A New Translation of An Old Murakami Book and Those Pesky Pronouns

A new translation of Sekai no owari to Hādo-boirudo wandṝando, known in English so far as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, is coming out on December 10. As is clear from the images below, the translator Jay Rubin has changed the order of phrases to reflect the order in the original title. Below are the American and British cover designs. It is interesting that on the British cover the title starts with "the" while the American one doesn't.

 

As we know from David Karashima's excellent book, Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami (Soft Skull, 2020), many pages were cut from the original translation (1991) by the translator, Alfred Birnbaum, and the editor, Elmer Luke, so this uncut version should be a real treat for Murakami fans. 

Among other things, I am very curious how Rubin has dealt with the fact that in the two alternating narratives that make up the novel, Murakami uses two different first-person pronouns (boku - less formal, used mostly by younger men, and watashi - more formal, more universal). Birnbaum used an ingenious method to differentiate the style of the two narratives: he translated one entirely into the present tense and the other into the past tense. 

I have been thinking a lot about this while translating Murakami's new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, into Polish. Like End of the World, this book also uses different pronouns in different narratives, but there is no option of using the trick devised by Birnbaum, because Murakami himself seems to use present and past tense in a very creative way for a different purpose. 

I have now finished the translation, which is going through the editing process. I have  – for now – tried differentiating the more informal and somehow "younger sounding" pronouns boku ("I") and kimi ("you") - written phonetically in hiragana - by writing them in a slightly different font. (The part where those pronouns are used in the original is not that long and they appear mostly in the beginning of the book only to return a few times in brief mentions later). Since Polish verbs take a different form for each person in singular and plural, it is often unnecessary to say "I" or "you" to indicate the subject, so these pronouns don't appear as often in the Polish text as they do in the Japanese text. Therefore, I have decided to use that slightly different font also for words like "your" or "my" to make this difference more evident.

The final decision hasn't been made yet, but given that the European translations that have already appeared don't seem to differentiate between the two types of pronouns, I keep wondering whether I am doing something creative and bringing the reader a little closer to the author, or making a big mistake.   

The New Novel Cover Design

The cover design of City and Its Uncertain Walls, the American edition of the English translation of the newest Murakami novel, has been released. The cover was created by Chip Kidd, who has designed a number of Murakami covers for Knopf. It seems to play on the themes of the shadow and the handless clock on the clock tower in the titular City. The book can already be preordered.

The British covers - "covers" in plural, since it appears there will be two covers - were apparently designed by Suzanne Dean. I have found the following statement on Instagram: "We have two different covers, exclusively for @waterstones and independent bookshops, plus a special sprayed edge edition available from Waterstones." There are more fun graphics in this post.  

These covers also seem to refer to shadows, but we also get the image of old dreams in the library (which are - spoiler alert! - shaped like eggs in this book), and there is one of the one-horned Beasts in the background. 

Both versions, the American and the British, are to be released on November 19, 2024. 

In the meantime, the Dutch and Norwegian translations have appeared.

The Norwegian translation, by Ika Kaminka, was published by Pax in April 2024. The cover design is wonderfully abstract. I really like it! Although I am not sure whether dividing the author's name like this Mur-aka-mi works, since it seems to be against the rules of the Japanese pronunciation. On the other hand, it *is* a translation and the designer is free to put their own spin on things or even turn them upside down. There is also a little liberty taken with the title, which (if we believe Google Translate) means  "The City behind the Wall," avoiding the problem of how to translate futashika na (which I have written about in an earlier post).

The Dutch version, published in May by Atlas Contact in Elbrich Fennema's translation, also appears to have two cover designs. They feature the library-related themes: the librarian, a cat with her kittens who lived in the garden, and a teapot on top of a stove.

The English translation of Murakami's Newest Novel Out in November

The English translation of Murakami's 2023 novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, will be out on November 26, 2024. The translator is Philip Gabriel, the UK publisher is Harvill Secker, and the book can already be pre-ordered here on amazon.co.uk. The cover design has not been released yet, so we only get to see the placeholder cover for now. 

I wonder whether Chip Kidd will be the one designing the US cover? A quick internet search shows that people are excited about the new book. One Reddit user, r/murakami attempted a design based on the UK paperback covers.

Spanish Translation of the New Novel to Be out in March

  The Spanish translation of Machi to sono futashika na kabe (City and Its Uncertain Walls) will appear on March 13 from Tusquets Editores, as announced on the publisher's page. The translator will be Juan Francisco González Sánchez. It seems that he has also translated Murakami's First Person Singular, a few books by Yoko Ogawa and other authors.

 

Also, while the readers are waiting for different translations, here is an interview Murakami gave to Kyodo news. He explains a number of things about the new novel:

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/11/910c6404f958-novelist-murakami-speaks-of-fully-pursuing-motifs-in-latest-novel.html

 

The German translation of the newest Murakami novel to appear on January 12

The German translation of Murakami's 2023 novel, which is to be called in English, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, will appear in German on January 12  — Murakami's birthday!  — from Dumont. The translation is by Ursula Gräfe. Congratulations, Ursula!

I heard through the grapevine that the English translation by Philip Gabriel may appear in the spring, but since it has not been announced on Amazon yet, perhaps the message I got became mangled owing to said grapevine. I have also just checked on the French and Italian Amazon sites. While I was able to see titles, ("La ville et se murs incertains" and "La città e le sue mura incerte") no date or cover image appears, so perhaps those are just a result of some AI magic. 

I am very curious to see the English and other European editions to see how translators will handle the pronouns in the book. As was the case in Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando, 1985 (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, 1991, English translation by Alfred Birnbaum), the protagonist of the newest novel also uses two different pronouns to differentiate the two worlds he inhabits - boku (a somewhat informal, masculine "I") and watashi (the universally used "I"). In this new book, we also get the second person pronoun kimi in two versions: sometimes it is written using the Chinese character, and sometimes in hiragana, one of the phonetic scripts used in Japanese. This creates an immediate difference between the two worlds and the atmosphere of the narratives. 

As many readers will know, in his translation of Hardboiled Wonderland, Alfred Birnbaum used an ingenious approach and translated one of the narratives entirely into present tense. In the case of the new book, that would not be possible, as this time Murakami uses tense creatively, switching between past and present to achieve certain effects I don't want to spoil by overexplaining (this is, of course, assuming that the English translation will choose to recreate those in some way). 

I understand from Ursula Gräfe that she tried to differentiate the narratives using style, since German, like most European languages, doesn't have a choice of multiple pronouns for each person. I haven't decided what I will do in my own translation. So far I have just been using I (ja) and you (ty), but I do feel I want to come up with a trick or two to show the difference.