The Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel

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.

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.

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'.

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).

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.

I feel a bit like a failure for saying this:

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")

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(Murakami_book)

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.

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.

[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...