While translating Chapter 15 of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, in which Tsukuru visits his former friend at her summer house in Finland, I kept imagining the scenery described in the book. The summer house is a wooden cabin with a small porch and a brick chimney located in the woods on the bank of a large lake. There are a lot of pines and birches. Between the trees one can catch a glimpse of water; there is a small pier and a little plastic boat, which keeps knocking against it. It is slightly windy and a little cloudy. We know that it is near a town called Hämeenlinna.
Since the translator often projects his or her own experiences onto the text, I found myself imagining a house in the Polish lake region of Mazury. However, Hämeenlinna is located much further north, so perhaps the scenery is somewhat different? I decided to Google "Hämenlinna Lake" and see what I could come up with.
Here are some images I found:
And here is a short movie showing Hämeenlinna and the surrounding area from a plane. You can see the green-roofed church, about which I wrote in August, and a beautiful castle by the lake that Olga, the Finnish travel agent, mentions to Tsukuru.
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