Stranger on Earth

I came across this revealing interview with two of Haruki Murakami’s trusted translators: Jay Rubin ( 1Q84 ) and J. Philip Gabriel ( Kafka on the Shore ). It sheds light on how difficult it can be to translate a "culture." The interview can also be found at San Francisco Bay Guardian Online . Found in Translation Haruki Murakami's interpreters discuss the art of building literature anew 04.11.12 - 3:22 pm |  Soojin Chang   Jay Rubin & Haruki Murakami Ludwig Wittgenstein once said "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." So for the sake of expanded horizons, let's say thank you to professional translators, the diligent souls who dedicate their lives to the subtleties of language. When interpreters dissolve linguistic barriers, we are able to peer into the worlds articulated in literature of distant lands to understand them as our own. But how do they do it? Surrealist Japanese author Haruki Murakami's translato...

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore  does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...

Kafka Tamura’s odyssey is not complete until he has been to that one place he has been cautioned not to underestimate: the thick forest around the cabin. While in there, he encounters two World War II soldiers who have, since the war, kept themselves hidden from the world because of their pacifist beliefs. They show him the way to a village of sorts, and it is here that Kafka is reunited with the fifteen-year-old Miss Saeki. Kafka describes being with her is “to feel a pain, like a frozen knife in [his] chest,” but the irony is that he is “thankful for it” (456). Kafka has entered the forest to search for confirmation, and he has found it in the shape of the fifteen-year-old Miss Saeki, who promises she will be here if he needs her. She is eternally fifteen in this realm, and will be waiting for him whenever he needs her – a fact that has a profound impact on him. Before the forest episode resumes in Chapter 47, an interlude simply entitled “The Boy Named Crow” appears o...

While residing in the library, Kafka sees the “ghost” of a young Miss Saeki in his room one night, and falls madly in love with her. His descriptions of the phenomenon are full of hyperbolic contradictions: Her features are gorgeous, but it’s not only that. She’s so perfect I know she can’t be real. She’s like a person who stepped right out of a dream. The purity of her beauty gives me a feeling close to sadness – a very natural feeling, though one that only something extraordinary could induce (235). After witnessing the ghostly manifestation, Kafka says his head is “too full of that enigmatic girl,” and that “a strange, terrific force unlike anything [he’s] ever experienced is sprouting in [his] heart, taking root there, growing” (236). This is a clear sign that the image of Miss Saeki has already found a way into his young heart. A remarkable coincidence in the form of a popular song sung by Miss Saeki entitled Kafka on the Shore and a painting of a young man by the sea, ...

With Kafka on the Shore ( 海辺のカフカ , 2003), Murakami delivers what is arguably his most crowd-pleasing work. It has all the ingredients that make up a great thriller; it has a sympathetic teenage anti-hero who is at odds with the world; it has an engrossing parallel plot that never loses steam; it proffers more than enough head-scratching, eyebrow-raising mysteries any Murakami fan could wish for. To top it all off, it is also a deeply philosophical work that tackles complex subjects such as identity and Fate. The novel’s intriguing title naturally calls to mind the Czech writer Franz Kafka, author of The Trial and the short story Metamorphosis , immortal symbol of twentieth-century Existentialist angst. When the novel opens, it is instantly clear to the reader that Kafka, a boy who has just turned fifteen, is a troubled soul. He has an internal voice called “the boy named Crow” (“Kafka,” incidentally, means “crow” in Czech) that he converses with, and he quickly comes to the ...