​Yume de Aimashou: Apartment (Itoi)

Yume de Aimashou: Asparagus (Murakami)

Yume de Aimashou: Assistant (Itoi)

Yume de Aimashou: Eisenhower (Murakami)

Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing Retranslation

Last September, The Guardian announced that Ted Goossen, a professor at NYU and literary translator, will be retranslating Haruki Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing (風の歌を聴け, Kaze no Uta wo Kike), which was first published in 1979 and has been out of print in English for a while now (originally translated by Alfred Birnbaum). The translation is apparently due out sometime this year (2015). Ted Goossen also translated Murakami's The Strange Library, which came out last year plus a number of short stories from Men Without Women (hey I did that too). Seeing this made me remember I had a copy of the book laying around! I've translated the first 10 or so chapters (some of them pretty short) and will post some here, with the caveat that y'all should buy the official version when it comes out of course. Text of the first chapter is below. Let me know if you want to read more!

Haruki Murakami- Men Without Women
村上春樹「女のいない男たち」

        JUST PAST ONE IN the morning, a phone call comes and wakes me up. The phone ringing is always more violent in the middle of the night. It sounds like somebody at work with ferocious metal fastenings, trying to wreck the very world. As a member of the human race myself, I of course must stop them. Which is why I get out of bed and go to the living room, and pick up the receiver.

A man's low voice informs me of something, of the fact that a woman has disappeared from this world for all time. The voice's owner was this woman's husband. Such was the only identification he gave for himself. And then he said this: My wife committed suicide on Wednesday this past week, and if nothing else I think I have got to tell you that, he said. If nothing else. As far as I heard, there wasn't a drop of emotion in his voice. It was like he was reading off a telegram. There was nearly no space between his words. A pure announcement. Information, no decoration. Period.

Now how did I respond to that? I'm sure I said something, but I can't remember what. Either way, for a while after there was silence. A silence like two people staring deeply, from opposite sides, into a gaping hole in the middle of the road. And then the man hung up just like that, without another word, like placing a fragile work of art gently on the floor. I stood there for some time after, holding onto the receiver without any real point. There in my white T-shirt and blue boxers.

How he even knew who I was, I have no idea. Had she dropped my name, that of an old lover? Why? And how did he get my home phone number (which was unlisted)? And in the first place, why me? Why had her husband had to expressly call me, and inform me that she had died? I highly doubted that she would have asked him to in her will. It had been a long, long time since we were together. We had only even seen each other once since then. We hadn't even talked on the phone.

But that, well, who really cares about that? The problem here is that he he didn't bother to give me a word of explanation. He'd believed he had to let me know that his wife had killed herself. Then he'd gotten hold of my home phone number from somewhere. And then he hadn't felt the need to give me any further details. Just left me right at the halfway point between knowledge and ignorance, where it certainly looked like he'd intended to leave me all along. Why in the world? Was there some thought he was trying to lead me to?

Like what?

I can't even imagine. The question marks just keep on piling up, as if some child with a question mark stamp were trying to fill up a whole notebook with them.

So I'm still in the dark as to why she committed suicide, and how she chose to do it. I have neither the inclination nor the means to find out. I'd had no idea where she was living, or even that she was married, for that matter. Couldn't possibly have known what her new surname was (the man on the phone hadn't given his name). How long had they been married, anyway? Did they have a child? Children, even?

But I accepted what her husband had told me at face value. I didn't feel inclined to doubt him. So, then: after breaking up with me, she'd gone on living through this world, fallen in love (probably) with someone, gotten married, and then, for some reason, by some means, ended her own life on Wednesday of last week. If nothing else. There had, without a doubt, been something in his voice that was deeply bound to the world of the dead. In the stillness of the night, I could hear it vividly. I could even see the tension of a thread pulled taut, the sharp glimmer. By that line of thought--whether it was intentional or not--calling me at one in the morning had been, from his perspective, the right choice. One in the afternoon probably wouldn't have worked out.

When I finally placed the receiver down and returned to bed, my wife was awake.

"What was the call about? Did someone die?" she asked.

"No one died. Just a wrong number," I said, in a sleepy drawl.

She didn't believe me, of course. A hint of death was buried in my voice. The unrest stirred by the recently deceased is virulently contagious. It travels down phone lines as a faint quiver, mutating the vibrations of words, synchronizing the world with its oscillations. But my wife didn't say anything else. We lay there in the dark, leaning our ears to the silence, each with our own thoughts spinning through our heads.

Haruki Murakami- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami's work is a good part of the reason I decided to study Japanese in the first place, though much of that credit goes to his seriously talented translators as well. I worked with a couple of his short stories for my senior thesis in college, and recently started translating some of his newest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Japanese: 色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年 | Shikisai wo Motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, Kare no Junrei no Toshi). There's no official English release yet, but looks like it'll be here August 12th.  Below I've shared probably the most "oh yep this is Murakami" passages out of what I've done so far. If you're into it, buy the book when it's available!  Trigger warning: both the book and this post contain suicidal and deathly thoughts described in sometimes unsettling detail.

image: http://www.haruki-murakami.com/post/47999929283/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of

           Normally he wasn't even aware of it, but there was one place on Tsukuru's body that had a terribly delicate sensitivity. It existed somewhere on his back. It was a soft and tender place that he couldn't reach with his hands, normally covered up and invisible from the outside. But when he least expected it, some accident would expose the spot, and someone's fingertip would find it. Then something would begin to work inside him, and an unusual substance would start secreting through his body. That substance would blend with his blood, permeating every nook and cranny of him. The stimulus that was born from that secretion manifested in a feeling that was both concrete and imaginary, simultaneously.

The time he first met Sara, he had felt the sensation of an anonymous finger, extended from who knew where, that pressed deeply into the switch on his back.  They had talked at fair length that day, but he could barely remember what about.  All he remembered was the small gasp and the sensation on his back, and the indescribable stimulus that it wrought in his mind and body.  Like he was part loose, part drawn tight.  That sort of feeling.  What on earth was it supposed to mean?  ....  Unfortunately, he was by nature ill-suited to thinking over abstract, shapeless ideas.  Tsukuru sent her a message inviting her out to eat.  He meant to find the meaning behind the sensation and the stimulus. from Chapter 1

           He was surrounded, as far as he could see, by earth littered with wild rocks. There was not a single drop of water or blade of grass. This place was empty of color and even the light seemed un-light--there was no sun, no moon nor stars, and most likely there were even no directions. There was only the enigmatic twilight and bottomless dark, trading places at predetermined times. It was the furthest reach of what a conscious being could perceive. Yet in its own way, it was rich with life. In the twilight time, flocks of birds came with razor-sharp beaks, and gouged out his flesh without mercy. But in the silence when darkness hid the earth's surface, and the birds took off to who knew where, this place filled the newly carved space in his body with substitutes.

Tsukuru didn't understand the things that made up his new substitute flesh, and he never had the chance to approve or reject them.  They came as swarms of shadows to alight on his body, and laid thousands of their shadow eggs.  When at last the dark retreated and twilight returned, the birds came again, and pecked furiously at his body.

At times like those, he was himself, but in another way he was not.  He was Tsukuru Tazaki, and he wasn't.  When his pain became unbearable, he left his body.  From a painless place a short distance away, he would observe the suffering form of Tsukuru Tazaki.  If he concentrated his whole awareness on it, it wasn't impossible.

Even now, the feeling of leaving himself, of gazing at his own pain like it belonged to someone else, could still be reawakened within him when he least expected it. from Chapter 2