Haruki Murakami

Recently met a Japanese Murakami fan who told me the variable quality in the translations is due to him having two translators who have different styles. I haven't read him for a decade, and haven't checked this up.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, August 29, 2018 5:55 AM (two hours ago)

There's a thread on ILB where a poster discussed this very issue quite some time ago!

Surely there have been more than two at this point

recommend a translation

jay rubin

oh god i think i've read all of that stuff before which is why my brain gets stuck on "this has to be his translator, right????" anyway jay rubin sucks

i should give hard boiled wonderland a shot before completely giving up on this dude anyway

I liked Hard Boiled Wonderland a lot more than Wind Up, Brad - both are interesting trips, but HBW more focused and concise. In fact, haven't read anything else of his I liked nearly as much as HBW

I agree, Hardboiled Wonderland is tighter and more memorable than Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

i actually studied japanese for years—not to the degree where i can speak it and write it well at all but i got pretty close to that point in college— and what i like about alfred birnbaum’s sentences in that post is that they feel like actual japanese sentences and phrases to me, just in english

I find it quite hard to believe that 1Q84 has as much to do with the quality of the translation as much as just being a bad book.

Yeah, I don’t think a translator could make the last third significantly less painfully boring.

I loved *Wind-Up Bird* 10 years ago when I read it, it spoke v deeply to me, I have nothing of import to add to that observation at the moment. I've got a whole set of sub-thoughts brewing about that, Persona 5 and my own private semiconscious, but I don't know if I can or want to articulate them yet. Can't articulate it to myself comfortably yet.

I find it quite hard to believe that 1Q84 has as much to do with the quality of the translation as much as just being a bad book.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, August 29, 2018 10:35 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is also good to know

Alfred Birnbaum's translations make HM read naturally in English. Jay Rubin's make HM read like an idiot.

satoshi kon's "paprika" (2006) is a neat little anime movie that pretty much has the same story as Iq84 (2009) excepting the boobcentric nonsense, cats etc. check it out if you haven't already

tried twice to read wind-up bird but twice stalled in rage over the prose style-- somehow both fastidious and flabby-- had never seen the birnbaum translation but that excerpt rly is better. huh.

i feel so vindicated, i thought i was alone!!!!!!!!

murakami writes about what people wear a lot.
rubin will always write "he had on his blue shirt with the button down collar"
several times in the same paragraph.
birnbaum will write "he wore... / he was wearing..."

I saw Lee Chang-Dong's film Burning, which is an adaptation of a Murakami story called Barn Burning. It's very good but my slight reservations are also reservations I generally have with Murakami although in a much less frustrating way in the film than in his books.

Murakami feels like a side-step away from High Fidelity to me. I’ve tried several books and usually come up empty (that said, Wild Sheep Chase was ok). I read his book about running last year and it was deeply arrogant and boring. Blah blah I opened a bar and got famous writing but I didn’t even want it and then I was great at running.

i think of this guy as the guy who begins every book with the same idea as Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveler... but then actually finishes the story, thus missing the joke.

Fun fact, 1Q84 was translated by two people to meet the publisher's deadline - Jay Rubin‎ pts 1 and 2, and ‎Philip Gabriel pt 3. Agreed that Birnbaum is the best Murakami "voice" but he works pretty closely with his English translators I'm told.
The best Murakami is deadpan Murakami, the flat neutrality of style when describing things people typically get excited about is the hook for me.

I also got about a third into WIBC and couldnt finish it, and couldnt put my finger on why. Something about it felt so male and listless. Maybe coming right off the back of a pile of Le Guin had me in a more demanding frame of mind. I dont know what turned me off.

(wether this is his or the translators fault, who can say)

"the flat neutrality of style when describing things people typically get excited about" yes agree

it was the 'strange casualness' of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki that first got me interested in his writing

I listened to the audiobook of A Wild Sheep Chase while on a long journey. I had the player set to shuffle, though, and I didn't notice for hours.

legendary

once when i was 8 or 9 i actually got my dad to read me a bedtime story, and he read for ~10mins before announcing he'd been reading all the sentences out of order "and you didn't notice because the prose doesn't go anywhere", then turned out the light

the plain bedtime be damned

just dad things

Name names!

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, August 29, 2018 2:29 AM (seventeen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obviously this depends on the type of books you like, but to name a few random contemporary ones:

shinichi hoshi
toh enjoe
yoriko shono
kenji nakagami
ryu murakami
yoko ogawa
yoshikichi furui (probably good to put him on the list, he was at the forefront of a turning point in japanaese lit)
genpei akasegawa
yoko tawada
hiroko oyamada
kenta nishimura
hiromo kawakami

okay so not all are highly praised, but most of them are

i stuck to 1970s and onward because that's when haruki murakami first started publishing

modern writers would be its own list (pre-1960s ish), and though they are what i prefer, it wouldn't be fair to compare him nor any contemporary writer to them. but suffice it to say, in my opinion, most contemporary literature in japan leaves a lot to be desired. i've included some very recent names on that list, but not because i particularly like them

i will break from this for one instance to say as much as murakami gets compared to kafka every so often, kobo abe is the real japanese kafka, a pretty amazing writer, though, again, a modern one

some of those authors i read in japanese and others in translation, so i don't know if everything is available in english

I really fucked up with this guy by reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle first and then reading all the others trying to recapture that high without much success. Although Wild Sheep Chase/Dance Dance Dance are very enjoyable and Kafka On The Shore has a lot to recommend it, most of them are all basically the same after a while. I'm pretty sure I'd find Norwegian Wood ideologically reprehensible if I were to reread it.

Yup

Dance Dance Dance was my first and still my favourite - loved the combination of deadpan absurdity with actual suspense. I like most if his stuff, a bit in the way I love all of Modiano, because he's always writing the same book. 1Q84 was horrendous though.

https://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-a-brief-history-of-japanese-short-fiction-according-to-me/?single=true

Long intro (in non-translated English!) to Penguin's new Japanese short story collection, which is funny because he admits that he not only detests but actively avoids most Japanese literature haha.

If you go to a Japanese bookstore, you'll notice that he's translated quite a few Western Literature authors into Japanese (Salinger, Fitzgerald, Theroux, Capote, Paley, Carver, Chandler... off the top of my head).

I saw Lee Chang-Dong's film Burning, which is an adaptation of a Murakami story called Barn Burning. It's very good but my slight reservations are also reservations I generally have with Murakami although in a much less frustrating way in the film than in his books.

― Britain's Sexiest Cow (jed_)

I saw Burning last week, read the short story a few days ago. The film deepens the story, I think, but I'm not sure it added up to anything more than marvelous flashes (the ending felt out of character).

I agree with that. Still the 4th best thing I caught at TIFF

(of 14 or so)

He's been pretty visible this year, here's a "DJ set" he put together (appears that this is a running series so perhaps more of these to come?):

https://www.tfm.co.jp/murakamiradio/

yoshikichi furui sunds great. I'll try and hunt down Yoko

https://granta.com/who-were-reading-when-were-reading-murakami/

Mildly interesting piece on how Murakami is edited for The New Yorker, and how that colours the perception his stories get.

There is a long post in the archives about Birnbaum's superiority of his translations of HM, and that HM's popularity in the west is directly correlated to his translations.

I always thought it was pretty funny that HM's rise in popularity happened when HM was living and teaching abroad (Boston, LA, Honolulu) and meanwhile Birnbaum was translating said books while living in Myanmar then Paris & Barcelona.

Also funny to think that Murakami is fluent in English and enjoys reading translations of his books in English because it feels to him like a completely different story/voice, he has also done numerous translations of English classics into Japanese.

After Philip Roth’s death in 2018, we were robbed of one of the funniest recurring images in American letters: Roth (reportedly) going to his agent’s office on the day of the announcement to await a call that never comes. I have no idea if Murakami wants the Nobel Prize or if he expects it — and he shouldn’t, because he is not going to win — but I have decided to now picture Murakami doing exactly this. He laces up his running shoes. He puts on a Stan Getz record on the most expensive, minimalist stereo system you have ever seen. Pasta boils on the stove in a gleaming, spotless pot. Murakami sits by the phone in an Eames chair, and he loads YouTube and watches the announcement muted, with subtitles: some Swedish words — Jon Fosse — some more Swedish words. He steps outside and runs 22 miles without stopping.

Who Will Win the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature?

A+

why were we robbed of that image?

Robbed? We still have a few months to go.

the one of roth. presumably he did that other years

i honestly think karl ove is going to get it. they're due for another crowd pleaser.

My eyes added an extra letter there and did a double take.

Oh you meant in what sense were we robbed, is that it? It’s not like we ever actually witnessed that images ourselves in previous years.