー」「ソマス・バー」、あといくつか名前の思い出せないバー。そういうバーにはミコノスに住み着いた外人（非ギリシャ人）たちがたむろして、小さな声で会話を交わしていた。そんな季節にミコノスにいる日本人は僕らくらいで、けっこう珍しがられた。「ミコノス・バー」で働いていた女性はとてもチャーミングな皺を寄せて笑う人で、僕はこの人を—というかその皺の具合を—イメージして『ノルウェイの森』のレイコさんという人物を描いた。(91-92)

Would you mind if I looked around inside the place a little? I lived here a little while a long time back. When I asked the old woman who managed the place, she replied, “Sure, look around as much as you like.”

The unit we lived in back then looked the same from the outside. Nothing had changed. Unit 19. White stucco walls and columns painted blue. I wrote the first few chapters of Norwegian Wood here. I remember it being very cold. It was December, just before Christmas. There was only a single electric heater in the room. I wrote while shivering in a thick sweater. I wasn’t yet using a word processor at the time, so I scratched out characters with a ballpoint pen in a college notebook. Outside the window was a ragged field covered with rocks where a small herd of sheep silently munched on the grass. The grass didn’t look all that tasty to me, but it seemed to satisfy the sheep.

When I got tired of writing, I rested my hand, lifted my head and gazed at the sheep. Even now I can still remember the landscape beyond that glass window. A large oleander had been growing along the wall. There had been an olive tree as well. The field outside the window was just as ragged as it had been, but for some reason the sheep were gone.

I would write the novel from the morning through the day, and at night I went out into town for a walk and had a little wine or beer at a bar. After working intently, I needed a change of pace like that. So we went to a bunch of different bars. Mykonos Bar, Somas Bar, and several others whose names I can’t remember. Foreigners (non-Greeks) who had settled on Mykonos hung out at bars like that and had quiet conversations. We were about the only Japanese on Mykonos during that season, and they were quite curious about us. There was a woman working at Mykonos Bar who had very charming wrinkles that gathered when she smiled, and I based the character Reiko on her—or should I say her wrinkles.

This section is mostly just a little trivia, but nice for Murakami maniacs like myself. There’s one more section where his writing comes up, and it’s worth sharing as well:

昔ながらの木造漁船を造る小さな造船所から、とんとんとんという木槌の響きが聞こえてくる。どことなく懐かしい音だ。規則正しい音がふと止み、それから少ししてまた聞こえる。そういうところはちっとも変わっていない。その木槌の音に耳を澄ませていると、二十四年前に心が戻っていく。当時の僕は『世界の終わりとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド』という小説を書き上げ、次の作品『ノルウェイの森』の執筆に取りかかることを考えている三十代半ばの作家だった。「若手作家」という部類にいちおう属していた。実を言えば、自分では今でもまだ「若手作家」みたいな気がしているんだけど、もちろんそんなことはない。時間は経過し、当然のことながら僕はそのぶん年齢をかさねた。なんといっても避けがたい経過だ。でも灯台の草の上に座って、まわりの世界の音に耳を澄ませていると、あの当時から僕自身の気持ちはそれほど変化していないみたいにも感じられる。あるいはうまく成長できなかった、というだけのことなのかもしれないけど。 (106-107)

I could hear the clap, clap, clap of a mallet coming from a small shipyard that built old wooden fishing boats. It was a somewhat nostalgic sound. The even beats stopped and then began again after a moment. This hadn’t changed at all. When I listened carefully to the sound of the mallet, my soul was transported back 24 years in the past. I was a writer in his mid-30’s who had just finished writing Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and was thinking about starting to write Norwegian Wood. I was considered a “young writer.” To tell you the truth, I myself still kind of feel like a “young writer” even now, but of course that isn’t the case. Time passed, and naturally I aged an equivalent amount. It’s an unavoidable progression, as it were. But as I sat there in the grass under the lighthouse and listened carefully to the sounds of the world around me, it didn’t seem like my feelings from that time had changed all that much. Or it might be just that I had not been able to grow very well.

Murakami is generally at his best when writing about himself and things he’s familiar with, stuff he’s experienced. This section is good, and there’s a very nice ending with him leaving on a boat and watching Mykonos fade into the distance.

I don’t think the essay is quite as good as Tōi Taiko, and it’s no A Moveable Feast, but it’s still a nice read. I’d definitely recommend picking up that book before this essay.

And that’s it for Murakami Fest 2016! Thanks for reading. The announcements come next week, as usual. The site says October 3-10, but the Literature date has not yet been set. Keep an eye out. You can stream the announcement live on the website or on YouTube. Maybe this is the year!

Deep Dives

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Daniel

I’m in the Japan Times this week with a look at using Wikipedia for anguish practice…er, reading practice: “Wikipedia ‘deep dives’ can help recreate the joys and pains of Japanese-language immersion.”

This is an exercise I’ve done in the past, but I think playing the game for the JT resulted in some pretty nice material to look at.

The textbook thing, of course, pops up in the news every now and then, but it was very funny to read about the Textbook Bribery Incident and how it was uncovered.

And I was thrilled to have an excuse to revisit Adam’s amazing trek of abandoned rail lines in Hokkaido. It makes me want to do a similar trip of my own, but I’m still lame from my surgery. It will be another 6-8 weeks before I’m back to normal, but I at least don’t have to wear my brace 24/7 anymore.

This gives me a good excuse to embed all the videos here. I’m always so impressed with his video editing skills. Crack open some beers and kick your feet up; these are longwatches:

And apropos of nothing, this week’s piece is my 32nd Bilingual column for the JT! I missed the even, diez-divisible anniversary two articles ago, so I thought I’d take a quick moment to pause and say…damn, I can’t believe I put out that many articles! Thanks as always for reading and commenting. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, I’d be glad to hear them.

I missed the Murakami Fest post last week due to being busy with freelance work, but I have a big post that I should be able to put up later this week before we hit October, so keep an eye out for that.

Cannonball

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Daniel

somethinelse

This week I’m looking at the third essay in Murakami’s 2015 collection of travel writing. The piece is 「おいしいものが食べたい」 (“I want to eat something delicious”), originally from 2008, and in it Murakami writes about two famous American Portlands—that of Oregon and that of Maine.

The essay is only okay. Not much of it sticks with me, now that I think back about it—it’s really just a magazine fluff piece, to put it bluntly. He gives a brief historical introduction to both cities and highlights the abundance of restaurants in both, driven by an influx of young people. Then he introduces a few restaurants he visited and describes the food. It sounds like a decent trip to make, one that would give you an interesting look at the U.S.

(On a side note, I’ve resumed making notes in the margin of my text, which I did not do for the first two essays. This is an easy technique to use to improve retention of Japanese texts.)

The passage I’m translating comes from the end of the essay. Enjoy:

僕はボストンに住んでいるときに、車を運転してちょくちょくこのポートランドの街を訪れたが、そのひとつの目的は家具職人のマルゴネッリさんの工房を訪れることであり、もうひとつは市内の某中古レコード屋で、古いジャズのレコードを買い込むことにあった。店主のボブ・ワーツさんはCDなんぞ絶対に扱わないという頑固にして几帳面なLP原理主義者で、そういうところで僕と話があう。この日も話をしながら、ついついたくさんのレコードを買ってしまった。キャノンボール・アダレイの「サムシン・エルス」（ブルーノート）のファースト・エディションのぴかぴかの美品が２０ドル。どうです、安いでしょう。よくわからない？LPなんかもう聴かない？そうですか、すみません。 (82)

When I lived in Boston, I drove over to visit Portland pretty often. One reason was to visit the workshop of the furniture craftsman Margonari, and the other was to buy up old jazz records at a certain used record store in the city. The owner is Bob Watts, a die-hard LP extremist who would never carry the likes of a CD. Today, again, I bought record after record while we talked. A pristine first edition of Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else” (Blue Note) was twenty dollars. How about that? Pretty cheap. Oh, you’re not sure? You don’t listen to records anymore? Well, excuse me.

I really only chose this passage because of the great jazz recommendation. I checked out the album and listened to it while writing this post, although I listened on Spotify, not an LP.

It’s a solid album. The Wikipedia page for the album is worth a read. The lineup is killer: Adderley, Miles Davis, Hank Jones, Sam Jones, and Art Blakey. *shiver* Adderley would feature again with Miles one year later on Kind of Blue…damn.

Murakami’s tone there at the end is kind of funny. He doesn’t take it any further than that, and this is the only instance of a technique like this, at least in this essay, and so far in this collection. It seems pretty ordinary Murakami and really only stands out because of the plain, guide-like style of these essays.

(Note: Apparently there’s no copyright on the album cover because it’s so simple…which seems kind of strange to me.)

Snæfellsnes

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Daniel

Another quick note before this week’s post:

Last week I forgot to mention the importance of “projects” in Japanese study. Little projects—like this annual Murakami exercise or even something smaller as resolving to read an entire book or a certain number of pages every day—are very helpful language study devices. I’ve had this Murakami collection since January but haven’t had a chance to read it yet, and now I’ve forced myself to. Accountability is important.

So, yeah, I recommend setting up some kind of project, maybe even an annual project, and then really committing to it. It doesn’t have to be in as public a forum as this, but making it public does make it more difficult to avoid.

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

snaefellsnes

This week I’m looking at the second essay in the collection: 「緑の苔と温泉のあるところ」 (“The Place with Green Moss and Hot Springs”). Murakami travels to Iceland for a writer’s conference and travels around a bit. The first part of the essay reads like a Wikipedia article, and Murakami does have a tendency to wonder wide-eyed at things that he deems strange about the country: they use credit cards very frequently, restaurants all decorate with plastic flowers, everyone seems to like to paint. But he does hit some high notes when writing about the scenery and with a side trip he takes to see the care for abandoned puffins.

He also breaks out one of his pet words: 引き出し (drawers). This gives me another opportunity to link to the 1Q84 Liveblog. He uses the more usual kanji here (rather than 抽斗) when discussing the Snæfellsnes peninsula. Enjoy:

スナイフェルスネーズ半島は天候はかなり惨めな代物だが、その風景が我々を失望させることはない。広く知られた観光名所みたいなものもとくになく、したがって訪れる旅行者もそんなに多くはないので、いかにも素朴、観光ずれもしていない。南側には比較的平坦な海岸線が続き、海鳥が多く、バードウォッチングに適している。北部沿岸にはいくつかの息をのむような美しいフィヨルドがある。大昔氷河によって削り取られた断崖、ひっそりとした静かな入り江、赤い屋根の小さな教会、どこまでもひろがる緑色の苔、低く速く流れるくっきりとした雲、不思議なかたちをした物言わぬ山々、風に揺れるソフトな草、句読点を打つように思い思いに散らばった羊たち、焼け落ちた廃屋（なぜか焼け落ちた家が多い）、冬に向けてしっかりと束ねられた干し草。それらの風景は、写真に撮ることさえはばかられた。そこにある美しさは、写真のフレームにはとても収まりきらない種類のものだったからだ。我々の前にある風景はその広がりと、そのほとんど恒久的な静寂と、深い潮の香りと、遮るものもなく地表を吹き抜けていく風と、そこに流れる独特の時間性を「込み」にして成立しているものなのだ。そこにある色は、古代からずっと風と雨に晒されて、その結果できあがったものなのだ。それはまた天候の変化や、潮の干満や、太陽の移動によって、刻々と変化していくものなのだ。いったんカメラのレンズで切り取られてしまえば、あるいは科学的な色彩の調合に翻訳されてしまえば、それは今日の前にあるものとはぜんぜん別のものになってしまうだろう。そこにある心持ちのようなものは、ほとんど消えてしまうことになるだろう。だから我々はそれをできるだけ長い時間をかけて自分の目で眺め、脳裏に刻み込むしかないのだ。そして記憶のはかない引き出しにしまい込んで、自分の力でどこかに持ち運ぶしかないのだ。 (53-54)

The weather on the Snæfellsnes peninsula is a miserable thing, but the scenery did not get us down. There aren’t any tourist spots that are particularly well known, and accordingly there aren’t many visitors, so it’s simple and doesn’t cater to visitors. A relatively flat coastline runs along the southern side, and there are lots of birds, which makes it suited for birdwatching. There are several beautiful fjords on the northern coast that take your breath away. Cliffs carved out by ancient glaciers; quiet, deserted inlets; small churches with red roofs; green moss that was everywhere; distinct clouds, low and fast-moving; strangely shaped, taciturn mountains; soft grass shimmering in the wind; sheep scattered about, wandering in search of a sentence to punctuate; the remains of burned down houses (for whatever reason there were a lot of burned down houses); bales of hay bundled tightly for winter. I hesitated over whether I should even take pictures of this scenery. Its beauty wasn’t the kind that could be fit into the frame of a photograph. The breadth of the scenery before us, its almost permanent stillness, the deep scent of the tides, the ceaseless wind blowing over the ground, and the unique flow of time all came into being as an “inclusiveness.” All of the colors there had been produced as a result of being exposed to wind and rain since time immemorial. And they changed, hour by hour, based on changes in weather, the ebb and flow of the tides, and the movement of the sun. Once you capture them through the camera’s lens, once you translate them into a mixture of scientific colors, what’s before you today has already become something entirely different. The mood within almost completely disappears. So all we could do was look at everything with our eyes for as long a time as we could and etch it into our minds. And then put it into our transitory memory drawers and use our own power to carry it somewhere else.

(Photo attribution here.)

Water

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Daniel

Wow. Nine years. That’s kind of unbelievable. I started studying Japanese 15 years ago this summer, so I’ve been doing this silly exercise (writing this only-slightly-less-silly blog) for a good majority of my Japanese studying experience…which is now sneaking up on half my life.

Without further ado…

Welcome to the Ninth Annual How to Japanese Murakami Fest!

Charles

This year I’ve done very little preparation. Tonight after I finished up some other work, I brainstormed a couple ideas, tossed most of them in the garbage, and decided to translate passages from the latest Murakami book that I purchased on my trip last Christmas.

The book is 『ラオスにいったい何があるというんですか？』(My contextless translation: What Exactly Do They Say is in Laos?), and it’s a collection of travel essays from various points in his career, many from the magazine AGORA.

The first essay titled 「チャールズ河畔の小径」(“The Path on the Charles”) is from 1995, when Murakami had run the Boston Marathon four times. He’s run it twice more since then, and I saw him run it one of those times in 2003.

The piece is an ode to the Boston Marathon and also to the running path on the Charles. Murakami calls the marathon 大げさに言えば精神的なふるさとのような大会 (“to put it in exaggerated terms, a race that is something like my emotional home”).

And here’s a passage I thought was nice, one that made me think of my twice daily bus rides that take me along Lake Michigan:

僕は思うのだけれど、たくさんの水を日常的に目にするというのは、人間にとってあるいは大事な意味を持つ行為なのではないだろうか。まあ「人間にとって」というのはいささかオーヴァーかもしれないが、でも少なくとも僕にとってはかなり大事なことであるような気がする。僕はしばらくのあいだ水を見ないでいると、自分が何かをちょっとずつ失い続けているような気持ちになってくる。それは音楽の大好きな人が、何かの事情で長いあいだ音楽から遠ざけられているときに感じる気持ちと、多少似ているかもしれない。あるいはそれには、僕が海岸のすぐ近くで生まれて育ったということもいくらか関係しているのかもしれない。 (14)

I think that the act of seeing a large amount of water every day may be, for humans, very meaningful. Well, it might be a bit of an exaggeration to say “for humans,” but I feel like it’s an incredibly meaningful thing for me at least. If I go for a while without seeing water, I start to feel as though I’m continuously losing something little by little. It might resemble to a certain extent how someone who loves music feels when, for some reason, they are separated from music. Or it might have something to do with me having been born and raised closed to the coast.

The photo at the top is of the sakura on the Charles, which Murakami mentions blossom in May, much later than the cherries in Tokyo and southern Japan.

I’ll start reading through a few more of these essays and hopefully turn up some more interesting passages for the coming weeks. As always, よろしくプリーズ.

(Photo attribution here.)

股関節唇

Posted on August 19, 2016 by Daniel

kokansetsushin

Just a quick post for fun. I had surgery on Tuesday to repair a torn labrum in my hip. It was my first major operation since I had a hernia repair when I was four.

I was curious about how to say “labrum” in Japanese, and it turns out the word is 股関節唇 (kokansetsu-shin). (Note: This blog post strikes me as a glimpse into the rich, multilingual inner lives of Japanese doctors.) I remember learning 股関節 (hip joint) in my yoga class in Tokyo, but I’d been using 軟骨 (nankotsu) instead of 唇 (shin) to explain it to Japanese speakers.

This reminds me of a good study strategy: Prepping vocab that you know you’ll likely have to talk about. I am mostly good at this but occasionally lousy. When I was a CIR on the JET Program, I had to interpret for some Lithuanian artists in my town, and I neglected to look up the word for statue and sculpture (彫刻), which was a big mistake. I did not look like a very good interpreter at their welcome party, which was disrupted by a massive Aizu snowfall. Good times.

I’m certain I’ll have to explain my surgery in further detail to coworkers and friends, and now I’m armed with the vocabulary to do so.

Bonus Link: I wish I knew more about medicine to understand this article, which seems to suggest that Japanese have more labral tears in normal shaped hips. (Some labral tears are due to congenital formations that impinge on the cartilage.) Maybe because of all the 正座 and squatting?

So far my recovery is going smoothly.

Oysters and Chopsticks Etiquette

Posted on August 9, 2016 by Daniel

Hello! I’m just back from visiting Mexico for the first time. I haven’t used my Spanish for 15 years, so I was pleasantly surprised with how much I was able to understand. Need to work on the speaking part. I was throwing out tons of けどs and ああ、そうs in my effort to make conversation.

While I was away, I had another Bilingual article in The Japan Times. I took a look at a 1965 エチケット事典 (Etiquette Encyclopedia): “A Japanese guide to dealing with gentleman callers and unruly dogs.”

It’s a pretty amazing text, and I look forward to reading through it more thoroughly. I wanted to share a couple of fun sections here. Under food, the author provides a list of 食べにくい一品料理 (tabenikui ippin ryōri, Difficult-to-eat items), one of which is 生かき (namakaki, raw oysters). Here are the instructions for eating them:

必ずレモンがそえてあります。これを絞りかけますが、レモンを絞る時はいつの場合でも、汁がまわりに飛ばないように左手でおおうのがエチケットです。レモン汁をかけたら左手で貝の殻をおさえ、かき用のフォークですくって一口に頂きます。

They are always accompanied with lemon. You squeeze this on top, but when you squeeze the lemon, it is always polite to cover it with your left hand so the juice doesn’t spray the surroundings. After adding the lemon juice, hold the shell of the oyster with your left hand, scoop out the oyster with an oyster fork, and eat it in one bite.

A couple of cool linguistic things to note here:

The first is the way エチケット gets used here to end the second sentence. Very interesting. A more literal translation would be “it is etiquette to cover it with your left hand.” I guess there’s a way to get closer to the Japanese than my translation. Something like “etiquette calls for…” or maybe “the etiquette is…”

Second, 貝の殻 is pretty interesting in that both characters can mean shell. 貝 seems to be referring to the meat of the oyster in this case, and it can mean shellfish more broadly whereas 殻 only refers to the shell or other kinds of outer coverings.

And if the oyster instructions didn’t convince you that this book is precise and prescriptive, check out some of the guides to 箸を上手に使うマナー (hashi o jōzu ni tsukau manā, Manners for using chopsticks well). In addition to the typical instructions, they provide this photograph for the section 器を持ったまま取る時 (ki o motta mama toru toki, taking them while holding a dish):

And the instructions:

左手で器を持ち右手で上から箸を取り、左手の薬指か小指で箸をはさんで右手を持ちかえます。逆に箸を持ったまま、お茶碗やお椀を取る時は、箸先を手前にして右手の掌と薬指、小指の間に挟み持ち、親指と人さし指と中指を使って取り上げます。

Hold the dish with your left hand and take the chopsticks from above with your right. Slip the chopsticks between your ring finger or pinky and hold the dish with your right hand. Conversely, if you’re picking up a teacup or bowl while holding chopsticks, hold the chopsticks between your right palm and ring finger or pinky with the tips facing out and take the teacup or bowl with your thumb, index finger, and middle finger.

Am I the only person who didn’t already know of this technique? The second half of the instructions seem to make more sense to me than the first, which seem a little…precious? Or maybe I’m mistranslating based solely on the image from the text. I’d be curious to hear from readers on this one.

And don’t forget the cool finger vocab listed in the paragraph above!

This is a great text. I might have to buy a more modern version just to see the kind of things that are listed. And I can see myself coming back to this old one for future blog posts.

Uwazumi

Posted on July 28, 2016 by Daniel

Chapter 32 “Shadow in the Throes of Death” (死にゆく影) is a short End of the World chapter in which Boku visits his shadow who is pretending to be sicker than he actually is to trick the Gatekeeper. The shadow tries to convince Boku to leave, Boku says he wants to stay because he has become attached to the town, but in the end he agrees to meet his shadow in three days and escape.

Very few changes in this one. A couple of very minor cuts, which I’ll show just to complete this blog post. They aren’t of much interest.

In the first, the Gatekeeper leads Boku into the area where his shadow is being kept:

The Gatekeeper takes his key ring off the hook and unlocks the iron gate to the Shadow Grounds. He walks quickly across the enclosure ahead of me, and shows me into the lean-to. It is as cold as an icehouse. (331)

The Japanese and my version:

門番は壁から鍵束をとり、その鍵で影の広場に通じる鉄の扉を開けた。そして僕の先に立って広場を足速やに横切り、影の小屋のドアを開いて僕を中に入れた。小屋の中はがらんとして家具ひとつなく、床は冷えきった煉瓦のままだった。窓のすきまからは寒風が吹きこみ、中の空気は凍りついてしまいそうだった。まるで氷室。(483)

The Gatekeeper takes a ring of keys from the wall and opens the iron door that leads to the Shadow Plaza. He then cuts briskly across the plaza in front of me, opens the door of the Shadow Shed, and lets me in. The shed is empty without a single piece of furniture, only a frozen brick floor. A cold wind comes in through a gap in the window, freezing over the air inside, like an ice house.

Probably just cut because it’s unnecessary. There weren’t many other cuts for space in this chapter – it’s only seven pages long in the Japanese.

The second cut is from the section when the shadow is trying to explain the Town:

“When the Dreamreader’s shadow dies, he ceases to be the Dreamreader and becomes one with the Town. This is how it’s possible for the Town to maintain its perfection. All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious. Is that the way it should be? Did you ever think to look at things from the viewpoint of the beasts and shadows and Woodsfolk?” (336)

And the original and my version:

「影が死ねば夢読みであることをやめて、街に同化する。街はそんな風にして完全性の環の中を永久にまわりつづけているんだ。不完全な部分を不完全な存在に押しつけ、そしてそのうわずみだけを吸って生きているんだ。それが正しいことだと君は思うのかい？それが本当の世界か？それがものごとのあるべき姿なのかい？いいかい、弱い不完全な方の立場からものを見るんだ。獣や影や森の人々の立場からね」 (490)

“When your shadow dies, you stop being the Dream Reader and become incorporated into the Town. That’s how the Town cycles within an eternal loop of perfection. It forces all imperfections onto the imperfect and lives off the rest. Do you think that’s right? Do you think that’s the real world? Do you think that’s the way things should be? Listen, look at things from the perspective of something weak and imperfect. From the perspective of the beasts, shadows, and the people in the forest.”

The cuts here are a bit more interesting. うわずみ is a difficult word to translate. It means the clear upper portion of a solution once the sediment has dropped out, which makes more sense when you see the kanji: 上澄み. Birnbaum handles it strikingly well with an 意訳.

Only eight chapters left now…

Flesh

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Daniel

Kustodiev

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Chapter 31 “Fares, Police, Detergent” has many of Birnbaum’s (or his editor’s) usual cuts:

– Section- and chapter-ends are often pared down to end on a better line of dialogue, a more dramatic action, or a more wry tone.

– Parts that could be considered excess or unnecessary are cut back.

– Sexy and questionable bits are cut.

This chapter has a huge amount of this final cut, which we have seen a couple times previously.

In this chapter, Watashi and the Girl in Pink make their way back into the city through the subway, have a snack at a grocery store sandwich stand, and then clean up at his apartment. The sexy parts start when they are waiting for their food and they share an abandoned newspaper. Here is Birnbaum’s translation:

The girl claimed the back pages. Some seedy article which addressed the question “Is Swallowing Semen Good for the Complexion?”

“Do you like having your semen swallowed?” the girl wanted to know. (323)

The original Japanese version goes on at greater length. My translation follows:

娘がいちばん手前のページを見たいと言ったので、私はそのページをとって渡した。彼女が読みたかったのは「精液を飲むとお肌の美容になる？」という記事らしかった。その下には「檻に入れられて犯された私」という読物記事が載っていた。檻に入れた女をどうやって犯すのか私には想像できなかった。きっとそれなりの上手いやり方があるのだろう。しかしいずれにしてもかなり面倒な作業に違いない。私にはとてもできない。

「ねえ、精液を飲まれるのって好き？」と娘が私に訊ねた。(469)

The girl said she wanted to read the back pages, so I took them out and handed them to her. She seemed to want to read an article titled “Does swallowing semen make your skin more beautiful?” Beneath it was an article titled “I was trapped in a cage and forced to have sex.” I had trouble imagining how exactly you would go about having sex with a woman in a cage. There must be some sort of clever way to go about it. But it would require a good bit of effort. Nothing I could ever manage.

“Hey, do you like having your semen swallowed?” the girl asked.

This cut seems understandable. Murakami is going for a joke, and I don’t think it’s all that successful. I guess it’s a little funny in a kind of Seinfeld-esque way? But the text isn’t diminished by its absence.

The subsequent sexy cut feels designed to make Watashi seem like less of a perv. After they make it to his apartment, Watashi draws a bath. Here is Birnbaum’s version:

I suggested that the chubby girl bathe first. While she was in the tub, I changed into some salvaged clothes and plopped down on what had been my bed.” (325)

Short and simple. There is a huge cut within this. The Japanese and my translation:

湯がたまると私は彼女に先に風呂に入るようにと言った。娘は本のページにしおりを入れてベッドから下り、台所でするすると服を脱いだ。服の脱ぎ方があまりにも自然だったので、私はベッドに腰をかけたまま彼女の裸をぼんやりと眺めた。彼女の体は子供のような大人のような妙な体つきだった。普通の人間の体にまんべんなくゼリーを塗ったように白いやわらかそうな肉がたっぷりと付着していた。それはとても均整のとれた太り方だったので、よく気をつけていないと彼女が太っているという事実をふと忘れてしまいそうなくらいだった。腕も太腿も首も腹のまわりも見事にふくらんでいて、鯨のようにつるつるとしていた。体の大きさに比べて乳房はそれほど大きくはなくほどほどにまとまりのある形をしていたし、お尻の肉もきちんと上にあがっていた。

「私の体、悪くないでしょう？」と台所から娘が私の方に向って言った。

「悪くないよ」と私は答えた。

「ここまで肉をつけるのは大変だったのよ。ごはんだっていっぱい食べなくちゃならないし、ケーキだとか油ものだとか」と彼女は言った。

私は黙って肯いた。

彼女が風呂に入っているあいだに私はシャツと濡れたズボンを脱いで残っていた服に着替え、ベッドに寝転んでこれから何をしようかと考えた。 (473-473)

As the tub filled, I told the girl to take the first bath. She put a bookmark in the pages of the book, got off the bed, and fluidly took off her clothes in the kitchen. The way she removed them was so natural that I remained there sitting on the bed, idly watching her nude figure. Her body had a strange build that seemed part child, part adult. There was a large amount of soft-looking white flesh stuck to her, as though someone had taken a normal person’s body and plastered it uniformly with some kind of jelly. It was all so incredibly balanced that unless you were paying close attention you would almost forget the fact that she was fat. The areas around her arms, thighs, and belly were also wonderfully full and taut like a whale. Her breasts were moderate bulges, not all that large compared with the rest of her body, and the flesh on her butt stuck out sharply.

“My body isn’t bad, right?” she said in my direction from the kitchen.

“Not bad,” I responded.

“It took a lot of work to put on this much flesh, you know,” she said. “I had to eat a ton of all sorts of food. Cake and fatty foods, all sorts.”

I nodded silently.

While she was in the bath, I took off the wet shirt and pants I was wearing, changed into my remaining clothes, lay down in the bed, and thought about what to do next.

It’s a little weird that Watashi is staring at this seventeen-year-old girl and enjoying it. But I guess it’s a little prudish to cut it. The girl does have a very erotic feel, even in translation, so it doesn’t lose too much, other than a small amount of direct explicitness. I wonder if editors demanded that it be cut or Birnbaum himself made the suggestion.

The final sexy cut, however, is the most extreme. Here is Birnbaum’s translation:

I popped open my eyes and rubbed my face between my hands. It was like rubbing someone else’s face. The spot on my neck where the leech had attached itself still stung.

“When are you going back for your grandfather?” I asked. (328)

You’d never notice anything without looking at the original. Here’s the Japanese and my version:

私は目をあけて、両手で顔をこすった。久しぶりに顔を洗って髭を剃ったせいで、顔の皮膚は乾燥した太鼓の皮のようにこわばっていた。まるで他人の顔をこすっているみたいだった。蛭に血を吸われた部分がひりひりと痛んだ。二匹の蛭はよほど沢山私の血を吸いとっていったようだった。

「ねえ」と娘が本をわきに置いて言った。「精液のことだけど、本当に飲んでほしくない？」

「今はね」と私は言った。

「そういう気分じゃないのね？」

「そう」

「私と寝たくもないのね？」

「今はね」

「私が太っているから嫌なの？」

「そんなことはない」と私は言った。「君の体はとても可愛いよ」

「じゃあどうして寝ないの？」

「わからない」と私は言った。「どうしてかはわからないけれど、今君とは寝るべきじゃないような気がするんだ」

「それは何か道徳上の理由によるのなの？あなたの生活倫理に反するとか？」

「生活倫理」と私は繰りかえした。不思議な響き方をすることばだった。私は天上を眺めながらそれについて少し考えてみた。

「いや、違うな、そういうものじゃない」と私は言った。「もっとべつのものだよ。本能とか直感とか、それに近いものだな。あるいは記憶の逆流に関係しているかもしれない。うまく説明することができない。僕自身は今すごく君と寝たいと思っているよ。でもその何かが僕を押しとどめてるんだ。今はその時期じゃないってね」

彼女は枕の上に肘をついて私の顔をじっと見ていた。

「嘘じゃなくて？」

「こういうことで嘘はつかない」

「本当にそう思うの？」

「そう感じるんだ」

「証明できる？」

「証明？」と私はびっくりして訊きかえあした。

「あなたが私と寝たがっているということについて、何か私が納得できるようなこと」

「勃起している」と私は言った。

「見せて」と娘は言った。

私は少し迷ったが、結局ズボンを下ろして見せてやることにした。これ以上の論争をするには私は疲れすぎていたし、それにどうせあと少ししかこの世界にはいないのだ。十七歳の女の子に勃起した健全なペニスを見せたからといって、それが重大な社会問題に発展するとも思えなかった。

「ふうん」と私の膨張したペニスを見ながら娘は言った。「それ触っていい？」

「駄目」と私は言った。「でもこれで証明になるんだろう？」

「そうね、まあいいわ」

私はズボンをあげてペニスをその中にしまった。窓の下を大型の貨物トラックがゆっくりと通りすぎていく音が聞こえた。

「君はいつおじいさんのところに戻るんだ？」と私は訊ねてみた。 (479-481)

I opened my eyes and rubbed my face with both hands. Because I’d shaved for the first time in so long, the skin on my face was dry and stiff like a drumhead. It felt like I was rubbing someone else’s face entirely. The areas where the leeches had gotten me still hurt. It seemed like those two leeches had taken a good bit of blood out of me.

“Hey,” the girl said and put the book by her side. “So, you really don’t want me to swallow your semen?”

“Not at the moment,” I said.

“You don’t feel like it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t want to sleep with me either?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Is it because I’m fat?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Your body is really nice.”

“Then why won’t you sleep with me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I do feel like I shouldn’t sleep with you right now.”

“Is it for some moral reason? Does it go against your lifestyle ethics?”

“Lifestyle ethics,” I repeated. The words had a strange ring to them. I stared up at the ceiling and thought about them for a moment. “No, that’s not it,” I said. “It’s something else entirely. Instinct or intuition, something like that. Or maybe it has something to do with my memories receding. I can’t explain it well. I actually really want to sleep with you right now. But that something is preventing me. It’s telling me now’s not the time for that.”

She put her elbows on a pillow and stared at me.

“Are you lying to me?”

“I wouldn’t lie about this kind of thing.”

“That’s what you really think?”

“That’s what I feel.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Prove it?” I repeated, a little taken aback.

“Something that can convince me that you want to sleep with me.”

“I have a hard on,” I said.

“Show me,” she said.

I hesitated for a moment but in the end decided to drop my pants and show her. I was too tired to argue any further, and I didn’t have much much time left in this world; I didn’t think me showing a seventeen-year-old girl my healthy, erect penis would become some massive social issue.

“Hmm,” she said as she looked at my engorged penis. “Can I touch it?”

“Nope,” I said. “But this proves it, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s fine.”

I lifted my pants and stored my penis inside them. The sound of a large moving truck passing by slowly rumbled up from the window.

“When will you go back to your grandfather?” I asked.

Hey now! What a scene to cut. Nothing changes drastically without this scene, of course, but it does give the girl a good bit of sexual agency that isn’t present in the translation. And it’s funny! The dialogue is a great back and forth, very strong. Also, it’s just a massive piece of text to remove, but as we’ve seen, this is how Murakami was translated at first.

This was a very exciting cut to find. We see deeper into Murakami’s sense of humor, how these two characters feel about each other, and how Murakami constructs sexuality in his books. It also shows something about the translation/editorial process back in the early 90s. Compared to some of his more recent works, this would probably be considered very tame. But it was cut for one reason or another, whether taste or style.

I don’t think we have many chapters left with the Girl in Pink. Watashi ends by taking her wet clothes to the laundromat to dry them. I don’t remember exactly what happens when he returns, but I’ll be curious to see if and how their sexual denouement is handled.

Cool Tongue Twister – 坊主が屏風に上手に坊主の絵を描いた

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Daniel

bozu

I’m in the Japan Times Bilingual page this week: “Repetition and role-play are crucial for speaking success in Japanese.”

I was stunned to see that no one had previously written about 早口言葉 (はやくちことば, tongue twisters)…as long as the search engine on the JT can be trusted.

They seem silly at first, but they’re actually really good speaking practice. So is just randomly repeating Japanese phrases while you’re at home alone. Gotta keep those muscles trained, and it’s fine to sound like a clown when no one’s around.

I wasn’t able to include one of my favorite tongue twisters: 坊主が屏風に上手に坊主の絵を描いた (Bōzu ga byōbu ni jōzu ni bōzu no e o kaita, A monk draws a picture of a monk on a folding screen well).

And of course there’s an excellent Yahoo Chiebukuro post where someone asks for the correct phrasing: Is the monk drawing a picture of a monk or ジョーズ (Jaws) or B’s (a band I think?). Someone mentions that only a monk would have existed pre-war. Another guy mentions that it could be regional and that near Universal Studios Japan (Osaka) they used Jaws…which sounds about right. Osaka is known for its sense of humor, but it could also very easily be just an elementary school thing. Those kids love jokes like that.

At any rate, an image search for a 上手坊主 led me to this amazing blog post that takes this absurd phrase to its logical conclusion: 坊主が屏風に描いた坊主が屏風に描いた坊主が屏風に坊主の絵を描いた.

I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing the image from the post (the blog appears to be deceased and originally intended to help old people retain their memory and eyesight?) and reproducing it above, but it’s an interesting read. Go check it out.

TJ(Too Japanese);DR: because of the way Japanese modifiers work, the language itself is easier to read silently rather than out loud. Modifiers (修飾) get stacked up upon a subject, and if you’re reading out loud you must sail only forward through unknown seas, while you may look back and forth if you’re reading silently and you are not slave to the unceasing plodding of your vision? Seems legit?

Y’all have any favorite 早口言葉?