Murakami's Coming!

"Everybody, including me, has the terribly personal sense that Murakami is burrowing into their minds and writing just for them."
-Jay Rubin
"New Yorker" Interview

With Murakami's newest novel not due out here in the US until October, I've had to tide myself over reading some of his older novels which I have read several times before. I just finished "Sputnik Sweetheart" this weekend. It is translated by Phillip Gabriel, who is not my favorite of his English translators but there is a lot good stuff in this story. It just always feels very stitched together to me.  I remember parts of it like the story of the woman who gets stuck in Ferris wheel with a bird's eye of her apartment where she watched helplessly as her doppelganger gets willingly defiled by a man whose clear intent she's been trying to avoid. But I can  never remember how the story gets here or recall all the other narratives and stories in this novel as having any relation to each other, as a whole. It feels like a bunch of short stories thrown together.

In "Sputnik Sweetheart" as in most all his other novel, Murukami writes incredibly well about lonliness, isolation, dreams, death, music, sex and food. He writes fearlessly and irreverently but with great care. It's clear what is important. And his voice is unmistakably anti-authoritarian and yet also mistrusting of joining any group that would have him as a member Yes, it can be stifling. But he is unapologetic. And it is often this lack of a desire to apologize at least not to any external voice of judgment in his writing that I admire the most. It is often this voice both external and otherwise that blocks a steady flow of honest and/or brutal honesty for any writer.

Of course after listening to Jay Rubin's interview in the New Yorker on the challenges of translating Murakami and the fact that a translation means you're primarily reading the translators interpretation which is vastly different from the language being translated, has begun to make me wonder what is being lost! Is it even better straight from the Japanese? Well that's a pretty broad assumption but I'm sure there are many nuances that never make it through translation, which might add something to the work which we're never even aware of. Lord knows I think about that whenever I see a foreign movie with English subtitles. I can always tell when the subtitles are over simplifying dialogue which seems to have a lot more going than we can understand through this particular choice of English subtitling. This is why I admire the bilingual.

Well in the meantime I have also found the release of a short story titled, "Town of Cats" by Murakami in the New Yorker, which I believe is an excerpt from his new Orwell inspired novel, 19Q4. So I'll be reading that this week, trying to pick up some clues on what's to come.