Stranger on Earth

Make no mistake about Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of uniquely restrained works such as The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans . His Japanese background suggests we should see him in the same light as the other Japanese literary colossus: Haruki Murakami. But Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to the UK when he was only five, is oceans away from Murakami. He does not deal with time warps, ghostly apparitions or talking cats. His fictional world is (on the surface) realistically rendered, populated by characters with emotions and motives that largely resemble our own. Ishiguro’s award-winning debut A Pale View of Hills (1982) introduces to us an author whose chief concern is the inner landscape – that twilight region of the human mind where shadows threaten to erase reality. The novel’s protagonist Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman residing in England, is having to cope with the aftermath of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide. Her English-born second daughter, Niki, is ...

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...

When a totalitarian regime or a theocracy imposes its narrow rules on the written word, dramatic things can happen to a people’s history. This point is touched upon early on – in Book 1, Chapter 20 – by Tengo when he is introducing Orwell’s 1984 to a clueless Fuka-Eri. He tells her how in the novel the regime is constantly rewriting history, distorting it to the extent where no-one can remember the actual past. He tells her that “robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves,” and labels the act a “crime.” “Our memory,” he says, “is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves” (257). Simply put, individuals who live under a totalitarian regime will always have to suppress their true selves – if they do not want to suffer punishment. W...

“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...

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

Long before the 1000-page 1Q84 draws to a close with the saccharine reunion of its two main protagonists, Tengo and Aomame, Murakami broaches the subject of religious orthodoxy and its effects on Literature – respectively represented by Sakigake (a secretive religious organisation legally sanctioned by the Japanese government) and the ghost-written fantasy novella Air Chrysalis . Although the premise of this subject was never fully explored (perhaps it was never Murakami’s intention), due to the novel’s shift to Tengo and Aomame’s love story in Book 3, enough of it inhabits the unconventional world of 1Q84 to warrant an in-depth discussion. Sakigake is an exclusive religious community (not at all unlike Aum, the sect that launched the Tokyo gas attacks in 1995, which Murakami had extensively dealt with in the probing Underground ) that thrives on secrecy and the vague, mystical promise of salvation. We catch a glimpse of its interior through the descriptions of several charac...

Insanity is never too far away when the modern man discovers to his shock and horror that the forces of the universe are never on his side. He may attempt to reconcile himself to this harrowing fact, but with every botched attempt he loses a piece of his sanity, up until that point of absolute inevitability where things must fall apart because the centre cannot hold. The French Nobel Prize winner of 2008, J.M.G. Le Clézio, shows us exactly how insanity and the failure of communication go hand in hand in the impressionistic The Interrogation ( Les Procès-Verbal, 1963). Following in the footsteps of the other French giants, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Le Clézio created a resonant piece about a man, aptly named Adam, who has lost his sanity and attempts to re-interpret the world on his own terms. Adam's world view is fragmented and irrational (to everyone but him); it is one that is predominated by destruction and death, by godlessness. He envisions a world where people l...

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...