Haruki Murakami

A Wild Sheep Chase
Dance Dance Dance

and whichever third seems interesting. (The Elephant Vanishes and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are possibly "best" but also most similar to those two above. For variety you can throw in some Norwegian Wood depression.)

Hard-Boiled Wonderland
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

If only because those are the only two I've read. They're grebt though.

This is precisly why I love Murakami and dislike him at the same time. He's a beautiful writer and he's got a really really twisted perspective sometimes, but the books I've read all seem like variations on a theme. In a way, though, it's kind of charming...it's like watching him rewrite the same book until he gets it right. And every time I come out of reading one of his books I feel like someone who's actually gone through a wrenching emotional ordeal where I've lost someone incredibly close to me, which probably speaks volumes about his skill as a writer and emotional manipulator...he's very good, but if I'm already feeling bad I don't want to go there.

Now, that said, I find his fixation on sex a bit creepy sometimes, especially when it comes to the May-December romance aspect of it...his protagonists, middle-aged men, almost always seem to have the hots for women that are on the verge of illegality. Also the smoking, drinking and rock and roll can be a bit much but only if you read all of the books in a row probably. Heh.

RE: Pinball 1973 - I guess I can find out for my self since the English translation is available here. Now I just have to figure out how to get away with printing off 74 pages at work so I don't have to stare at my computer screen in order to read it.

Reading Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 are good if you love Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance since the first two books introduce the main character of the latter two, also the Rat. They're quite short as well. Hear the Wind Sing is usually available on eBay for not too much, but Pinball 1973 usually hits $200 when it turns up. Luckily it's floating around online now.

Murakami himself isn't very proud of Hear the Wind Sing or Pinball 1973, so they probably won't ever be re-translated (the existing English translations are aimed at Japanese learning English) and published in the West. It was only recently Norwegian Wood was published.

For an early work, I think Norwegian Wood is much more enjoyable than Pinball or Hear the Wind Sing. Also it was Murakami's first big breakthrough in Japan. It is more sentimental and not as literary as later works, but still enjoyable and gives more biographical insight than the later works - for example his attitude to the student protests in Japan of the late 60's.

people on ile are mad for him.

I mean, its pacing is slow. OK, I might just be impatient, but Murakami is quite bleak really and the tighter pacing of, say, Wild Sheep Chase helps counteract the bleakness. Also there is little context for Westerners to understand the stuff about the war in China, and many threads are picked up only to be dropped and not dealt with again for hundreds of pages.

You wouldn't go wrong with Hard Boiled Wonderland for these reasons either, I just think WSC/DDD are nicer.

One reason I keep going back to Murakami is the same reason I keep going back to Chandler: even though it's all the same, I like the world they have created, and the sense of something menacing lurking just over the horizon.

Anyone read "Haruki Murakami and the Music or Words" by Jay Rubin?

I saw these at a film festival in Vancouver in the late 80s, and it was my first introduction to Murakami Haruki.

I read Dance Dance Dance first; it isn't a direct sequel so much as another story about the same character, but events from WSC are referenced in it. But for that matter, events from Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 are referenced in Wild Sheep Chase, and the fact that very few English-speaking readers have read them doesn't seem to bother anyone. I don't think the story in DDD really relies on knowledge of WSC at all; just expect a few mentions of backstory that'll be summarized instead of fully relived.

In the end it boiled down to choice rather than choices becasue the 3 for 2 offer finished before I could make my mind up. It was 'A Wild Sheep Chase'. I tried to read it while moving house, etc., so I couldn't really get into it and I didn't finish it. What I liked best about it was the drawing of a sheep. Looking upthread I see it is a man in a sheep costume. That encourages me to finish it one day. Also looking upthread I see you are all very well informed, perhaps to the point of lunacy.

Sorry this is such a damp squib of an answer.

At least two posters upthread have read it ... anyone else? What'd you think compared to later things?

I have just finished 'A Wild Sheep Chase'. I thought it was very good. The last bit made me sad and I don't know why. I suppose this is quite clever. It is a game of three halves. I wish I understood Japanese.

I look forward to reading more.

i like murakami, and don't think he is as lightweight as is oft suggested, but referencing kafka in the title is seriously stepping up to the plate, isn't it?

I was attempting the movie adaptation in my head enthusiastically while reading DANCE DANCE DANCE, which remains my favorite, but the darkness seemed to present problems.

I need to finish the copy of Norwegian Wood I've had out from the library the entire summer but I've been hesistant to subject myself to the sadness.

not with the sony cinealta!!

Wind-Up was the best when it came to the individual strands, but it really didn't seem to hang together and the ending felt forced. Dance Dance Dance was probably my favourite, just for the sheer feeling of joy it inspired - much needed after the end of Wild Sheep Chase.

Which should I read next? I was thinking about The Elephant Vanishes but Norwegian Wood is tempting me as well.

For myself, I'm putting more and more of my thoughts on recent reading on the Brown Wedge on FT -- but that said, I'm definitely concentrating on nonfiction reading first and foremost. I think this is partially down to the fact that in many cases I'd rather be writing fiction than reading it!

As for the Elephant Vanishes dramatisation, I saw it when it was on. it was great fun - lots of Mcburney trickery without losing the murakaminess of the stories.

My POV obviously, but I fail to see how this makes Murakami better than Lynch. I find mysteries more rewarding if I have to make an effort to solve them.

But it would be brilliant if it was actually Apache Indian.

Patrick 'Picard' Stewart was in the audience (I had a good view of the crowd), I wanted to shout out "Hey Picard! Dude! Make it so!", but I didn't. I kond of regret it now.

Anyway, bearing in mind Chronicle is my favourite, is Wonderland a good next move?

Also can anyone who's read the first two novels tell me more about the girl who dies at the beginning of Wild Sheep Chase?

definitely, if you like the more surreal side (i do, and its my favourite).
i read 'hear the wind sing' yesterday, its very short but a nice preamble to the wild sheep chase/dance dance dance books. he mentions 3 girls in it, one of who may be the girl at the start of AWS, i'll have to reread the start of that to remind myself.

That's what I think about Philp K. Dick.

I think the "Sputnik Sweetheart" is the most non-Murakami Murakami book I've read, and it's rather good. Strange how nobody mentioned it.

-- Japanese Giraffe (nihonnokiri...), September 2nd, 2004 4:51 PM.

I will retaliate in due course.

You keep your books in very good condition.

I wonder if I will stay up all night to read it, like Mooro did.

Please note: I will soon have read 3 Murakamis for the price of 1, thus beating the original Borders offer by 1 Murakami. If I take up Mooro on his offer of a loan, I will make it 4 for the price 1.

I've got to hand it to myself.

I'm not surprised.

Archel didn't see it, everybody else.

She thought perhaps it had got lost.

We need to talk about YASUNARI KAWABATA one day.

PJM's beloved Ottakars are selling 'Norwegian Wood' for a mere 99p, see http://www.ottakars.co.uk/Internet/home/harukimurakami.jsp

+ £3 off 'Kafka on the Shore'

+ still doing 3 for 3 offer

I've got mixed feelings about 'Norwegian Wood' costing less than the postage Archel paid.

Jel, I've seen the film of 'Sound of the Mountain'! Corking proto-'Vera Drake' stuff.

And I don't think that I will ever be able to drink Johnnie Walker again ...

This thread has put me off reading more of his stuff though, as I don't know if I could go through a similar experience again so soon.

I sorta begin to think I'll enjoy reading fiction again if/when I can get one of my own books published.

Blimey, I must track this "Sound of the Mountain" film.

I'm going to borrow Natsume Soseki's "I Am a Cat" from the library tomorrow.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047682/

I think it's better than that review implies.

or maybe i am a snob, and i just don't like the sort of people who read him. it makes me vaguely irritated that he is often compared, favourably to paul auster, who i rate a lot more highly.

For example, he's definitely much easier to read than the typical postmodern writer and his lyricism has an awkwardness to it that makes it more digestible than poetry, maybe like Kurt Vonnegut. And he seems to combine pulp forms (sex! what happened to the girl!) to give the reader something to be interested in, so the novel goes by much faster than if it were just quirky surrealism.

any defenders?

lex if I were you
I would try norwegian wood,
hard-boiled wonderland

murakami reminds me a little of nick hornby urgh!

when i was a kid it used to bug me when people mocked the bands or movies i liked or whatever, now it's really only haruki murakami i'm precious about.

What I really enjoyed wasn't the moments of revelation or the magic realism but the long stretches inbetween where nothing happens except eating, drinking, sleeping, listening to music, etc.. No one (who I've read) really writes that stuff as well as he does.

I'm excited this thread popped up again as it inspired me to check and see his new short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman has finally got a release date on August 29th

I love reading Dance Dance Dance after A Wild Sheep Chase because the same awful stuff keeps happening to the guy that happened in A Wild Sheep Chase, but he has a much different reaction in Dance Dance Dance. Even though for the most part it doesn't seem like it will do much good. His reaction in both books is still basically "fuck it" but he engages instead of disconnecting and the contrast is really uplifting.

Kafka on the Shore is out in paperback, by the way. If not now, soon. When I finish this vampire novel I'm going to reread it.

What I really enjoyed wasn't the moments of revelation or the magic realism but the long stretches inbetween where nothing happens except eating, drinking, sleeping, listening to music, etc.. No one (who I've read) really writes that stuff as well as he does.

OTM. Some amazing writing during those stretches.

i thought those bits were even more tedious - they didn't actively make me cringe and throw the book across the room like some of the more, er, contrived sections, but i am not convinced that boring writing is the best way to evoke boring quotidian life. and the narrator is pretty obnoxious to be around - whiny, perpetually self-justifying, completely self-obsessed.

i just finished kafka on the shore. while it was pretty enjoyable all the way through (except for THAT scene, you can probably guess which if you've read it), i couldn't help feeling like it didn't exactly...add up.

I completely agree. I finished this literally two days ago, and while I enjoyed it, I also thought there were a couple things that didn't quite add up. I think he's great though, and I would give my left arm to meet a girl like Midori from Norwegian Wood.

does anyone know what song's playing on his website?

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/site_flashforce.php?id=

http://www.jeffersonrabb.com/

thanks

Opening an animation studio in LA.

different murakami

if only Haruki Murakami would dabble in animation!

What I Talk About When I Talk About Cartoons

Hahaha, I like my mistake! Let's fuse the two!

you may be interested in Phil Collins' video installation at the Dallas Museum of Art. wouldn't have pegged the guy for a Smiths fan myself.

Haruki Murakami used to live in Santa Ana, CA about 15 years ago when he was a relative unknown in America.

I wish the song from Kafka on the Shore was real.

I've only read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (read this 1st, many people have told me it's a good place to start), Hard-Boiled Wonderland... (favorite so far...love that he bought a 6 of Miller High Life for his last moment of consciousness), and Kafka on the Shore (seemed most scattershot of the 3 but also the most emotionally involved). My sister is reading Sputnik Sweetheart right now so I guess that one's next.

No one has really noted this on this thread...scenes of violence in his books are among the most graphic and disturbing in anything I've ever read.

I met Haruki Murakami once and he was an absolute gentleman imho.

i met him not long after and talked about hard-bop and the tampa bay devil rays. very nice guy.

im reading his memoir about running, i love it -- helps that im really getting into distance running at the moment

When I read it, am I gonna want to run?

Please say no because seriously I hate running so hard.

Dude in Japan liveblogs reading new novel 1Q84
http://howtojaponese.com/2009/05/29/1q84-liveblog/

viral marketing?

reading UNDERGROUND made me hella paranoid on the train for weeks afterward.

^ Me too and I was already plenty paranoid on the train to begin with.

http://twitter.com/haruki_murakami

Good night, Mr. Pain.

I´m still alive, i feel the wind.

Some words, something, some thing.
11:40 PM Aug 24th from web

Is Haruki Murakami secretly an 8th grade dork?

Um...

secretly?

so i finally read windup bird chronicle. i dont know why i had been avoiding it--my gf read it back in high school and has been pressing me to read it for years but i resisted b/c hes been popular and i am a snob.

but.. i really dug. i didnt know it would be so romantic! or so melancholy! the segment w/ cinnamon and nutmeg was kind of irritating since i was impatient to find out what had happened to kumiko. i love that he catalogs every beer toru drinks.

I'd take a bullet for that book.

he really gets the heart of a certain kind of relationship, doesnt he? scary how much i was able to identify w/ toru.

love WBC. I'm quite wary of magic realist stuff but that book feels very true to its own logic and closer in spirit to Breton than Marquez. Romantic big and small r is spot on.

Man, Murakami's work is one of those things I want to talk about a lot, but I love it so unequivocally, I can't think of much to say other than "Oh my god yes it's fucking awesome"

ha yeah i feel that way about most of the things I love - like I'm not gonna debate anybody about it.

my gf read it back in high school and has been pressing me to read it for years but i resisted b/c hes been popular and i am a snob

friends love him and have read everything but i resist because they sound like some culty motherfuckers when they talk about him. v similar to reaction of somebody in the movie poll thread (to Pixar movies, i think)

must try to find hatchet job on him which a fan told me was hilarious no matter how unfair

I met this guy once. Very polite.

ha yeah i feel that way about most of the things I love - like I'm not gonna debate anybody about it.

― Oi'll show you da loife of da moind (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 6 February 2010 20:02 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Should be a thread? Is a thread?

I've found reading his books has been really helpful during difficult emotional stages of my life. His delicate narrative structure and gentle, relaxed writing style seem to help me calm down and organise my thoughts.

― Andrew (enneff), Wednesday, April 12, 2006 9:26 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

There might be something to this. I always feel there's criticism to be made for somewhat dry prose but I can never completely bring myself to fault him for it. Maybe "dry" is the wrong word. Maybe it's just thoughtful, and untangled? And if I think it's so dry, why do I plow through his books in just a few days? I can never unpack it all, I just love it.

Just picked up the "running" book. Looking forward to it.

so i have a colleague i need to buy a present for. hes into "fantasy" books and once told me he was a big fan of murakami and lent me 'hard-boiled wonderland'. can anyone recommend another author a murakami fan might enjoy?

Have any runners read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running? I want to give this as a present for a colleague.

tpp, philip k. dick - ubik would be nice.

xyzzzz, I've read that but I'm not a runner. can't really remember what he says in it - just remember that it was a pleasant, quick read.

thanks dyao this sounds spot on!

Thanks, dyao, my colleague is a runner and I was just wondering whether its way too obvious, but I guess if it reads well..

Have any runners read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running?

Yeah, I have. If your colleague is a runner, just get it for them. Runners love to read anything about running, and it's good anyway.

just finished kafka on the shore a few days ago (right after reading kafka's 'metamorphosis'). it was a pretty good read, but after reading windup bird chronicles (the only two i've read), it just didn't hold up. i definitely feel that murakami is trying to reference kafka in his writings. people running around doing weird things, not knowing exactly why they're doing them.

someone compared Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco to murakami. i'm gonna check it out. also interested in filipino history/culture
http://www.amazon.com/Ilustrado-Novel-Miguel-Syjuco/dp/0374174784

Also might suggest a novel by Karen Yamashita called Through the Arc of the Rainforest. There's a similarity in the way that fantastic events are narrated very calmly. Looking it up on Wikipedia will make it sound stupid, though.

the way that fantastic events are narrated very calmly

was just talking to a friend about kobo abe and this very tactic. it is a good thing to do, imo.

Have any runners read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running?
yeah, toward the end it just sounds like he's making shit up
so i have a colleague i need to buy a present for. hes into "fantasy" books and once told me he was a big fan of murakami and lent me 'hard-boiled wonderland'. can anyone recommend another author a murakami fan might enjoy?
felix gilman - thunderer
kj bishop - the etched city

Yeah, as I said yesterday in the running thread I would only recommend WITAWITAR to someone who's both a runner and a Murakami fan - it's not exceptional as a running book or a Murakami book, but it's kind of unique in its literary running niche, and it's a pleasant read.

Yasutaka Tsutsui - Salmonella Men on Planet Porno
really odd short story collection, fantastical modern folk tales with a strange sense of humour.
Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar
read somewhere that this was a big influence on Murakami, has some definite similarities with Hard-Boiled Wonderland. might be too hippy dippy though.

Getting a shot at a signed 1Ed of 1Q84 tonight at a raffle...

<3 this guy, although, I have to admit that even though I enjoyed his recent New Yorker thing, it was borderline "let's make up our own Murakami short!".

Got it, at a price of $33.80 (unsigned $30.50 list, ~$20ish on Amazon), but mine came with 2 cans of Sapporo and 1 Lengua Taco.

Apparently 200 copies of signed 1Q84 1st Eds made it to the USA and were raffled off tonight. SF got 40.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?_r=2&smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all

i'm both excited for and apprehensive about this book. got a feeling it's either gonna be the ULTIMATE MURAKAMI NOVEL or a run-on mess.

i think wind-up bird was the ULTIMATE and now i dont feel the need to read anything else by him tbh

Telegraph seemed to think the uncoupling of Murakami's universe from even nominal realism was a mistake.

I'll obviously read this, kinda annoyed it's only available in two volumes rather than one gigantic tome.

i love it when they do that! obviously it should have been three but oh well

that's kind of interesting actually -- did japan ever do the terrible self-defeating slide to STUPID GIANT FORMAT hardbacks?

Yeah in fairness after Against The Day I'm never reading/carrying around another 800 page-plus hardback ever again but I'd quite like the paperback in one volume.

its just one volume here in the us

we like our books extra large like our hamburgers and pizzas

holding out til 3rd volume comes out, at which point i'm pretty sure an omnibus version will appear.

17 holds on first copy returned of 8 copies

dammit.

Wiki sez the third volume was published yesterday, is that true? Are all three out here now?

confusing wording

In English translation, Knopf will publish the novel in the United States in a single volume on October 25, 2011. In the United Kingdom the novel is published by Harvill Secker in two volumes. The first volume, containing Books 1 and 2, was published on October 18th, 2011,[9] with the second, containing Book 3, due for publication on October 25th, 2011.

jon, here in the US, theres a single volume comprising the three "books" published elsewhere, it was released yesterday

Thanks max! I did misread that wiki thing.

np, its a good looking book too, its just crazy big, definitely not for the subway

Probably just get it on my Nook in that case.

this one then?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0307593312/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds

yikes

i meant this one:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51mGxL5j-CL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

yup

"it's easily the grandest work of world literature since Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and represents a monstrous literary event"

monstrous!

Does that actually mean anything than "guys! It's really long and is in translation".

all the magical little people are horribly killed during the third part of the book, each death dryly but meticulously described.

sorry should have ****SPOILERS**** there.

got a feeling it's either gonna be the ULTIMATE MURAKAMI NOVEL or a run-on mess.

there's a difference?

i'm guessing the mess would involve no less than 1/3 of the book's total length being devoted to cooking scenes and mentions of old records

:D

That still leaves 1/3 available for icky sex stuff with younger women.

i forget where i read it (maybe in that nyt profile?) (or maybe upthread?) but whoever said murakami's books after hardboiled wonderland read like him trying to tinker with and hopefully perfect a formula was otm. i still kinda love him though.

thats okay with me, i like the formula!

as far as I'm concerned, he never topped 'Dance, Dance, Dance'

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the best for me, but Dance Dance Dance is my favourite of the rest. I was pleasantly surprised when I read Wonderland as well, because people seem to be so down on it, although that was after about 5yrs of not reading any Murakami so anything was welcome by that point.

wind-up is probably still the one to put in the canon but wonderland is my fave because it's an easy trick (contrasting the kafka-esque sections in the mysterious city with the typically wacky-in-modern-japan stuff) but a good one.

i actually remembered i had wind-up on my phone kindle last night and started reading it again since i wont be able to read the new one for a long while, despite having many paper books i need to read.

http://i.imgur.com/FGAbl.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/3Bylw.jpg

the dust jacket is impossibly thin, like tracing paper. it's about the same size as Wind Up Bird tbh, it's not as massive as people are making it out to be.

yeah the book is beautifully designed. you can sort of see in shasta's photo how the hard cover is printed so that the vellum jacket completes the image

its like 300 pages longer that WUBC but printed on thinner paper. also slightly taller.

haha sorry theyre like right in front of me right now so

i'm guessing the mess would involve no less than 1/3 of the book's total length being devoted to cooking scenes and mentions of old records

― strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Wednesday, October 26, 2011 3:16 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark

My kind of book. Pissed off that we can't buy the one volume book in the UK and that the cover looks better in the US version. Also on Amazon.com it's $16 - over here both volumes would set you back nearly twice that (on Amazon anyway). Any American's coming to the UK with a spare suitcase soon?

From the official website:

In order to reflect the experience of 1Q84's first readers, Harvill Secker is publishing Books One and Two in one beautifully designed volume and Book Three in a separate edition.

So you see, you US readers are missing out on the "experience", even tho you are saving 16 bucks.

I would really prefer the 16 bucks thanks Harvill Secker.

Fuck it, I've just ordered the one-volume version from the US, if it's huge I'll just read it over the Christmas holidays.

It's like £10 for the book and £8 for the shipping, that's got to be cheaper than buying both volumes in hardback. Excellent work fucking this up, British publishing industry.

that's got to be cheaper than buying both volumes in hardback.

Yep, it's £18.29 for both from Amazon.co.uk with free shipping, so you've saved yourself 29p. Congrats!

1Q84 is my favorite book title since 2666

Another member of the choir that says he peaked with Wind-Up Bird but also enjoyed Dance Dance Dance and HBW. New one seems too long to tackle without some kind of running start. I think I read almost everything up until Kafka on the Shore where I ran out of gas. Should I try that one again? Read something short like After Dark?

If you are an endurance athlete, his previous book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" is rewarding and inspiring.

...yet still written in "that voice" not uncommon among his narrators.

...in his fictional works.

Even if you're an endurance athlete it's worth a look. I found it v. enjoyable for instance.

that's got to be cheaper than buying both volumes in hardback.

Yep, it's £18.29 for both from Amazon.co.uk with free shipping, so you've saved yourself 29p. Congrats!

Yes, but you've got better looking book imo and in handy brick form. Will customs hit u with tax tho, is my serious question? I think books are exempt from such shenanigans?

Damn, I meant even if you're NOT an endurance athlete obv.

was a limit of £18 for non 'gift' marked imports, being reduced to £15 on Nov 1st. just in time for xmas.

How will they know how much you paid for the book? These things have bugged me since I was caught out for some ridiculous amount for a Seinfeld boxset back in the day.

sender has to mark the value on the customs declaration. i bought something from someone on ebay for £10 and they marked the value as $40, completely fucking me over. grrr still mad about it.

that is awful... i'd leave them negative feedback for that alone.

jealous of that dude that got to hang out and run with murakami

When choosing from among his best books, do not neglect the short story collections, which are awesome. He is a fantastic short story writer.

The last few days I've been reading the short story collections, going through the stories in the order of composition (anyway, the order they're listed on his Wikipedia page). It's been kind of fascinating to follow the development of his themes and methods, which seem to have stayed much the same from the beginning. Everything is in first person, more or less in the same voice -- in some instances, the same character appears to be the narrator of otherwise unrelated stories.

I love this guy.

i first read murakami in high school and ray carver in college but when i found out the former loved the latter it was like oh yeah duh.

1Q84 is my favorite book title since 2666

― ∞th-wave ska (diamonddave85), Wednesday, October 26, 2011 10:59 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

likes this post

OK, I guess I'll give Blind Willow, Sleeping Womam a try and after that the running book, even though I am am not an endurance athlete.

do not neglect the short story collections, which are awesome

Recently finished After the Quake, and it's great. Previously I'd read W-UBC and NW, and the stories of ATQ are kind of a mix of both these styles. Engaging and a quick read.

Came across ATQ at the bookshop the day after the quake this year and thus couldn't resist the purchase.

Got my US copy yesterday and stayed up too late reading it, spurred on by the fact that I was listening to Janáček's Sinfonietta literally a couple of hours before I opened the book - you can't ignore synchronistic shit like that.

did not like him before this one but this one is really, really good

read Norwegian Wood entirely off seeing this thread the other week. i dug the story lots, but at times i feel that utterly clean style is so 'in' as of now its become generic to me

does he change it up much?

does he still write in that angsty teenager first person style

I did the amazon.com thing too like the day it was released here and got a while you were out card on monday so I assume that's what it is

The Mysterious Bookshop has both UK and US versions of 1Q84.

about a quarter of the way through. it's compelling but kind of gross in regard to the female characters.

I heard that this was... really bad? Can somebody who's read lots of other Murakami weigh in on this one?

it's compelling but kind of gross in regard to the female characters.

This sums up a lot of his stuff that I've read so far.

it's been so long since i've read his other stuff that i can't really compare 1Q84 relatively but the AV club gave it a D: http://www.avclub.com/articles/haruki-murakami-1q84,64876/

the first 50 or so pages have been p good imo

I heard that this was... really bad? Can somebody who's read lots of other Murakami weigh in on this one?

― free banana man! free banana man! (remy bean), Wednesday, November 9, 2011 8:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Seems just fine to me, with some bits of brilliance. I've been reading a few so-so reviews, and wonder if that is to do with the 'oh, i was into him years ago and now everyone likes him, he's rubbish'? Having said that, if you haven't read any before because it didn't appeal, this won't change your mind. And if you did read him and didn't like him, this will probably back up that opinion.

it's compelling but kind of gross in regard to the female characters.

This sums up a lot of his stuff that I've read so far.

tbh, his male characters have their..er..issues also.

about 300 pages in. certainly very boob-centric to the extent of it being a worry. clunky expository passages & backstory, kinda wishing it was a birnbaum translation rather than rubin but that's maybe cos i've been teaching english for a couple of years since i read anything by him & come over all hypersensitive wrt grammatical/usage issues, despite that lazily recounted nugget that huki muki just translates back & forth on purpose to get that stilted feel. such a page turner, tho' - patterson style! makes me think of "lost" on the tv, pulpy, silly, in some places this is downright corny, but it's hooky as hell. i can't wait to find out what happens next even if it is the usual humu malarky. overall pleasantly surprised thus far.
oh get this prize clunk tho' (no spoiler): "some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might've been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world".
OW! bradbury class clunker. i'm looking forward to more !

lol @ the quotes in that av club review

the uk edition is translated by rubin in pts one and two, birnbaum in pt three

i have been wondering to what extent murakami is aware of the crepe-ness of it. when i am reading a new sword and sorcery novel and a new literary novel and the literary novel is the creepier, actually never mind that doesn't work i mean fuckin' jonathan franzen right

hahaha

the uk edition is translated by rubin in pts one and two, birnbaum in pt three

― thomp, Thursday, November 10, 2011 8:43 AM (8 minutes ago)

Philip Gabriel in pt 3 you mean. Birnbaum hasn't worked with Murakami since Underground, unfortunately.

oop, my bad. here is an interview with him about the process, though

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/how-haruki-murakamis-1q84-was-translated-into-english/247093/#.TqYkHccXFY8.facebook

3.2% of the way into this and it's a bit bad so far I've read nothing by him before

conrad do you like books

so murakami is a big john irving fan, and is the guy who translates all of his novels into japanese. which makes a lot of sense, because, much like murakami, irvings first umpteen novels were all sort of variations on a theme, always with wrestlers, zoos, dysfunctional marriages, and vienna in them, yet are similarly addictive (to me anyway) even though they're all a little bit samey. just as 99% of all murakami novels have the everyman protaganist searching for the missing girlfriend and slowly slipping into some sort of surreal otherworld, yet i will continue to buy each variation of the same book and avidly reading them until murakami stops writing them.

just thought i'd throw that out there.

ps. hard boiled wonderland is his best book. norwegian wood is great if you are tired of everyman protaganists searching for the missing girlfriend and slowly slipping into some sort of surreal otherworld, yet still want to read a murakami novel. underground too, except more so. his short stories are awesome.

pps. somewhere, apparently, written in japanese, is a list of every song/album mentioned in all of his written works. has anyone ever seen that in translated into english? a murakami mixtape would probably be awesome, but going through each novel looking for the music he mentions by name and writing it down is way too much work (i tried)

love em

cool conrad what else do you love

pps. somewhere, apparently, written in japanese, is a list of every song/album mentioned in all of his written works. has anyone ever seen that in translated into english? a murakami mixtape would probably be awesome, but going through each novel looking for the music he mentions by name and writing it down is way too much work (i tried)

― messiahwannabe, Monday, November 14, 2011 7:01 AM (3 minutes ago)

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/printable2.php?file=xml/music/classical.xml
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/printable2.php?file=xml/music/jazz.xml
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/printable2.php?file=xml/music/pop.xml

i finally got a(n unsigned) copy of 1q84 so I can finally start reading this.

humanity the internet dunno

cool contad I love those things as well Im glad we have something in common

this might have already been mentioned in some other thread, or even this one, but for those with spotify, some folks have already made playlists with the songs mentioned in various murakami books:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/spotify-playlists-for-writers-haruki-murakami_b34843

taking a break from 1Q84 at about halfway through to read other stuff for a while, not sure if i'll come back to it or not.

q looks more like a 9 than Q

this book is actually v bad

it's almost as bad as I imagine dan brown or something

One thing that does annoy me is the constant restating of what is currently occuring

yeah that get's annoying. like a weekly serial or something, endless recaps. but no way is it in dan brown territory. i'd put it more with stephen king but w/ aspergers/blank jazz loving protagonists rather than king's hairshirt everymen.
having read all the others but one, i think the translation & editing in this one is pretty flippin shoddy, tho. yesmen proofreaders. still enjoying it 500 pages in.

get's? gets

I finished the first book and a half or so. Really enjoying it - but then, it's the first of his that I have read.

finished the first book last night. it's compelling despite its crepeness, i guess. did he always describe female characters in terms of their breasts? have i only just noticed this?

anyway i started wondering whether he'd read steig larsson; this book and his three seem to have something in common. (and the phrase 'men who hate women' showed up just as i was wondering this, so now i'm convinced of it.) like they're both about resistance to systemic male-on-female violence, but both very much immediately compromised in their form.

(though they weren't available in english until he'd have been well on the way to finishing this. and it seems unlikely he read them in swedish.)

"she scowled immensely" NO NO NO.
intensely maybe. who let this through?
yeh i'm guessing it all hinges on something to do with boobs in the third book.

v well may be the translator's fault but it's pretty relentlessly infuriatingly distracting

5.2%

There seems to be a large Lynch influence on this novel (finished the first 2 books), especially Twin Peaks. *Spoilers?* there's a hint that birds, crows in this case (owls in TP), are agents of someone else. There are doubles, sexual abuse as portals/spiritually charged events, morally ambiguous 'little people' and the idea that the 'forest'/'woods' holds something more primitive and powerful. Okay, actually, looking at that list it isn't that strong, but towards the end of the second book I got a very strong Lynchian vibe.

wow, thanks steve - i've been looking for those lists for ages!

finished the first two books & not really in a major hurry to start the third.
don't think it's a lynch influence ( although i believe hurakami is a fan ) so much as an overlap. there's deeper wellsprings than lynch i don't think he thought of evil or forests or mystery before anyone else. common themes.

this is either getting better or I'm getting used to it still occasionally annoying if not bad like I imagine dan brown then slow and repetitive like a kids' book have been kind of reluctant to pick it up but gonna give it a good go now

8.65%

conrad do you like Japan

Why do hate japan so much?

don't know japan

any good?

Finished! By the way this is fun to read while blasting Janacek in your headphones.

conrad, dunno if you know this but japan is a country

where i am in book two i feel like i enjoy this a lot more. i don't think it's as 'deep' as his best stuff but whatever

idea that came to mind earlier: 'thriller as fugue'

probably not a v good idea

yep knew about the country thing

are you reading this book dayo?

11.36%

conrad, what things do you like about japan

I think that it's a country

conrad, are these kindle percentages or are they like numeric ratings of how you feel about this novel at the moment of posting

conrad, have you ever been to nuneaton?

conrad, do you like percentages

percentages are fine

I've been to derby leicester coventry and birmingham

I don't have a kindle but they represent progress I've only been able to read in odd moments this week

13.19%

current feeling 68.61%

66.7% thro books 1+2. currently feeling it ~ 78%.

my percentage of the whole lot btw

when were you last kicked in the balls?

this managed the neat trick of being overly expository while still leaving you in the dark about a lot of stuff, in the usual style. i liked it a lot tho, firmly in the middle of the pack murakami. i'm looking forward to re-reading it. not any time soon.

what did you think of the ending, if anything

spoilers here of course...

the last part was probably the weakest in general. in terms of where tengo and aomame end up, that was obviously where things were heading and it was drawn out getting there, to no real value. the possible tension just dribbled away: ushikawa was the last wildcard and he left the story so tamely; likewise, the long arm of sakigake proved to be somewhat less long and potent than repeatedly advertized. i don't know about the tiger facing the wrong way thing - if they haven't just gone back to the 'real' world then the idea of her retracing her path to exit loses all meaning.

the real potential twists in the ending of course are the roles of the little people and whatever power the 'voice' represents. it wasn't clear to me what the last appearance of the little people signified. they were making another air chrysalis, but were they anticipating aomame coming to sakigake, or were they planning something with the foreknowledge that she and tengo were going back to 1984? what was the reason for incorporating ushikawa's hair? i prefer to think that i have just missed some nuance than the alternative.

as for the 'voice' and whatever power was directing things, the impression i got was that there was an undercurrent of the old god-beings using humans as chess pieces thing. the taxi driver at the start and the woman in the silver car seem to be significant around this. i like this aspect though, there is a lot to think about, although some more substantial hints would have been appreciated.

part of me thinks that there is a lot more there that i won't really appreciate until i reread, and part of me worries that when i go back through there won't be any layers to peel back.

feel like for the book to be interesting tengo and aomame's happy ending has to be beside the point, and what happens to ushikawa important

feel like we're meant to try and work out to what extent tengo's writing is productive of iq84 as they experience it / we read it

possibly trying to make an 'interesting reading' on a text that doesn't support it, i don't know; i think it might also be possible that we're meant to believe in the power of eyes-meeting-across-a-crowded-room romantic love &/or reincarnation to bridge the most difficult material to a happy ending

finding that ushikawa was the new focus was my favourite aspect of pt iii; anticipating and enjoying the moment he was going to look up and see the two moons

enjoyed that five minutes where everyone was in the same park but everyone failed to notice who they were actually looking for was something it came back to three times

i couldn't make anything much of what logic actually operates w/r/t the little people, the voice, the dohtas & mazas. re the last i think it's interesting that we're given so strongly suggestive names against the background of a plot where every single parent/child bond is broken or ineffective.

i figured the idea was that tengo was writing 1q84 (i.e. the murakami book, in a cute spin on the ghostwriting/authorship theme) but then why was he surprised by everything at the end, in particular the pregnancy? again, i am torn between i didn't get it vs HM didn't really doing anything with it

for ushikawa's entire presence in the book to be anything more than a wanky paul auster tribute, i wanted what happened to him to be important. i can't even begin to come up with even a vague idea of the significance of him and the little people tho.

i got the idea that the dohta/maza thing was representative of a person who is lost or somehow damaged, e.g. before and after trauma. like, fuka-eri as met by tengo was clearly supposed to be a dohta, but she seems to have become that (after being fucked by her dad, reasonably enough), rather than to actually have been split in 2, as there is no suggestion that another eriko was actaully left behind when she fled. and tengo gets the premonition of aomame becoming a dohta but she fights the transition. it is not the tidiest symbolism, and the whole little people business confuses shit even further.

the whole 1q84/cat town world is the state of depression or 'impotence' and dohta is an anthropomorphization of that

ppl in the book actually talk about the idea of another eriko being around somewhere, i think?

mad love for ushikawa

xp yeah that's how it is explained, but i got the impression that the events didn't actually bear it out. there was nothing else in the story to support that part of the explanation. i wouldn't swear i'm right but that was how it seemed to me.

but i got the impression that the events didn't actually bear it out

its definitely stated explicitly that there is another eriko but i thought they have meant in the 'other world', rather than in the one they were in? like many parts of the book he suggested at a lot of interesting things that he never delivered on, i guess

for ushikawa's entire presence in the book to be anything more than a wanky paul auster tribute, i wanted what happened to him to be important.

i think his death was important for the little people? the details are getting foggy but i think that he was an acceptable substitute in some way and they could use his dead body as a gate?

when i was reading this and shortly after i had a whole thing about how this book was just about the 'creative process' that seemed to reconcile all the inconsistencies and difficulties i had w/it but ive kinda lost the thread on that

why do they particularly need ushikawa for a gate, when a dead goat and a dead dog worked in the past? it would make sense if they need a person in a particular state of emotional damage to make a air chrysalis and so a dhota/perceiver, and ushikawa fit the bill. that would explain the abuse of the girls. but why them not just abuse another kid? what is the particular reason ushikawa should be involved? and if they don't have a receiver after the leader's death, absent the only 2 hinted possibilities (tengo and the unborn child), what value is another dhota? i can't turn it around and find a way that ushikawa is really important at all to the meat of the story (as opposed to its telling).

http://i.imgur.com/3e6vc.jpg

dissociative females ftw

that person has definitely read a murakami novel and summaries of some other murakami novels

IQ84 is probably the worst 900-page novel I have ever read in its entirety. He could fairly easily have got it down to 500 pages or so if he hadn't treated his audience like idiots who can't remember what happened five pages ago, or need endless pedestrian internal monologues because they're incapable of making the slightest cognitive leap without having their hand held.

the worst 900-page novel I have ever read in its entirety

i like the specificity of this claim

Matt makes me sad in my heart but i will still read this eventually

sad in my heart because i can conceive the possibility that you're right, i shd've added

I didn't hate it, I just don't feel that I was able to connect the dots... Or HM wasn't, and left the burden on the reader. Agreed that the book could have been 500 pages, though.

I finished my first Murakami early last week: Norwegian Wood. Not impressive.

Norwegian Wood didn't do much for me, either. One of my favorite Murakami novels is No. 9 Dream by David Mitchell.

yeah that's the only one i've read. even when i had nothing left to read on holiday i found it a real chore to finish.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my first and still my favorite. I haven't read the new one yet, but I keep hearing pretty similar complaints.

I can't remember anything about Norwegian Wood or South of the Border, West of the Sun. I read them both closely together so maybe that's why, but I think I enjoyed them. I'm still reading IQ84 and enjoying the story, but it's taking me forever to finished, unlike his other books, which I read in a few days.

The earlier novels are a lot leaner and more mysterious. A Wild Sheep Chase is my favorite thing he's done -the banal, everyday stuff and the uncanny stuff coexist there in much less clunky ways than they do in the later books.

Yeah I recommend Wild Sheep Chase to everyone.

Wild Sheep Chase and IQ84 are the only 2 I don't like.
Wind Up Bird Chronicle is my favourite.

I like every one I've read except IQ84, by the way. Which is most of them.

I've read Wind-Up Bird, Kafka On the Shore, and Hard Boiled Wonderland so far. I've got Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart on my Nook waiting to be read.

Norwegian Wood seemed like the most 'normal' or 'ordinary' of his novels from memory. I liked After Dark a lot, but wished it was longer (which is a good thing)

norwegian wood seemed like it lost a lot in the translation since it was so explicitly about quotidian japanese life, it's like one of PKD's 'normal' novels

that person has definitely read a murakami novel and summaries of some other murakami novels

― bosomy English rose (thomp), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 9:22 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

I've read a fair # of murakami novels and you can't front that the same themes don't ever recur

its not wrong, really, but I think its missing a slice for "early rock and roll music"

i'm not claiming the themes don't recur, i'm claiming that it fails as gag and as insight bcz i. it doesn't evince any real considered familiarity w/ hm ii. it isn't funny

maybe it was just what it looks like: an INFOGRAPHIC. to give u INFO.

I guess this guy could have made sure to actually determine word counts for every specific reference in his entire collected works, but tbh I feel like thats a lot of work for a lame "gag" and he gets the point across just as well. But, y'know, I tend not to get all pedantic about these sorts of things.

i'm not claiming the themes don't recur, i'm claiming that it fails as gag and as insight bcz i. it doesn't evince any real considered familiarity w/ hm ii. it isn't funny

― ↖MODERNIST↗ hangups (thomp), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 12:01 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

your second claim is much stronger than your first

1q84 has got to be his clunkiest writing ever.

his or his translator's?

definitely reached a point of diminishing returns with HM

just finished this finally what a bag of shite

i feel like if they couldn't figure out a way to translate the title then don't trust them so much with the rest

that said i don't know that i'd go out of my way to call it a 'good' novel. it seems to be going out of its way to not work on a lot of levels, but i don't know if that's any better than trying to work and failing, really. i got more out of it than i did kafka.

Read most of the books up until Kafka, where I stopped at the beginning and never went back. Every once in a while think about dipping in a toe and reading some short stories.

Which of course I said upthread. Carry on.

The short stories are my favorite stuff he's written.

I started IQ84 months ago and read a few hundred pages in, but I haven't picked it up since. I liked what I read, and I still want to finish it, but I never think to read it. It's weird with his other books I never took a break or put them down. I wasn't bored with it or anything, I liked the two stories running parallel. I dunno.

it is essential that people stop calling this rubbish book "IQ84"

reading it right now, I did think it was called IQ84 before I began it :(

his or his translator's?

― spextor vs bextor (contenderizer)

the translation seems the same as ever i guess, but the scene-setting, the characterization, the dialogue, the plot construction - ugh. i think 'thought processes' is a good term upthread. the characters speak, and are narrated as thinking, really repetitively through stuff that's not more effective or informative for being gone through again. in past books it might have generated some effect of disaffected perplexity, aimlessness (like when the 'wind-up bird' narrator is sitting around cooking spaghetti, doing chores, wondering about the weird phone calls he's received), but here it just fills up the space without generating an effect or substantively driving the story forward.

the talk about rape and abuse and retribution for them in part 1 seems weird and stilted to me, too. as if someone sat murakami down after the abuse plot of 'bird' and the caricatures of 'feminist' characters in 'kafka' and tried to school him and now he's trying to show that he understands. 'rape, really? you mean with penetration and everything? that would certainly be wrong.'

i think throughout we're meant to have the impression that everything's being consciously filtered through a male-centric ... consciousness; i really want to read it as us being in tengo's novel throughout. i don't know if that's quite supportable in the text though.

i haven't been able to go back to this to try to finish it / give it some benefit of the doubt.

not sure i care to.

I'm maybe 50 pages in, taking 10 pages or so at a sitting. Don't hate it but it isn't a page turner.

After Dark is my favorite HM, with Elephant and Kafka right behind.

I've read four books by Murakami and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is far and away my favorite. I thought Norwegian Wood was actually bad, not just disappointing.

find iq84 hard to dislike that much in retrospect

I'm sort of like that despite spending most of the time reading it hating it

still reads like it was translated into english by a twelve year old

I'm reading Norwegian Wood at the moment. Or, I started it months ago and stalled halfway through, to be more accurate, because I wasn't really enjoying it. The main character just seems like a dick.

Which is the old one about a dude who was cheating on his wife? That felt pointless

pointlessness and dickish characters are two of my favourite things about murakami !

I like the pointlessness and the dickishness too. My issue with Norwegian Wood was with the female characters, who are just fantasy objects or plot devices for the main character. Naoki's (sp?) death was like a right of passage for the narrator, allowing him to bury his childhood, and that seemed like a poor (not beautiful) destiny for a human being.

This is an issue with his work in general but it was more glaring and off putting in NW for me.

Ah, so that was NW. I guess I should read it again, but despite some nice moments it felt like a...waste of time.

at moments i could almost see how people would think it is a classic bildungsroman, but it is just such a vulgar example of that genre -- pulling out all the stops -- that i just couldn't like it.

I finally finished 1Q84 and it was a fun read, no where near the greatness of the wind up bird, but I'm happy to have finished it. It was more apparent and sort of tidy while still being weird. Better than Kafka on the Shore, which really bothered me for reasons I can't remember.

that's heartening. i think he works better in large doses than small ones. hardboiled wonderland or whatever it's called was too short... you didn't really *feel* the protagonist's ordeal the way you do in wind up bird. both are cool though because they are journeys to the heart of the psyche in which not much is discovered but something is learned.

What I enjoyed the most about 1Q84 was the length, I love long forays into minute detail, and Murakami does it very well. I can get lost in his stories. I think I keep hoping to find the enjoyment I found in reading Moby Dick.

what I enjoyed the least about 1q84 was its unstylistic and unstructural repetitiveness I don't mind long forays into minute detail if that's what they are

I like Murakami but IQ84 is basically drivel.

Sorry, 1Q84.

it may as well have been called iq84

"HO HO," said the keeper of the beat.

i'm in the book where the twitchy investigator gets his own entries

Urgh just finished 1q84. Wanted to get to the end but parts were so bad (mostly the aomame pep talks and breast fixation) that I felt embarrassed reading it

dammit

http://www.harukimurakami.com/author

the desk of murakami
what a cool room

how are those early ones that just got (re)published in usa

interesting, we share a mug with haruki murakami.

unsanitary

how are those early ones that just got (re)published in usa

― johnny crunch, Friday, August 14, 2015 10:07 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't count on them being very good at all. But I would gladly be proven wrong by someone who has read them...

they are okay, worth checking out now that it's easier to do so if you are a big fan in general. a chance to see some of the idiosyncrasies crystallize might be pretty refreshing now that they have ossified somewhat.

first new novel in 7 years 'Killing Commendatore'
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170110/p2g/00m/0et/071000c

first new novel in 7 years

Just finished Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and oh my god what an incredible book; exactly the kind of surrealist mindfuck that I wished it would be. I know it's a lazy and trite comparison, but I loved how it was complex like how Twin Peaks is complex: things happen without explanation, there's multiple plot threads, and you're not gonna get every answer that you want -- but that's okay, because its fun to revel in the mystery and try to connect the dots yourself. And the Hotel Room is a well-executed rip-off of the Red Room. I was surprised to see some critics' reviews of it wishing it were more linear, but to each their own I guess. Also some user reviews called it boring, and like I could understand if someone was bored its endless prose but goddamn i could not stop reading it

it was the perfect length too. I haven't read 1Q84 (or any other book by him) but it looks like overambitious gobshite.

i hated every moment i spent with that book but i either don't get murakami or i hate his translators

really? I really loved that book

looking forward to 1Q84

honestly given the way other people talk about him i just really hate his style i think

j.'s reference upthread to murakami's "clunky" prose in 1Q84 seems otm to me just with a different book

I listened to Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as an audiobook. I really think an audio experience makes almost any book more enjoyable, but I get your point

I think the “clunkiness” is a deliberate effect. There is a real clinica detachment and awkwardness to his style that lends it a kind of weird naivete/documentary quality... i don’t think it’s a translation thing

That’s why i like him though. I feel his books are of variable quality. Norwegian Wood struck me as trite and bad whereas Wind Up Bird Chronicle was an incredible experience

I am halfway through reading Windup Bird... it just seems very Japanese modernist/introvert. It could be a weird translation but I can see why people are so gaaah over him.

note: i never really wanted to read him before because every indie boy ever in brooklyn was over the moon about him so I wanted to stay away. Now that I just hit 40, I figure it's time.

Brooklyn indie boys are good though

Oh and I guess I saw the Norwegian Wood movie with Virginia plain? when it came out ages ago. I only remember there being too much slo-mo to depict ANGST!

I am not into Canterbury Tales types of books so I am going to be pissed if there are tons of shorts stories the remainder of this book.

Yeah, i think that book is really bad; I can imagine the movie would be bad too. Such boilerplate coming of age, set in the 60s, although even so there was somethinf “off” about it that made it even less enjoyable. It’s possible I didn’t get it.

The wind up bird chronicle is just an amazing trip. I had ideas at the time about the way history figures into the narrative—how it only appears as trauma and is otherwse invisible—but it’s been too long for me to really talk about it

“That book” = norwegian wood obv

I just loved Malta the clairvoyant, the backyard pathway, the open space between the apartments, the missing cat, the abandoned house, the knowing teenage girl May Kasahara, the dream states, the bottom of the well...that last aspect reminds me a little of The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

I think the “clunkiness” is a deliberate effect

yeah i'm aware of this. and i hate it

i enjoy it possibly only filtered through the cinema of wong kar-wai

When you guys read it do/did you see it through the eyes of a japanese dude or through your own eyes? I was wondering about this earlier this week.

note: i never really wanted to read him before because every indie boy ever in brooklyn was over the moon about him so I wanted to stay away. Now that I just hit 40, I figure it's time.

Hah now I'm wondering how re-reading it in my early 40s would compare to when I was a LA indie dork in my early 20s

You should do it and let us know. I mean it's fine to read on the subway but Terrace House is 100xs better.

When I talked to him he told me he wrote Wind-Up Bird when he was living in Orange County (CA), which kinda blew my mind.

What? No way

did you ask him if he likes Murakame Udon?

1991 – January, Went to the US as a associate researcher of Princeton University.

1992 – In January, nominated an associate professor at Princeton University (till August 1993). South of the Border, West of the Sun

1993 – In July, transferred and taught at William Howard Taft University (till May 1995).

1994 – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle volume 1 and 2

1995 – Returned to Japan. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle volume 3 For The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary Award (Best Novel).

1997 – The first nonfiction by Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche received the Takeo Kuwabara Prize (1999).

http://www.philosophical-investigations.com/2016/09/16/study-note/timeline-of-haruki-murakami/

Haha, no but he spends half the year in Hawaii.

Hard Boiled Wonderland is better than Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And shorter!

Carne, he taught Comparative World Literature at WHTU in Santa Ana pretty much while he was rising to international fame.

I've read and loved some of his books but really don't know much about him I really had no idea he was in southern California when I was.

I really liked A Wild Sheep Chase, remember hearing that there was a sequel Dance Dance Dance but haven't read it

ok it was already mentioned many times I guess I should read this thread

When you guys read it do/did you see it through the eyes of a japanese dude or through your own eyes?

Oh god, definitely not through my own eyes. I like Toru, but he's definitely in that mold of "passive everyman protagonist" where viewers/readers project themselves onto the character and get emotionally invested as a result, despite the character's immature moments. Fortunately he exists in a fascinating world, so it works out

The blurb of Norwegian Wood seemed like it doubles down on at character archetype, and with a far less interesting setting/plot line (a college dorm love triangle?) to boot. But it has a number of fans so maybe I should check it out

This dude is such a boring writer that it makes sense japanese high schools would have you struggle through (one of) his books just to study his prose

While it’s true that there’s something very japanese about his writing style and characters’ personalities (a kind of victimized male), there are so many varied and great japanese writers who have done/are doing something totally different and remain unpopular/unknown in the west

...but are highly praised in japan i should add

Name names!

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.

Some of the English translations, like 1Q84, show signs of having been rushed -- he sells well and his publishers want to get those books out in a hurry.

I've never been less than entertained by any of his books, and I'm impressed by his ability to alternate between sprawling fantasies and low-key realism.

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.

Yes exactly. Just an odd phrasing.

It’s not like it was some kind of New Year’s Eve drinking game that got cancelled.

An interesting little interview with Birnbaum from Mat Alt's 'Pure Invention' newsletter this week -

I came of age in the Eighties, a period where the vast majority of content imported from Japan, which is to say video games, toys, anime, comics, and films, wasn’t particularly well translated. The translations of games in particular were often unbelievably, epically, legendarily bad, to the point some have achieved eternal meme status today.

Occasionally, however, I’d stumble across a gem in the rough. Something translated by someone whose prose truly matched the level of the content, elevating it out of the mere “translated” and into the realm of something that might be actually enjoyed by someone who didn’t have any particular interest in Japan at all. In manga, for instance, that name was Frederik Schodt; in games, Ted Woolsey. But when it came to modern Japanese literature, that someone was Alfred Birnbaum.

Alfred’s translations of Haruki Murakami’s novels were some of the first Japanese lit I took actual pleasure in reading. Murakami made Japan feel modern, branded, real, warts and all. And Birnbaum’s prose, as laconic as the protagonists themselves, made them sing in English. A Wild Sheep Chase left a particularly deep impression, leading me down the rabbit-hole of Murakami’s oeuvre in translation. And I wasn’t alone: it was through Alfred’s translations that Murakami first began to be read abroad.

One can make the argument that Alfred “discovered” Murakami, in the sense that he was the first to bring Murakami’s work to the attention of a major publisher for books in translation: the late, lamented Kodansha International. Over the course of the Eighties and Nineties, Alfred translated Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing; Pinball, 1973; Norwegian Wood; A Wild Sheep Chase; Dance Dance Dance; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Underground; and assorted short stories.

One of the most interesting of these is “The Windup Bird and Tuesday's Women,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1990. It is an excerpt from A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the book that would put Murakami on the map in American literary circles. The book itself was translated into English by Jay Rubin, making this one of the rare and fun occasions you can compare two master translators’ approach to the same writer. (The same later happened with Norwegian Wood, in its entirety: first translated by Birnbaum and then again by Rubin.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known Alfred for fifteen years now (which is why I can’t bring myself to call him by his last name here, as custom ordinarily dictates.) Over the years, we’ve spoken offhandedly about his work. But despite his fame in literary translation circles, there are surprisingly few interviews with him on the record. It was a pleasure to be allowed to conduct one of them. And if you’re interested in an even deeper dive on the translation process of Murakami’s books, I highly recommend David Karashima’s Who We’re Reading When We Read Murakami.

So how did you first become interested in Japan?

I had no choice! My father’s job brought me here in 1960, when I was five years old. I lived here until I was seven or eight, for kindergarten and first grade, and then again for high school.

What was Tokyo like back then?

Well, I came to Japan just fifteen years after the end of the war. There were no tall buildings at all in Tokyo. Trollies were still running everywhere. It wasn’t high tech at all. What I remember is in winter, the smell of coal burning in the city, everywhere. And most homes were not connected to sewers. My memory is that the whole city sort of smelled like rotten takuan, pickled radish.

Did you pick up the language naturally?

I had no formal training. From what little I remember, I used to play with local Japanese kids all the time, and we had a maid — the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar, everyone from abroad had a maid — and I used to watch TV in her room. I grew up before the boom for mecha and robots in Japan, so all of the kid’s entertainment was chambara, samurai things. I remember having wearing a yukata and a toy topknot wig. We would play-swordfight.

How did you encounter Haruki Murakami’s work?

My first wife was Japanese, and was reading a lot, and she basically said, why don’t you translate Murakami? The first book I read of his was Slow Boat to China. I’d done some translation of short stories when I was in university, Taisho-era stuff, Izumi Kyoka and Kajimoto Jiro. One Kajimoto story was published in the Kyoto Journal, for what it’s worth. I really didn’t like the prevailing trends in Japanese literature at the time, all dark and suffering. The whole tearful poverty aesthetic that came together in the Sixties along with the protest movement. I really hated that.

It was a trend in manga of the era, too, the underdog hero.

The only manga-ka I really liked at the time was Hisauchi Michio. He was crazy. I met him a couple of times. Who else draws a manga about a mole who’s a painter and a fan of Duchamp having a love affair with an angel who speaks in a Kansai accent? That doesn’t usually happen in manga. (Laughs)

What were you reading for pleasure?

Not much in Japanese. I’d pick things up and find more of the same “wet” family tragedies, wet being the Japanese idiom for emotive and weepy. And against that backdrop, Murakami came across as a breath of fresh air. He was a humorist and a satirist. So I took Slow Boat to China to Kodansha International. They said well, okay, but there’s no market for short stories. Then a couple of years later, A Wild Sheep Chase came out, and I went back and asked, can I do this? After some sort of editorial meeting, I was told “no, it’s too thick.” (Laughs) What is this, lit by the kilo? You can’t sell it because it weighs too much? (Laughs) They gave me Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing instead.

But A Wild Sheep Chase eventually was translated.

Eventually. I did some short stories first. There was a festival promoting cultural relations between the UK and Japan. They wanted to showcase Japanese arts, one of them being literature. Kodansha wanted something they could promote. My impression at this time was, it could have been anybody. Kodansha told me they’d release hardcovers in the English speaking world but in the end, Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing only came out in paperback in Japan, with English-Japanese glossaries at the back. I had this wonderful sense that Japanese high school students might be walking around speaking my English.

What was the process on translating A Wild Sheep Chase?

I worked on it for about six months. I would translate pages and send them to Elmer Luke, my editor. This was even before fax machines. One or two times we camped out for a weekend in the office and went over the translations line by line. We didn’t have much back and forth with Murakami. He gave us carte blanche to translate as we saw fit. What we did was save up half a book’s worth of queries and couriered them over to Murakami. And he’d send written answers back. Which were pretty much, “carry on.” I remember one section Elmer thought I’d taken too many liberties with, and sent to Murakami asking, Did you write this? And Murakami said, No, that’s Alfred. But he let us leave it in anyway! (Laughs) I worked for six months on the translation, on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Then editing took another six months.

Next came Norwegian Wood. That book was an absolute phenomenon when it came out in Japan. Did you notice the hype?

Not really. No. I guess I was self-absorbed. (Laughs) Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t like the book to begin with.

There’s a big shift in tone between the trilogy of Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing and Wild Sheep Chase, and Norwegian Wood.

Murakami wrote those, which are lighter, by design, and then decided to become a “serious realist” with Norwegian Wood. The earlier work is heavily influenced by, he says, Raymond Carver, but it’s really more Vonnegut, as far as I can see. Even the repeats, like his use of yare-yare, it resembles Vonnegut’s hi-ho and so it goes. In fact, when I translated Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I wanted to change the title. I wanted to reference Vonnegut, so I proposed The End of the World/The Way it Goes.

What did Murakami say to that?

It never got to that point because Elmer shot it down. He liked Hard Boiled Wonderland.

The translations of Pinball and Hear the Wind were initially released only in Japan. But A Wild Sheep Chase got a proper international release. What were the reactions to it abroad, when it came out in 1989?

I remember reviews that came out, saying things like, “Wow, they’re eating hamburgers! They’re wearing jeans!” As if the Martians had finally discovered American culture. The UK press is famous for painting the Japanese as people from outer space. In America at the time, the prevailing image of Japan was one of a successful manufacturing competitor, while America’s industry was in decline. So there was a measure of antipathy towards Japan. Most people were not aware that there was a hip side to Japan, or a youth culture at all. We were maybe no longer World War II enemies, but Americans felt they couldn’t trust them.

It’s ironic, today it’s the opposite. Most people interact with Japan through some form of youth culture, whether anime and manga or Murakami, who I still consider youth culture even though he isn’t exactly a spring chicken.

I think Japan is becoming more and more like a theme park, the whole of it. Have you ever read Julian Barnes’ England, England? England in that book has nothing to sell but its own past, and turns the Isle of Wight into a miniature English theme park. Japan is almost a parody of itself.

Don’t you think Murakami’s work, and your translations of it, has played a big role in flipping Japan’s image?

Many times I’ve wondered if I didn’t help create a monster. (Laughs)

I assume you met Murakami on occasion while working on his translations. What was your most memorable time together with him?

An assignment for Magazine House. They sent him to cover Mexico. He was teaching at Princeton at the time. The photographer Eizo and I drove from Princeton to Texas, and crossed at Brownsville. Murakami took a bus and arrived separately. I was basically interpreting. We drove all over, down to Oaxaca, Campeche and wound up in Yucatan, we went all around. We even rented a helicopter at one point so Eizo could get aerial photos of the Mayan ruins at Bonampak, the three of us crammed into that rickety thing. It was reportage, Murakami’s impressions of Mexico. We were there a couple weeks together, probably more acquaintances than friends, but it was mostly fun.

Let’s talk about your approach to translation.

I don’t consider Murakami a stylist. By which I mean, I don’t think he ever thought of himself as writing so-called high literature or high art, so he wasn’t fussing over each individual word. Which I felt gave me the liberty to express things more naturally for a foreign reader. Typically, because my background is in fine arts, and he is from the television-film generation, I approached his writing “cinematically.”He tends to drive the narrative scene by scene, rather than through, say, internal monologue, what this character is feeling, or via omniscient commentary. It’s a bit manga-like, or perhaps more like a television script. My approach was simply to picture the scene in my mind’s eye and describe how an English-speaker might see the scene. Occasionally I would go back for specific words, but often I would ignore the syntax and grammar of the Japanese original, and just go for the feel of it, how I imagined an English writer would describe that situation.

Murakami was not yet a “big name,” back then, so you didn’t come to his work out of fandom. Do you think that detachment proved an asset in translating him?

Over the course of my quote-unquote career, I’ve drifted further away from staying close to originals as I translate. Those first translations I did of Izumi Kyoka and so on were pretty damn literal. And pretty damn boring, I think. The way I see it, part of my job is to make any writer seem intelligible and intelligent. Japanese writing relies quite a lot more on flow than English does. It doesn’t depend on “logical progression” or voice as much as English writing. It’s not as strict. So you have to invent those voices, to separate the characters. Japanese has very standardized ways of expressing whether you’re a woman or a man, child or sixty-eight-year-old, so even without the subject you can tell who’s saying what. English doesn’t really have that, hence you need to extrapolate and invent. Japanese also has aizuchi, throwaway comments that keep conversations flowing, but don’t always make sense in English. “So, ne.” Nobody interjects, “Sure . . . Yeah right . . .” five times in an English conversation. It doesn’t work in English. I also try to work in more character development, to heighten the theatrics of the scene or the story.

And this is all in service of helping authors get their original intent across?

Well, let’s put it this way. A translation that reads like a translation is no good. Whether you’re acting as someone behind the scenes or in partnership with the author makes little difference. What matters is, if a reader gets caught up on an unnatural phrase, then you’re in trouble. Especially when you’re working for a commercial publisher, you don’t want people to be conscious they’re reading a translation. It’s not some heavyweight scholarly tome, it’s entertainment. People have to be entertained. Which doesn’t necessarily mean putting it into American idiom; it means coming up with a distinctive flavor. It’s a lot like cooking.

Has anyone ever told you you resemble a Murakami protagonist? Every time I read A Wild Sheep Chase I imagine you. (Laughs)

I’ve had it said to me, but I don’t see it. They say artists gravitate towards self-portraits, but I’m not sure that applies to translators. And anyway, I’m not much for confessional fiction. Whatever, it wasn’t intentional on my part. Maybe it’s true to the extent that his protagonists are generally freelancers! (Laughs)

The last book of Murakami’s you translated was Dance Dance Dance, which came out in 1994. Do you want to talk about why that is?

Well, a big part of that is I was gone. I got married and was living in Burma, and I wasn’t here in Japan. Communication to and from Burma was difficult back then. And Kodansha International, who put out my translations, was struggling. I gather that Murakami’s side wasn't happy at how they were distributing the books, which is to say not very well, and not being publicized very well. Which was all true. Publishing his books in English in Japan didn’t make any sense anymore. Anyway, by the time I made it back to Japan, decisions had been made.

What are you working on now?

The last thing I translated was Toshihiko Yahagi’s The Wrong Goodbye, put out by a UK publisher. Yahagi started out as a writer for manga, and he’s a bit of a jack of all trades. He’s a satirist and a political writer. He attacks the status quo Japan head-on and is quite the stylist; he appropriates all sorts of writing styles. As the title implies, it plays off of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

Most recently, though, I’ve been concentrating on writing my own fiction. There have been very few commissions coming in and Covid killed off a lot of smaller publishers, added to the fact that reading books has generally declined in competition with the net and other media. Also, I find I’m not very interested in current trends in Japanese writing — or at least I haven’t tried to keep up. I’d written various short stories over years, but this lull allowed me to finish one full-length novel and start work on another. I doubt they will ever get published or find an audience, but the writing itself is the main thing for me.

Thanks for that, I'm a huge Birnbaum-head and have brought up much of the opening to this interview on this very board (probably not this thread though, I think the "Translators" thread?) probably 17-20 years ago.

One thing I always wondered (and it's glossed at here as he was a professor in the west(US/UK) for over a decade) is that Murakami is highly proficiently bilingual and extremely capable of translating his own work which he never did, despite translating dozens of English language works to Japanese (Carver, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, et al)... but he always mentions that he loves reading translations of his work because he considers them original fiction!

Having talked with Japanese fans of Murakami, it's pretty interesting just how much license Birnbaum can take with his books... I remember a baffling conversation about the Sheep Man where we eventually realized the character was just totally different in the English translation.

Was hoping this might be bumped with an update on the English language version of The City and Its Uncertain Walls, but thanks for that!

For some bilingual authors it seems like translation is like mastering a record, they could do it themselves but prefer to get a fresh perspective, or maybe they're just sick of working on it by that point.

I love the collection of Japanese fiction that Birnbaum edited, Monkey Brain Sushi (1990)

There is a magic to his translations of Murakami, but he was also lucky in the Murakami’s output during that era was just superior, too. Birnbaum says that he would decline to translate Murakami’s new works

Reading “ Norwegian Wood” and of my god, the woman the protagonist gets involved with at university is so profoundly unlikeable that I’m repulsed. But I’m gonna finish this thing

I think what bothers me is that I can be a lot like the protagonist- overly agreeable, easily persuaded, eager to make the tiger person happy

The movie adaptation is free on Tubi, currently.

Not sure it's a great film but god some of the cinematography is so goddam romantic.

I like Greenwood's score (and the CAN tracks) but the film is a dud for me.

Seeing this in the Seattle Library catalog - 街とその不確かな壁 (Machi to sono futashika na kabe). Google translates to “The City and its Uncertain Walls”. Would figure translating/refining now for 2024 release?

Browsing at the bookstore and overheard this young woman berating Murakami for his sexism to this guy. Did giggle but I do think this stuff will sink without trace quite quickly.

New "Kaho" short story in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/08/kaho-fiction-haruki-murakami

heard there are beatles references

glad he's still got it

Still wishing Alfred Birnbaum was translating into English, but he doesn’t even care for Murakami’s material from the last 20+ years. I often read Dutch translations instead

https://soundcloud.com/benjamin-studebaker/murakami-and-political-despair

this is a great podcast about murakami.

I loved reading the Rat books in Birnbaum’s translations, and the new edition of the first two just feels so lifeless. I sometimes wonder if Birnbaum might just be a better writer than Murakami

heard there are beatles references

glad he's still got it

A title-swapped End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland coming with new translation by Jay Rubin. Alfred Birnbaum did Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

does this mean the order of the chapters will also be changed or just a new title?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World doesn't mention, but that would be appropriate, wouldn't it? Odd, HBW, even, TEotW, currently.

I'm excited for The City and Its Uncertain Walls to finally get the English translation next month.

Haruki Murakami’s New Novel Doesn’t Feel All That New

“The City and Its Uncertain Walls” features all the author’s signature elements — and his singular voice — in a story he has told before.

wow, who could have guessed