{"id":287766,"date":"2011-10-25T17:01:37","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T17:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/10\/25\/murakami-profile-in-the-ny-times-magazine\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:16:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:16:53","slug":"murakami-profile-in-the-ny-times-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/10\/25\/murakami-profile-in-the-ny-times-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Murakami Profile in the NY Times Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend, in advance of today’s drop date for 1Q84<\/em>, Sam Anderson wrote a long, very well-textured profile of Murakami entitled The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.<\/a><\/p>\n

To be honest, I’m not the biggest Murakami fan in the world. I really like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World<\/em>, and to a lesser extent The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles<\/em>, but could do without Kafka on the Shore<\/em>, and was rather disappointed when I recently read A Wild Sheep Chase.<\/em> That said, everything I read about 1Q84<\/em> makes me more and more excited about this book. (Which I wish Random House would send us. We’ve been asking for months, and I will happily publish a review of it here if they’d just send us a copy . . . Grrr.)<\/p>\n

First off, this book is the very definition of massive. According to Anderson, it is “932 pages long and nearly a foot tall \u2014 the size of an extremely serious piece of legislation.” In other words, perfect for the Rochester winter. <\/p>\n

Secondly, there’s a religious cult involved. I’m a sucker for reading, hearing, or watching about religious cults. I love them. (In an intellectual, curious way, you know?) And that’s just the beginning of the weirdness this book contains:<\/p>\n

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1Q84<\/em> is not, actually, a simple story. Its plot may not even be fully summarizable \u2014 at least not in the space of a magazine article, written in human language, on this astral plane. It begins at a dead stop: a young woman named Aomame (it means \u201cgreen peas\u201d) is stuck in a taxi, in a traffic jam, on one of the elevated highways that circle the outskirts of Tokyo. A song comes over the taxi\u2019s radio: a classical piece called the \u201cSinfonietta,\u201d by the Czechoslovakian composer Leos Janacek \u2014 \u201cprobably not the ideal music,\u201d Murakami writes, \u201cto hear in a taxi caught in traffic.\u201d And yet it resonates with her on some mysterious level. As the \u201cSinfonietta\u201d plays and the taxi idles, the driver finally suggests to Aomame an unusual escape route. The elevated highways, he tells her, are studded with emergency pullouts; in fact, there happens to be one just ahead. These pullouts, he says, have secret stairways to the street that most people aren\u2019t aware of. If she is truly desperate she could probably manage to climb down one of these. As Aomame considers this, the driver suddenly issues a very Murakami warning. \u201cPlease remember,\u201d he says, \u201cthings are not what they seem.\u201d If she goes down, he warns, her world might suddenly change forever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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She does, and it does. The world Aomame descends into has a subtly different history, and there are also \u2014 less subtly \u2014 two moons. (The appointment she\u2019s late for, by the way, turns out to be an assassination.) There is also a tribe of magical beings called the Little People who emerge, one evening, from the mouth of a dead, blind goat (long story), expand themselves from the size of a tadpole to the size of a prairie dog and then, while chanting \u201cho ho\u201d in unison, start plucking white translucent threads out of the air in order to weave a big peanut-shaped orb called an \u201cair chrysalis.\u201d This is pretty much the baseline of craziness in \u201c1Q84.\u201d Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ halfway through, the book launches itself to such rarefied supernatural heights (a levitating clock, mystical sex-paralysis) that I found myself drawing exclamation points all over the margins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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For decades now, Murakami has been talking about working himself up to write what he calls a \u201ccomprehensive novel\u201d \u2014 something on the scale of The Brothers Karamazov,<\/em> one of his artistic touchstones. (He has read the book four times.) This seems to be what he has attempted with \u201c1Q84\u201d: a grand, third-person, all-encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it \u2014 a book that, even despite its occasional awkwardness (or maybe even because of that awkwardness), makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That last paragraph is another reason I want to read this: it’s a blatant display of writerly ambition. Granted, short novels can be much more fulfilling and tight and readable in a relatively normal amount of time, but there’s something compelling about a wooly, extravagant, discursive, life-consuming novel. Like Gravity’s Rainbow<\/em> or Infinite Jest<\/em> or Cryptonomicon.<\/em> I think it’s a boy thing. <\/p>\n

Another part of Anderson’s piece that is really interesting (and relates nicely to this blog) is about translation in relation to Murakami’s influences, and the way that his books have a tendency seep into parts of your life:<\/p>\n

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Murakami\u2019s fiction has a special way of leaking into reality. During my five days in Japan, I found that I was less comfortable in actual Tokyo than I was in Murakami\u2019s Tokyo \u2014 the real city filtered through the imaginative lens of his books. [. . .] I became hyperaware, as I wandered around, of the things Murakami novels are hyperaware of: incidental music, ascents and descents, the shapes of people\u2019s ears.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In doing all of this I was joining a long line of Murakami pilgrims. People have published cookbooks based on the meals described in his novels and assembled endless online playlists of the music his characters listen to. Murakami told me, with obvious delight, that a company in Korea has organized \u201cKafka on the Shore\u201d tour groups in Western Japan, and that his Polish translator is putting together a 1Q84<\/i>-themed travel guide to Tokyo.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Sometimes the tourism even crosses metaphysical boundaries. Murakami often hears from readers who have \u201cdiscovered\u201d his inventions in the real world: a restaurant or a shop that he thought he made up, they report, actually exists in Tokyo. In Sapporo, there are now apparently multiple Dolphin Hotels \u2014 an establishment Murakami invented in A Wild Sheep Chase.<\/em> After publishing 1Q84,<\/em> Murakami received a letter from a family with the surname \u201cAomame,\u201d a name so improbable (remember: \u201cgreen peas\u201d) he thought he invented it. He sent them a signed copy of the book. The kicker is that all of this \u2014 fiction leaking into reality, reality leaking into fiction \u2014 is what most of Murakami\u2019s fiction (including, especially, 1Q84<\/i>) is all about. He is always shuttling us back and forth between worlds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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This calls to mind the act of translation \u2014 shuttling from one world to another \u2014 which is in many ways the key to understanding Murakami\u2019s work. He has consistently denied being influenced by Japanese writers; he even spoke, early in his career, about escaping \u201cthe curse of Japanese.\u201d Instead, he formed his literary sensibilities as a teenager by obsessively reading Western novelists: the classic Europeans (Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Dickens) but especially a cluster of 20th-century Americans whom he has read over and over throughout his life \u2014 Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut. When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up with an unorthodox solution: he wrote the book\u2019s opening in English, then translated it back into Japanese. This, he says, is how he found his voice. Murakami\u2019s longstanding translator, Jay Rubin, told me that a distinctive feature of Murakami\u2019s Japanese is that it often reads, in the original, as if it has been translated from English.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami\u2019s work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) \u2014 watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can read the entire piece by clicking here<\/a> and you can buy your copy of 1Q84<\/em> here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend, in advance of today’s drop date for 1Q84, Sam Anderson wrote a long, very well-textured profile of Murakami entitled The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami. To be honest, I’m not the biggest Murakami fan in the world. I really like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and to a lesser […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[23976,6506,226,1646,43676],"class_list":["post-287766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-1q84","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-new-york-times","tag-review","tag-sam-anderson"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319976,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287766\/revisions\/319976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}