I can't read his work. I know they're considered great works of literature, and to be honest they seem to be much more accessible than many other extremely well regarded works of literature, but I just can't get into his work.
I've tried reading them, I've tried listening to audio books. A small bit here or there, a paragraph or a full page, will strike me as interesting with excellent style (certainly attributable in part to excellent translations) but as a whole, they all fall flat for me.
Given their popularity, I sometimes think the failure is mine, though I also wonder how many people may just be riding the "Oh they're great!!" bandwagon without actually reading the books themselves. Probably not a majority, I would hope. I didn't enjoy it much but still managed to make it halfway through "Windup Bird Chronicle" before calling it quits, so I suppose many people go all the way to the end. (Although I read a synopsis of the rest of the story and said to myself "Yeah, glad I missed that")
I wouldn't worry that it's your failure, you're just not into it.
I loved Windup Bird Chronicle. I struggled with 1Q84. I find the same thing in every creative field (art, film, lit, games); a favourite author/artist/director/company will release something I think is a real stinker while everyone else praises it, and vice versa.
Of course it can help to build up a vocab/grammar/approach to appreciate particular works or what something is referencing, but there are too many fish you'll never even see to be worrying about one author. Just hunt down the stuff you like and don't be afraid to give up halfway through if you're not enjoying it. It sounds like you've already figured that part out.
Interesting. That's the second one I read, but I put it down 5 chapters in and never picked it back up. So it sits in my 'to read' pile. I even confiscated the bookmark the last time I rearranged my books, because I'd have to start over at this point.
As a big fan of his books, they read a lot differently than most novels. They usually feel pretty un-structured, much of the story doesn't connect logically to me, often times they come to an abrupt end with no resolution. I basically read it by paying attention to the feelings or moods it's trying to invoke.
But if that isn't for you, I wouldn't beat yourself up for it. Just not your thing, and there isn't anything incorrect with that.
I've read a good number of them and enjoyed them, but I don't think he's my favorite author by any stretch.
My complaints (which need not apply to others, of course)
- A lot of the main characters and plot lines feel the same. I can't tell you what happened in some books vs other books because they all (to me) feature listless males who drink Cutty Sark, enjoy jazz music, and have weird shit happen to them that they mostly tolerate while acknowledging that it is bizarre.
- The style feels a little flat. It just kind of is. Even though the sentences can get quite long and windy and full of descriptions and details until you get lost, much like a sentence like this, my inner voice still reads it in a kind of monotone that I imagine resembles how the protaganist (if you could call them that) goes through life. The kind of prose that, if you're tired, will make you more tired.
What I liked
- The casual surrealness. I complained about it earlier but it's also a feature. It isn't meant to transform the book into a sci-fi or fantasy novel, it just is what it is.
- The lack of resolution. Too many books try too hard to wrap things up. Sometimes things just are. Which is also probably why I can't remember what happened in which books since they just end up being a series of events (think another commentator noted that).
- The way things weave together. Not everything wraps up, but that doesn't mean they aren't connected.
- Japan. I've lived there before, it's fun to read about characters and think "oh, I've been there!"
I don't think this accurately sums up my feelings, which I guess means there's actually a lot to unpack which is a positive sign, but basically I think if you can't get into Murakami, that's fine and isn't on you.
i had the pleasure of going to a talk/Q&A that Murakami did many years ago. i am paraphrasing the following question and answer, but the root of it made a deep impression on me:
> someone in the audience asked what his stories meant. there was a sense of the plots being profound, but just out of reach.
>
> Murakami replied that there was no great meaning. they were dreams he had.
Just to present another view, I enjoy Murakami's books despite agreeing with you that the style seems pretty flat (I've read some in English and some in my native Romanian, but I didn't notice any big differences of style, though I have no idea how well either translation holds up to the original Japanese).
The thing that keeps me coming back to his work are the stories themselves, I am usually quite curious how events will unfold, and I do find that, despite remaining mysterious, there is some sense of revelation.
On the other hand, I still prefer other works of magical realism, especially those by Marquez and Rushdie - of which I feel both have a much more interesting style to their writing.
Aren’t like half of modern Japanese books in Romanian – including some Murakamis – translated by Angela Hondru? Her output is so prolific that I suspect she doesn’t get that much time to polish the prose, and so it is no surprise if the result feels a bit flat. (I don’t blame her for that; I have also worked in literary translation and I know that deadlines are always much shorter than one would like.)
I am very much a layman when it comes to literature, but I want to say that Kawabata's writing has an awe-inspiring quality to me - I've never been as engrossed reading stories that, if I were to summarize, would barely have any plot; and have felt so satisfied by the end, even when they usually stop before any major changes.
You can definitely feel his mastery in the art of telling a story, not just the art of creating a story itself. I feel Murakami unfortunately lacks the former, even though he has taken with the latter.
For me, I think the enjoyable thing about Murakami's books isn't necessarily the story line in the traditional sense. The story lines are always wacky, surreal, etc. But the things that captivate me are the characters and world-building. The characters are deep. He does a really good job explaining what they're thinking and where they come from. In such surreal stories, they're surprisingly rational and consistent.
I also feel like a lot of the author himself comes through the pages. You'll read a lot of really detailed descriptions of that jazz bar that one character visited (Murakami owned a jazz bar for some time). He talks a lot about cats (a cat lover, for sure), and all of the protagonists are males that have really similar personalities.
Murakami is one of my favorite writers. For "classic" Murakami style, which generally has a lot of magical realism, I recommend A Wild Sheep Chase, which is hilarious and quite accessible, and Kafka on the Shore, which is a bit more ethereal. I also really enjoyed Norwegian Wood, but be aware that this is quite different from most of his work. In an interview with the Paris Review, Murakami says that Norwegian Wood was his attempt to write a mainstream novel. It's quite good, but it's also artificial, in the sense that it is not his true style. Windup Bird Chronicle, mentioned in another comment, is good, but a bit more of an investment of time and energy. I really recommend starting with A Wild Sheep Chase.
It doesn't surprise me that Murakami's works are well-regarded internationally. His characters always read as highly cosmopolitan: they name-drop popular American bands, they drink famous European liquor, they quote Plato, Aristotle, etc. I'm more surprised that he's well-regarded domestically, because the Japanese traditionally do not seem to regard well artists that they perceive as not being "Japanese" enough (see: Akira Kurosawa).
After having lived all my life in an area without real seasons, I have very fond memories of listening to Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World while walking my dog regularly but aimlessly in a forest as the leaves began to change.
It felt almost surreal, and paired quite naturally with Murakami’s dreamy but lucid world building.
I haven’t read the original, and don’t understand Japanese, but the translation certainly didn’t feel, to me, like a translation.
In 1Q84, a central character plays a role in rewriting a work, so the translation process must be front of mind for Murakami. Perhaps Birnbaum is his very own Tengo when adapting his works to English.
as a Murakami fan (both Hiroku and Ryu), I have to admin that a lot of the feeling of the novels come from the translator. I've been a bigger fan of Birnbaum than Rubin, which led me to attempt to find Birnbaum's translation of Norwegian Wood, hoping that I'd like it better.
Unfortunately, no Birnbaum Norwegian Wood for me, but reading Haruki's books put me into an interesting state of enlightenment. Contrasted, Ryu's books bring in a dark whimsical side which is also enchanting.
Let's see. I enjoyed Hard-boiled Wonderland quite a bit, failed to make a dent in Kafka on the Shore, and loved Wind-Up Bird almost despite itself - the writing read "flat" to me, as many others are saying, and the dramatic conclusion was trite and disappointing, though I'm open to the possibility that I missed the point.
I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation. After all, I know there's plenty of room for the translator to insert themselves when going between English and French or German, languages I speak that are close enough to English you can often jump word for word between them, even with closely related words. Japanese (a language I'm learning but know an awful lot less of) is vastly more different; you can usually capture literal meaning without too much issue but the thought of translating "style" "accurately" really boggles the mind. Especially when I learned how much the translator of Wind-Up Bird, Jay Rubin, and the American publishers played with the structure of the book, my conjecture is that there's no "real" way to read Murakami (or any Japanese writer) without learning Japanese first; if you try to you're mostly just reading Rubin or whoever retell Murakami's story.
I look forward to whenever my Japanese is strong enough to be able to test that theory, but that'll probably be another few years still. Turns out Japanese is hard.
> Some chapters and paragraphs of the Japanese paperback edition were not included in the English translation. Translator Jay Rubin cut about 61 of 1,379 pages, including three chapters (Book 2 Chapters 15, 18, and part of 17; and Book 3 Chapter 26). Combining the original three-volumes (Japanese) would have been too long, and so the publisher requested that ~25,000 words be cut for the English translation. These chapters contain plot elements not found elsewhere in the book. For example, the two missing chapters from the second volume of the original three-volume elaborate on the relationship between Toru Okada and Creta Kano, and a "hearing" of the wind-up bird as Toru burns a box of Kumiko's belongings (Book 2 Chapter 15). In the third volume, the computer conversation between Toru and Noboru Wataya (Book 3 Chapter 26) and Toru's encounter with Ushikawa at the train station are also omitted. In addition to reducing the word count, some chapters were moved ahead of others, taking them out of the context of the original order. At the start of Book 3 the chapters have been rearranged. Rubin combined two chapters called “May Kasahara’s POV” and moved the “Hanging House” chapter to make the chronology of events consistent.
That’s not a translation, whatever the publisher is calling it! A translation attempts to accurately portray the original piece as written in another language. Not every word needs to be literal, but moving around chapters is clearly out of bounds!
Here's an email discussion where the translator discusses the cuts and changes. Notably, he mentions that Murakami knew about and was involved in the process.
Jump down to the middle, starting from: "The cutting done on WIND-UP is a complex matter".
> That’s not a translation, whatever the publisher is calling it!
Abridged translations have been pretty normal in the publishing world, in fact this is a tradition that goes back centuries. Think of authors who made a big splash across Europe in the Renaissance and early modern era: Cervantes, Chaucer, Boccaccio. They were usually read in abridged versions, not the full work.
This leaves me totally confused. How can rearranging chapter order reduce wordcount? Also I find the argument a 1379 page novel is 61 pages too large not believable (but who knows; well ppl who can read japanese would know if there wad offensive content)
> I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation.
Whenever I think about this I'm reminded of a book of Voltaire stories I once read, where the translator's note ended: "...but mostly I've tried to say out of Voltaire's way, for I find that he speaks very good English". It stuck in my mind because I kept thinking how hard it is to imagine an EN↔JP translation with a similar kind of note. I'm no expert but my gut feeling is that the translator's style plays a bigger role for highly dissimilar languages, since "just staying out of the author's way" isn't really an option.
On the other hand, some years ago Murakami did a JP translation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. I'd read the original a bunch of times so I was really curious to find out what Murakami would do with it, how different it would be, etc. But everywhere I checked, it seemed to be very much a rote, practically word-for-word translation, to the extent that it seemed flat and overly explanatory to me (as a non-native reader). It felt more like he'd gone to pains not to leave any imprint on it. But of course Murakami isn't mainly a translator, so maybe I'm reading too much into this.
> I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation.
I think I understand your point, but I reckon a good translation is far from hearsay. That said, I have never taken a single book, and read multiple translations of it. Perhaps someone has, and can determine how big a difference an individual translator has on the work of the original author...
But I've read a handful of Murakami books now, and this post made me think about that. Most recently, I'd read 'Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki', as translated by Phillip Gabriel, and 'Norwegian Wood', translated by Jay Rubin.
Now every book is different of course, but while the stories are different, all the Murakami books tend to rely on a number of tropes, which seem to appear in all his books (at least the one's I've read), no matter who translates them... Strong female characters, especially supporting characters. Explicit, but not overt, references to sex. Fleeting, but highly edifying references to classical music. Numerous references to drink...
It felt like I was reading the same author, for sure.
Hard Boiled Wonderland was my first Murakami... The odd conjoined narrative made me think of Final Fantasy 8 a lot for some reason (which also had a strange twin narrative). I thought the book was at it's best when he was trying to work out what was happening to him...
Whenever I read about Murakami novels being translated, I'm reminded of his writing process for his first novel, "Kaze no uta (The Wind Song)". He wrote the novel in English first, and translated that English version into Japanese. His reason being "if it is English, my vocabulary is not that great, so I'm forced to write in short sentences, which creates this natural rhythm. Kind of like an 8 beat." [1]
Being bilingual, I often find myself pondering whether I should write something for myself in English or in Japanese for tasks such as note taking or journal/blog entries for myself. More and more, I'm finding that my writing in English is clearer, and more to the point. Not only that, but my thinking is structured in a more productive way, so I can write at a faster pace.
This was not meant to be a comparison of languages. We have enough of those discussions with programming, why would we talk about Natural Languages and risk angering a whole nation, instead of just Java programmers. Maybe my Japanese is no longer at the level of my English. But when somebody like Murakami also says that he wrote his first novel in English because it was easier for him, I feel there might be something there besides my English being better than my Japanese. Something worth exploring at least.
There are many great things about Japanese writing, the kanji characters bring about conciseness to the writing. I can glance at a page and quickly get a sense of the contents from the face of the characters much easier than English text. The characters feel closer to pictures. I also love the style of the "Bunkobon", which is a smaller sized book, which can fit inside a pocket. I used to carry those everywhere with me and pull it out when I had a moment.
The novels and stories are great. People like Haruki and Souseki and Ranpo are my heroes.
I guess my Kokugo teacher would have liked for me to mention the beautiful poetry that arises from Haiku and the seasons, but those things are no longer practical use to me.
On the other hand, there are also many mental blocks and barriers that I face when writing Japanese. Finding the right Kanji characters is one thing. That's probably attributed to my poor memory of kanji characters. Another thing is sentence endings: Desu/masu and dearu/da. The Desu/masu is a more respectful tone. Dearu/da is authoritative and sometimes regarded as casual. So now in addition to wondering whether I should write in the first person or third person, I have to worry whether my reader will be offended by my writing.
Anyway, would love to hear from other multilingual people on their views of language preference and differences.
For what it's worth, my partner also generally prefers writing in English. They also really like kanji, but generally seem to find that English more easily enables precise expression of meaning. For instance, they find English better for navigating bureaucracy, or communicating specific requirements to a contractor.
Of all Murakami's books, the one that made the biggest impression on me was "Underground", his non-fiction book consisting entirely of interviews with survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks in Tokyo. It's simultaneously fascinating and absolutely horrifying, and it goes into a lot of depth on the lives of the people both before and after the attack.
Dmitrii Kovalenin, Russian translator of Murakami has written a book on Murakami which is 1/3rd about the translation process, 1/3rd literary analysis of Murakami's novels and 1/3rd about author's experiences with Japan and Japanese people.
Kovalenin's chapter on the difficulty and involvement of translation the 'Hard-boiled Wonderland' is especially striking and goes into much similar details of how he had to be immersed in the book to a great extent to pull off a translation that would honor the original.
It is his literary analysis chapters that shed a great deal of light on 'why'. Turns out that Murakami's prose is highly structured, with subtle cross-refereces that, if translated differently will 'de-sync' and leave the reader of a translated version without the clues to understanding the real structure of the novel.
While an example of a structurally meaningful cross-reference escapes me at the moment, I do remember a different example of a structural clue. It occurs in the 'Hear the Wind Sing', the first book of the Sheep Trilogy, which ends in the much-recommended 'A Wild Sheep Chase' (technically it was later followed with a 4th book in 'Dance, Dance, Dance' so it's a 4-book trilogy). In the very beginning of the 'Hear the Wind Sing' there is a small unassuming line: 'This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later — in other words, on August 26 of the same year'. If you follow the other time references given in the book -- such as days of the week mentioned on the radio etc -- this time frame given cannot possibly be true. The assumption that it is not an author's mistake gives a hint that there is a hidden structure to the novel, which on its face looks fairly simple and linear.
I personally think that it is very difficult to get to like Murakami if you start with 'Kafka' or, god forbid, the 'Wind-up Bird'. These are hard books and they require a specific mindset to enjoy. 'Sheep' into 'Dance' is much easier to enjoy and 'Norwegian Wood' and 'South of the Border' both provide a large tractable multi-layered experience that can be explored up to an individual desire for complexity in undertones.
According to Kovalenin, Murakami himself refuses to elaborate on his books' structures and recommends instead to 'understand [the books] via the way you feel about them'.
I have, for years, been reading my first Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
This probably sounds like a bad thing, but after seeing some comments about it I felt compelled to offer a small defense (as in--do read it, but maybe trust someone else's advice on which Murakami to read first).
I absolutely adore it, and have gifted two copies of it since I started reading. But, for the past several years, most of my engaged/active reading time is going into a deep pile of dense nonfiction that I'd like to get through--leaving Murakami with my I-am-failing-to-sleep-so-bad-that-I-might-as-well-read-for-an-hour-or-two slot.
I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through. I'm always happy to pick it up, but sometimes I'll go many months without needing to. There's something calming (!= boring) about the pace (of the plot, and the narrator's thoughts, and of the language itself) that usually defuses whatever mind-race was keeping me awake, yet manages to keep me turning pages until my eyelids are heavy.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 26.6 ms ] threadI can't read his work. I know they're considered great works of literature, and to be honest they seem to be much more accessible than many other extremely well regarded works of literature, but I just can't get into his work.
I've tried reading them, I've tried listening to audio books. A small bit here or there, a paragraph or a full page, will strike me as interesting with excellent style (certainly attributable in part to excellent translations) but as a whole, they all fall flat for me.
Given their popularity, I sometimes think the failure is mine, though I also wonder how many people may just be riding the "Oh they're great!!" bandwagon without actually reading the books themselves. Probably not a majority, I would hope. I didn't enjoy it much but still managed to make it halfway through "Windup Bird Chronicle" before calling it quits, so I suppose many people go all the way to the end. (Although I read a synopsis of the rest of the story and said to myself "Yeah, glad I missed that")
I loved Windup Bird Chronicle. I struggled with 1Q84. I find the same thing in every creative field (art, film, lit, games); a favourite author/artist/director/company will release something I think is a real stinker while everyone else praises it, and vice versa.
Of course it can help to build up a vocab/grammar/approach to appreciate particular works or what something is referencing, but there are too many fish you'll never even see to be worrying about one author. Just hunt down the stuff you like and don't be afraid to give up halfway through if you're not enjoying it. It sounds like you've already figured that part out.
But if that isn't for you, I wouldn't beat yourself up for it. Just not your thing, and there isn't anything incorrect with that.
My complaints (which need not apply to others, of course) - A lot of the main characters and plot lines feel the same. I can't tell you what happened in some books vs other books because they all (to me) feature listless males who drink Cutty Sark, enjoy jazz music, and have weird shit happen to them that they mostly tolerate while acknowledging that it is bizarre. - The style feels a little flat. It just kind of is. Even though the sentences can get quite long and windy and full of descriptions and details until you get lost, much like a sentence like this, my inner voice still reads it in a kind of monotone that I imagine resembles how the protaganist (if you could call them that) goes through life. The kind of prose that, if you're tired, will make you more tired.
What I liked - The casual surrealness. I complained about it earlier but it's also a feature. It isn't meant to transform the book into a sci-fi or fantasy novel, it just is what it is. - The lack of resolution. Too many books try too hard to wrap things up. Sometimes things just are. Which is also probably why I can't remember what happened in which books since they just end up being a series of events (think another commentator noted that). - The way things weave together. Not everything wraps up, but that doesn't mean they aren't connected. - Japan. I've lived there before, it's fun to read about characters and think "oh, I've been there!"
I don't think this accurately sums up my feelings, which I guess means there's actually a lot to unpack which is a positive sign, but basically I think if you can't get into Murakami, that's fine and isn't on you.
> someone in the audience asked what his stories meant. there was a sense of the plots being profound, but just out of reach. > > Murakami replied that there was no great meaning. they were dreams he had.
The thing that keeps me coming back to his work are the stories themselves, I am usually quite curious how events will unfold, and I do find that, despite remaining mysterious, there is some sense of revelation.
On the other hand, I still prefer other works of magical realism, especially those by Marquez and Rushdie - of which I feel both have a much more interesting style to their writing.
My impression is that he is a popular author, but literary-wise, not really up there with the great ones, like Yasunari Kawabata.
You can definitely feel his mastery in the art of telling a story, not just the art of creating a story itself. I feel Murakami unfortunately lacks the former, even though he has taken with the latter.
I also feel like a lot of the author himself comes through the pages. You'll read a lot of really detailed descriptions of that jazz bar that one character visited (Murakami owned a jazz bar for some time). He talks a lot about cats (a cat lover, for sure), and all of the protagonists are males that have really similar personalities.
It felt almost surreal, and paired quite naturally with Murakami’s dreamy but lucid world building.
I haven’t read the original, and don’t understand Japanese, but the translation certainly didn’t feel, to me, like a translation.
In 1Q84, a central character plays a role in rewriting a work, so the translation process must be front of mind for Murakami. Perhaps Birnbaum is his very own Tengo when adapting his works to English.
Unfortunately, no Birnbaum Norwegian Wood for me, but reading Haruki's books put me into an interesting state of enlightenment. Contrasted, Ryu's books bring in a dark whimsical side which is also enchanting.
I've often wondered how much of my opinion I could chalk up to translation. After all, I know there's plenty of room for the translator to insert themselves when going between English and French or German, languages I speak that are close enough to English you can often jump word for word between them, even with closely related words. Japanese (a language I'm learning but know an awful lot less of) is vastly more different; you can usually capture literal meaning without too much issue but the thought of translating "style" "accurately" really boggles the mind. Especially when I learned how much the translator of Wind-Up Bird, Jay Rubin, and the American publishers played with the structure of the book, my conjecture is that there's no "real" way to read Murakami (or any Japanese writer) without learning Japanese first; if you try to you're mostly just reading Rubin or whoever retell Murakami's story.
I look forward to whenever my Japanese is strong enough to be able to test that theory, but that'll probably be another few years still. Turns out Japanese is hard.
Wait, sorry, what? How does a translation mess with the overall structure of the book? That doesn’t sound like a translation problem.
> Some chapters and paragraphs of the Japanese paperback edition were not included in the English translation. Translator Jay Rubin cut about 61 of 1,379 pages, including three chapters (Book 2 Chapters 15, 18, and part of 17; and Book 3 Chapter 26). Combining the original three-volumes (Japanese) would have been too long, and so the publisher requested that ~25,000 words be cut for the English translation. These chapters contain plot elements not found elsewhere in the book. For example, the two missing chapters from the second volume of the original three-volume elaborate on the relationship between Toru Okada and Creta Kano, and a "hearing" of the wind-up bird as Toru burns a box of Kumiko's belongings (Book 2 Chapter 15). In the third volume, the computer conversation between Toru and Noboru Wataya (Book 3 Chapter 26) and Toru's encounter with Ushikawa at the train station are also omitted. In addition to reducing the word count, some chapters were moved ahead of others, taking them out of the context of the original order. At the start of Book 3 the chapters have been rearranged. Rubin combined two chapters called “May Kasahara’s POV” and moved the “Hanging House” chapter to make the chronology of events consistent.
Jump down to the middle, starting from: "The cutting done on WIND-UP is a complex matter".
> http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/murakami/complete.h...
Abridged translations have been pretty normal in the publishing world, in fact this is a tradition that goes back centuries. Think of authors who made a big splash across Europe in the Renaissance and early modern era: Cervantes, Chaucer, Boccaccio. They were usually read in abridged versions, not the full work.
Whenever I think about this I'm reminded of a book of Voltaire stories I once read, where the translator's note ended: "...but mostly I've tried to say out of Voltaire's way, for I find that he speaks very good English". It stuck in my mind because I kept thinking how hard it is to imagine an EN↔JP translation with a similar kind of note. I'm no expert but my gut feeling is that the translator's style plays a bigger role for highly dissimilar languages, since "just staying out of the author's way" isn't really an option.
On the other hand, some years ago Murakami did a JP translation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. I'd read the original a bunch of times so I was really curious to find out what Murakami would do with it, how different it would be, etc. But everywhere I checked, it seemed to be very much a rote, practically word-for-word translation, to the extent that it seemed flat and overly explanatory to me (as a non-native reader). It felt more like he'd gone to pains not to leave any imprint on it. But of course Murakami isn't mainly a translator, so maybe I'm reading too much into this.
I think I understand your point, but I reckon a good translation is far from hearsay. That said, I have never taken a single book, and read multiple translations of it. Perhaps someone has, and can determine how big a difference an individual translator has on the work of the original author...
But I've read a handful of Murakami books now, and this post made me think about that. Most recently, I'd read 'Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki', as translated by Phillip Gabriel, and 'Norwegian Wood', translated by Jay Rubin.
Now every book is different of course, but while the stories are different, all the Murakami books tend to rely on a number of tropes, which seem to appear in all his books (at least the one's I've read), no matter who translates them... Strong female characters, especially supporting characters. Explicit, but not overt, references to sex. Fleeting, but highly edifying references to classical music. Numerous references to drink...
It felt like I was reading the same author, for sure.
Hard Boiled Wonderland was my first Murakami... The odd conjoined narrative made me think of Final Fantasy 8 a lot for some reason (which also had a strange twin narrative). I thought the book was at it's best when he was trying to work out what was happening to him...
Being bilingual, I often find myself pondering whether I should write something for myself in English or in Japanese for tasks such as note taking or journal/blog entries for myself. More and more, I'm finding that my writing in English is clearer, and more to the point. Not only that, but my thinking is structured in a more productive way, so I can write at a faster pace.
This was not meant to be a comparison of languages. We have enough of those discussions with programming, why would we talk about Natural Languages and risk angering a whole nation, instead of just Java programmers. Maybe my Japanese is no longer at the level of my English. But when somebody like Murakami also says that he wrote his first novel in English because it was easier for him, I feel there might be something there besides my English being better than my Japanese. Something worth exploring at least.
There are many great things about Japanese writing, the kanji characters bring about conciseness to the writing. I can glance at a page and quickly get a sense of the contents from the face of the characters much easier than English text. The characters feel closer to pictures. I also love the style of the "Bunkobon", which is a smaller sized book, which can fit inside a pocket. I used to carry those everywhere with me and pull it out when I had a moment.
The novels and stories are great. People like Haruki and Souseki and Ranpo are my heroes.
I guess my Kokugo teacher would have liked for me to mention the beautiful poetry that arises from Haiku and the seasons, but those things are no longer practical use to me.
On the other hand, there are also many mental blocks and barriers that I face when writing Japanese. Finding the right Kanji characters is one thing. That's probably attributed to my poor memory of kanji characters. Another thing is sentence endings: Desu/masu and dearu/da. The Desu/masu is a more respectful tone. Dearu/da is authoritative and sometimes regarded as casual. So now in addition to wondering whether I should write in the first person or third person, I have to worry whether my reader will be offended by my writing.
Anyway, would love to hear from other multilingual people on their views of language preference and differences.
[1] This was from an interview he did with a magazine called "Kaie", The New Yorker also mentions this https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(Murakami_book)
Kovalenin's chapter on the difficulty and involvement of translation the 'Hard-boiled Wonderland' is especially striking and goes into much similar details of how he had to be immersed in the book to a great extent to pull off a translation that would honor the original.
It is his literary analysis chapters that shed a great deal of light on 'why'. Turns out that Murakami's prose is highly structured, with subtle cross-refereces that, if translated differently will 'de-sync' and leave the reader of a translated version without the clues to understanding the real structure of the novel.
While an example of a structurally meaningful cross-reference escapes me at the moment, I do remember a different example of a structural clue. It occurs in the 'Hear the Wind Sing', the first book of the Sheep Trilogy, which ends in the much-recommended 'A Wild Sheep Chase' (technically it was later followed with a 4th book in 'Dance, Dance, Dance' so it's a 4-book trilogy). In the very beginning of the 'Hear the Wind Sing' there is a small unassuming line: 'This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later — in other words, on August 26 of the same year'. If you follow the other time references given in the book -- such as days of the week mentioned on the radio etc -- this time frame given cannot possibly be true. The assumption that it is not an author's mistake gives a hint that there is a hidden structure to the novel, which on its face looks fairly simple and linear.
I personally think that it is very difficult to get to like Murakami if you start with 'Kafka' or, god forbid, the 'Wind-up Bird'. These are hard books and they require a specific mindset to enjoy. 'Sheep' into 'Dance' is much easier to enjoy and 'Norwegian Wood' and 'South of the Border' both provide a large tractable multi-layered experience that can be explored up to an individual desire for complexity in undertones.
According to Kovalenin, Murakami himself refuses to elaborate on his books' structures and recommends instead to 'understand [the books] via the way you feel about them'.
This probably sounds like a bad thing, but after seeing some comments about it I felt compelled to offer a small defense (as in--do read it, but maybe trust someone else's advice on which Murakami to read first).
I absolutely adore it, and have gifted two copies of it since I started reading. But, for the past several years, most of my engaged/active reading time is going into a deep pile of dense nonfiction that I'd like to get through--leaving Murakami with my I-am-failing-to-sleep-so-bad-that-I-might-as-well-read-for-an-hour-or-two slot.
I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through. I'm always happy to pick it up, but sometimes I'll go many months without needing to. There's something calming (!= boring) about the pace (of the plot, and the narrator's thoughts, and of the language itself) that usually defuses whatever mind-race was keeping me awake, yet manages to keep me turning pages until my eyelids are heavy.