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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

First, I presume he writes in Japanese, so the first question I would ask is are you reading it in Japanese. Translations vary greatly in quality.

Second, Asian literature often seems to follow a "Life continues with or without you" path and the characters may not learn anything and may have been completely bound to their (generally doomed) trajectory from the very start and just resign themselves to their fate.

Some call that deep and meaningful--I call it crap. YMMV.

I apparently am so completely steeped in Aristotelian tradition that I can't stand those kinds of stories. Ted Chiang, in spite of being an American, somehow channels this, and I found I had to force myself through his writing. I have held off on reading Liú Cíxīn because I'm terrified I'm going to bump into the same problem.

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Coincidentally there was a recent article covering Haruki Murakami's translators. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/haruki-m...

In my personal experience being a native speaker of both languages and having read some of his books in both languages, the translators take great care to preserve the reader's experience. I have great respect for their work.

Interestingly, Murakami actually wrote (at least) his early works in English, after he found that writing in his native Japanese he was channeling too much other Japanese authors as well as the classical style of the time. His English was more plain, so he ended up with this relatively simple style that is now his trademark. He translated them back to Japanese for publication.

(source: Murakami wrote a couple of essays on his writing career)

The Three Body Problem does have people caught in situations far bigger than them, but the characters do have agency and change the flow of history significantly.

I can only recommend these books, among the best I ever read.

> First, I presume he writes in Japanese, so the first question I would ask is are you reading it in Japanese. Translations vary greatly in quality.

Murakami is known for writing in Japanese as-if he was translating himself from English.

He's also the author whose fans most want him to win a Nobel even though his books aren't good enough. He's the ultimate boomer - as a teen real estate prices were so low he somehow ran a jazz bar while in college, and now he writes books about how it's impossible to understand the minds of women.

Wow. I don't usually go for snarky remarks like this, but you hit the nail on the head. It could be that he just realized he won't die a timeless author and curiously a Nobel most probably won't save him. A lot of past literature Nobel laureates are quite obscure and as it turns out - not that good after all.

In my personal opinion he's fairly strong at driving a narrative, but I never get to what end. Like a painter that works extremely hard at a masterpiece to finally pour some gasoline and set it on fire. Compared to an all star like Tolstoy for example he's just not cutting it even a bit.

I haven't read a lot of ""real"" Japanese literature but supposedly anticlimactic endings are appreciated there. I remember Kafka on the Shore having an especially bad one which I thought was very funny, he telegraphs an ending and then suddenly the book ends before it gets there.

But I do think too much of his writing is about the narrator meeting a series of mysterious women, not paying them enough attention and then pretending it's an ineffable mystery when they leave him. My favorite of his books is Hard-boiled Wonderland, where this doesn't happen. (There's an anime called Haibane Renmei whose plot is 100% plagiarized from that book.)

> Second, Asian literature often seems to follow a "Life continues with or without you" path and the characters may not learn anything and may have been completely bound to their (generally doomed) trajectory from the very start and just resign themselves to their fate.

Some call that deep and meaningful--I call it crap.

You don't know anything about Asian literature or literature in general.

I am a Bengali, and there are so much deep and profoundly interesting works in Bengali literature alone- I am afraid I am going to have to die before reading all the good stuff.

Although Bengali is 1200 years old, the modern Bengali literature only started about 200 years ago, and due to invasions and political unrest during 1200-1757, there are mot much volume of work of note.

Japan has had political unrest in its history, but it is a more continued (for the lack of a better word) culture. There must be 3x-10x more works in Japanese than Bengali.

And I have left out modern and medieval Urdu literature, and whole of China out of this comment.

The fact that you are putting all of the works- literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands pieces of literary art into "Asian literature" bucket and trying to generalize them foolishly shows your utter and complete ignorance in these matters.

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