Too muggy to think coherently, hence numbers

[flemmings]

1. Kafka on the Shore is amazing. (cough) I didn't know the Japanese *did* things like that. That's why I'm now 100 pages into The Wind-up Bird Chronicles and unable to put it down.

2. I'd kind of like to see what the Japanese of Kafka reads like. The translation is slightly clunkier than Bird or Sheep, ie I can guess what a lot of the original Japanese was, but Kafka's voices are quite different from the other two narrators. OTOH I know from comparing texts that Birnbaum slicked up Bird's narrator, in ways that may be legitimate or may not. I don't think that's true of Kafka, but I wonder if it too sounds flatter in Japanese.

3. The Japanese translations of Kafka must surely be quantitatively different from the English translations, because the Japanese associations with the name are *really* different from ours. Cf also Kaori Yuki. (No grand guignol in Kafka's works that I can tell; even In the Penal Colony reads rather bloodless to me.) Is this a case of Great God Pan syndrome?

(To refresh your memories-- various Japanese have written what an utterly shudderous feeling they got from that Machen story. I read it. Essence of 'meh.' Was informed that yes, it's all in the translation.)

Comments

[summer-queen.livejournal.com]

I'm very (very) fond of Murakami. In translation, obviously, and my preference is for Jay Rubin's translations over Alfred Birnbaum's, just based on the English itself. Kafka is good, but Wind-up Bird and, even more so, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World are my favorites. Cannot wait to get my hands on 1Q84 in October.

I would dearly love to read Murakami in the original, and I do own a Kodansha bilingual version of one of his early novellas (Hear the Wind Sing), but my reading skills just aren't up to it.

(funny you should mention Kaori's Guignol. I have book 4 here waiting for me to read tomorrow)

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World is my favourite too! And I do prefer Jay Rubin's translations as well.

RE not knowing the Japanese did things like that, I've heard it said that Murakami's so wildly popular overseas because his stories don't feel especially Japanese. Not sure how true that is though.

[summer-queen.livejournal.com]

Talk about serendipity -- I haven't had time to listen to it, but here's an audio interview with Jay Rubin about translating Murakami. Plus a short story by the latter.

http://nyr.kr/oXQq20

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Murakami's so wildly popular overseas because his stories don't feel especially Japanese.

What feels Japanese to westerners tends to be based on a very small sampling, she notes.

The odd thing is that his books feel Japanese to me now that I've lived in Japan but the early ones didn't at all when I read them before going there. The physical background is there in my head and I read these flat narrators as Tokyoites living their flat lives in that very flat city.

Kafka is quite different, of course-- it's genuinely magical realism. But I want to read it in Japanese just because Kafka didn't convince me as a fifteen year old boy in English. Except that very likely he wasn't a 15 year old-- he was a 20 year old who could say, quite rationally, 'I'm only 15 what do I know about it?' which is something no 15 year old on earth would. This is why it occasionally gave me frissons of 100 Demons.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I like the narrator of Wind-up Bird a lot but the long historical interpolations felt, well, inserted for effect. I wasn't quite sure what they were doing there, though I'll admit they added weight and heft. (I still skimmed the last two, having had my fill of horrors in the first.)

I actually didn't know Kaori'd done a series *called* Guignol. I was referring back to the earlier Count Cain excesses.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at 15 and loved it. All the Murakami I've read since (Wild Sheep Chase, Sputnik Sweetheart, and Norwegian Wood, fwiw) just doesn't do anything for me, and I have no idea why this one book was so different in affect from subsequent ones. They feel hollow, like there's slightly less to them than there should be. And yet this hollowness or flatness pervades Hard-Boiled Wonderland and I liked it there as part of the story.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

You might try Kafka on the Shore. It's definitely different from Sheep Chase and the earlier works. Reminds me a bit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, reminds me a bit of the 100 Demons manga-- depends which way you turn it and look at it. It's a different translator, one who doesn't impose his own voice on Murakami's that I can see.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

I might indeed! You've certainly rekindled my curiosity. I am curious to read /Hard-Boiled Wonderland/ again too, except that if it has changed in the meantime, I don't think I want to know.

Tangentially, I read a rumour that Murakami composes his texts in English and then translates them into Japanese, accounting partially for his particular style. (...and then has them translated back into English by others for the anglophone version? idk, sounds fairly dubious tbh)