Murakami with a Fake Accent?

Recently somebody told me that the audiobook of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Random House Audio 2014) is read with a fake Japanese accent.  I couldn't believe my ears. It seemed absurd and impossible: how could such an Orientalist practice still be condoned today?  It's not the 1930s, after all.

So I ordered the audiobook from my local library and started listening.

I am sorry to say, Dear Readers, that it's true: Tazaki Tsukuru and all other characters in the novel are characterized with artificial Japanese accents.  (One notable exception is Kuro's Finnish husband, whose voice is read in an attempted European accent.)  The reader, American actor Bruce Locke, is of Japanese ancestry, but was born and raised in the United States, and to judge from his other work speaks without much of an accent.  So why impose a Japanese (or rather, pseudo-Japanese) accent upon the dialogue in the narration?

If the story featured Japanese characters in non-Japanese settings, where they would be speaking in languages other than Japanese, one might still understand the decision to voice characters with an accent.  But in this case most of the plot takes place in Japan, and the characters speak unaccented Japanese to each other.  No accent is called for.

I can think of only one explanation, which is that someone -- the publisher? the producer? the actor? -- decided that the book was otherwise insufficiently "Japanese" and wanted to ensure that the reader wouldn't forget that s/he is listening to a Japanese novel.  This is no small irony, given Murakami's widely acknowledged position as a writer who just happens to write in Japanese and who has spent much of his career deliberately seeking to undermine the cliches surrounding modern Japanese fiction.

Beyond this, it is really discouraging to think that in this day and age somebody thought this was a good idea.  Does Shakespeare have to be performed with phony British accents? Does a performance of Molière require actors to sound like Inspector Clouseau? Or is it because Japan is more "exotic" that Tsukuru, Sara, Ao, Shiro, Kuro, and Aka are voiced as Japanese-y caricatures of real people? I used to think that only Hollywood did this, but clearly I was wrong.

I started wondering whether other Murakami novels are also read with an accent in their American audiobook versions, so I borrowed 1Q84 and after dark.  I am happy to report that no such experiments were made in either of those. after dark (Random House Audio, 2007) is read by Janet Song, and 1Q84 (Brilliance Audio on MP3-CD; Unabridged edition, 2011) by Alison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, and Mark Boyett.

Curious to see if others shared my negative feelings about the accent, I checked the reviews on Audible.com. It looks like I am not alone in my dismay:  

Reviews like this continue for a few pages. One person compared the narration style of Bruce Locke to the Charlie Chan accent: "The narrator has the worst fake Japanese accent. Sounds more like the old racist Charlie Chan movies. It was astoundingly bad. There was absolutely no need for that fake accent. It was as though the narration was making fun of Murakami being Japanese. I stopped listening because it was so distracting to the story. Why didn't anyone else notice ? Amazing. As a Japanese I felt insulted." 

To see more comments go here.

Let's just hope that when the time comes to produce and direct the audio performance of the next Murakami novel no one makes the same mistake again.

"The Translator Is Always Wrong": On Dialect and the Dutch Translation of "Men Without Women" from Its Translator

The Dutch translation of Men Without Women is coming out very soon from Atlas Contact: the de luxe limited edition with each story as a separate booklet on February 15, and the regular edition on March 1. You can see large pictures of all the covers on Facebook. The stories were translated by James Westerhoven and Elbrich Fennema.

 

James, who has contributed to this blog in the past, has been following the Osaka dialect discussion on this page and has kindly sent me his opinion to share with the readers. 

James writes: 

"It is always difficult to deal with dialect in translation. My own policy is to ignore dialect if at all possible. In my translation of Tanizaki’s Manji, which is almost completely in the Kansai dialect, I purposely opted for a garrulous form of Dutch. But Kitaru’s Kansai-ben in ‘Yesterday’ requires special treatment. Kitaru is not from the Kansai, but born and bred in Tokyo. He chooses to speak Kansai-ben for reasons of his own, and each time he opens his mouth, the people around him (and the Japanese readers as well) are reminded how weird he is. His Kansai-ben alienates him from his environment and from the girl who loves him. It also marks him as the inverse image of the narrator, who does hail from the Kansai but rejects his origins and speaks beautiful standard Japanese. That’s why the narrator feels a certain kinship with him.

"If the translator tries to solve this with a sweeping statement that ‘Kitaru spoke Kansai dialect’, his readers will get neither a sense of Kitaru's weirdness nor of his loneliness. In this case, a special effort should be made to convey the pathos of Kitaru’s situation, or the entire point of the story is lost. In other words, his speech should be made to look or sound different. Here the translator has one of three options: a colloquial form of speech, an existing dialect, or an artificial dialect. There may be more, but I can’t think of any. The disadvantage of colloquial speech is that it doesn’t really sound weird enough, at least not in most of the languages that I know, but maybe this is an option that works in some cases. And the disadvantage of an artificial dialect is of course that you run the risk of it sounding unnatural.

"My personal preference was to have Kitaru speak a form of Belgian Netherlandic. What is known as ‘Flemish’ in English is really a group of three distinct dialects of the Netherlandic language, all of which are spoken south of the Dutch border. They are grammatically the same as Dutch Netherlandic, but their pronunciation and vocabulary are distinct enough to be immediately recognizable, and what is more important, the Belgian Netherlandic dialects have a rich cultural history. Flanders, like the Kansai, never was a cultural backwater. It would be closer to the truth to call Belgian Netherlandic a ‘variant’ rather than a dialect, just as American English is a variant, not a dialect, of English.

"However, my editors strongly disagreed and suggested a form of colloquial Dutch (to refer to the language by its more familiar name). So I wrote a draft version with Kitaru’s words translated into colloquial language. Then they gave me Elbrich Fennema, an experienced Murakami translator, as collaborator. Elbrich saw right away that Kitaru’s speech should be set off more distinctly, but she did not agree with my idea of using an existing dialect. Instead, she offered to design an artificial one. I liked the results. Kitaru certainly sounded weird and fantastic enough to raise eyebrows all around, so that was the version we finally submitted to the publisher, but in the proofreading stage our editors decided that they preferred the colloquial after all, though not exactly the version I had submitted at the beginning. So all Elbrich’s hard work had been in vain. Anyway, back I went to my draft and tinkered around a bit until I came up with something that satisfied everyone except myself. Because I still think that another dialect would have been the proper choice.

"For how different is colloquial Dutch from standard Dutch? Not very. Mostly it is a matter of contractions, like writing ‘it’s’ instead of ‘it is’ – in other words, writing the way people actually speak, with a few interjections thrown in to show you’re being colloquial. And that does not make Kitaru sound particularly alienated, now does it? 

"The Polish and Norwegian translators have been criticized for their use of dialect, and the Danish translator as well. But then, the translator is always wrong anyway. Maybe I won’t be criticized, because I did not use dialect. But I was wrong too, because I wanted to and didn’t. And all the reviewers who missed the point because they didn't read the story properly were wrongest of all."

Curious to know what other readers of the blog might have to say on this point!

Norwegian Translation of "Men Without Women" and Dialect in "Yesterday"

The Norwegian translation of Onna no inai otokotachi just came out from Pax. The translator is Yngve Johan Larsen and the title is Menn ten kvinner, with "men" and "women" both in plural. (For more on different translations of this title see the post of March 30, 2015.) 

I wrote to Yngve to ask how he handled the dialect in the story "Yesterday." To my surprise, I learned that the solution used in Norwegian is somewhat similar to the solution used in Polish, in that a dialect from the Western part of the country was chosen to represent Osaka-ben. In the Norwegian case, however, the process was slightly different: after a number of solutions suggested by the translator, the editor decided to seek outside help. 

Here is a quote from Yngve's e-mail explaining what happened: 

The decision on the dialect was left to the very end. We tried several dialects, and also the other written language in Norway, nynorsk (new Norwegian), but in the end my editor asked a quite famous Norwegian writer to translate my lines into his own dialect. His name is Frode Grytten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frode_Grytten

He previously wrote the foreword to my translation of "Hashiru koto ni tsuite kataru toki ni, boku no kataru koto", and he's a Murakami fan.

His dialect is from the western part of Norway, and it is very far from written Norwegian. It's not a city dialect like Osaka-ben, but it can be considered "hearty" and "melodic." There is, as I am sure you remember, a description of Kansai-ben at the beginning of "Yesterday," and Grytten's dialect fits this nicely. There has only been one review so far as I know, and the critic commented positively on the choice to use Grytten.

Thank you, Yngve!

Some New Murakami Translations

When surfing the internet I discovered that a French translation of the first two Murakami novels is appearing tomorrow, January 14th, from Belfond. The translator is Hélène Morita who has translated a number of Murakami novels. She has also done works by Natsume Soseki, Kawabata Yasunari, Miyazawa Kenji and Dazai Osamu. It is interesting to note that the word "pinball" [Japanese: pinbõru became "flipper"in French, like in Polish and Dutch translations.

Here is a link to an interview with Morita.
https://www.letemps.ch/culture/2014/09/05/helene-morita-voix-francaise-haruki-murakami
She calls Murakami's language "simple," "direct and flowing" and talks about Japanese being ambiguous, but admits that Murakami's language is less so. She also mentions the difficulty of translating tense and how her Japanese informants are sometimes not sure how to answer her questions. It is an issue I myself am very familiar with and will address in a future post – you ask three people and you get three different answers. How do you decide which one to choose?

And here is a link to a video where Hélène Morita talks about translating 1Q84 during the literary festival Mixed Zone organized by Université de Liège in October 2012.
http://culture.ulg.ac.be/plugins/VideosPlugin/jsp/modaleVideo.jsp?idVid=prod_1199286

Also, I seem to have missed the appearance of the Russian translation of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki by Dmitry Kovalenin. It came out last May from Eksmo.



One is struck by the similarity of the cover to the American version, designed by Chip Kidd and Maggie Hinders.



Readers of this blog may remember that sometimes particularly nice Murakami covers get "reused" by other translations. For example on September 14, 2014, I described how the Portuguese translation of Tsukuru Tazaki used the German cover design (by Lübekke Naumann Thoben) because the editor, Marta Ramires, "loved the cover and thought it might work for the Portuguese market as well." Some editions, for example, the Taiwanese translation by Lai Ming Chu, used the original Japanese cover design featuring a painting titled Pillars of Fire, by Morris Louis.

I have also found the Turkish cover of Tsukuru Tazaki. The book came out in 2014 from Doǧan Kitap and was translated by Hüseyin Can Erkin, a Japan scholar and a translator of a number Murakami's novels, including 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore.

Murakami Wins the Andersen Literature Award

This is a slightly delayed post about Haruki Murakami's winning the H.C. Andersen Literary Award, which was announced on November 17th. The H.C. Andersen Literature Award is a Danish prize established in 2010. It is given every two years to authors whose works resemble Andersen's work. (It should not be confused with the H.C. Andersen Award, or Medal, given to authors of children's literature). The previous winners include Paulo Coelho, J.K. Rowling, Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie.

On the official H.C. Andersen Award webpage we find the following explanation:
The purpose of the award is to pay tribute to Hans Christian Andersen’s influence on authors all over the world by choosing recipients whose work can be attached to Hans Christian Andersen’s name and life’s work – for instance through genre-based likenesses or artistic storytelling qualities. The chosen authors must, as it has been expressed, be at swan level with Hans Christian Andersen.
According to the article on Yahoo News, the jury honored Murakami for his "bold mix of classic narrative, pop culture, Japanese tradition, dreamlike realism and philosophical debate." The award ceremony will take place in October 2016 in Odense, Andersen's hometown.

This success, it must be said, owes in great measure to the fine translations of Mette Holm, Murakami's Danish translator. Mette has been working on Murakami for a number of years. (See the covers of her last four Danish versions of Murakami.)  A very versatile translator, Mette has also done works by Hiromi Kawakami, Kirino Natsuo, Banana Yoshimoto, Ryu Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Jiro Taniguchi and Taichi Yamada.  

photograph from: http://www.detkvindeligelitteraturselskab.dk/murakami-mette-holm/

Don't Spare the Rod on the Translator! -- More on Dialect Translation

Today is Christmas Eve, so I thought it would be fitting to share one of the comments that appeared on this blog with the readers who don't speak Polish.

In the previous post, I described my dilemma about how to translate Kitaru's Kansai dialect into Polish and explained my decision to use the Poznan dialect. I was hesitant, since I knew that while this experiment would be acceptable to some readers, it was also bound to cause objections.

A reader (anksu) posted a comment a couple of days ago criticizing my decision. I am going to translate it here for the sake of fairness (I quoted a positive reader comment in the last post) and also for its humor and Christmas-related element. Readers not familiar with Polish culture need to know that, in Poland, instead of a lump of coal, naughty children get a rod (or switch) from Santa to be beaten with.  Looks like I deserve a beating!

"I had to stop reading in the middle because I am too angry to continue. Your decision to make Kitaru speak Poznan dialect was the worst you could have possibly made! It is unreadable. You didn't even bother to make footnotes! You are not translating books only for people from the Poznan area. Providing information that Kitaru speaks in a dialect or introducing SEVERAL phrases would have been more than enough. I hope that next time you won't get such ideas, because otherwise I will send you a Christmas rod next year!!!"

As you can imagine, I feel duly chastised.

More on Dialect in "Yesterday"

My Polish translation of Onna no inai otokotachi, titled Mężczyźni bez kobiet, came out several weeks ago from Muza S.A. 

I'm happy to say that the reviews are good -- critics seem to like this short-story anthology more than Tsukuru Tazaki. There are also a lot of readers' comments on reading blogs. One of the things that often gets mentioned is my experimental treatment of Kansai dialect in the story "Yesterday." 

I had hesitated for a long time about how to render Kitaru's dialect in Polish. The best thing would have been to have created a new dialect, but that would have taken a long time, time I did not have due to the publisher's deadline. And I wasn't sure whether I had the ability to do it in the first place. 

In the end, I decided to stylize Kitaru's speeches to make him speak the way people speak in Poznan, in Western Poland. Somehow the intonation and the melody of the language there reminded me of Osaka dialect: it seemed a little more direct, a little louder.  

So I began by changing Kitaru's lines a bit. I added a "nie" ("no?") at the end of sentences (which is reminiscent of the "ja?" Usula Gräfe added at the end of some Kitaru's lines in the German version quoted in the previous post), but I still felt that my Kitaru did not sound different enough. So I sent the story to my cousin, a born-and-bread Poznanian and asked his opinion. A scholar and a historian, my cousin approached the task methodically and changed Kitaru's speeches so that he started sounding like a working-class kid from Poznan. I was pleased with the results, but I still needed help with a few phrases and with the final polishing (Polishing?) of the dialect. I asked around and somebody put me in touch with a writer from Poznan, who made a few additional changes and carefully reviewed things to make Kitaru's language more uniform. 

At that point, though, I started feeling a little anxious: Was I even on the right track? 

Let me explain my dilemma briefly: there are many differences between Kansai dialect and standard Japanese, but the most noticeable ones have to do with different verb and adjectival endings, different intonation and some differences in vocabulary. Poznan dialect, on the other hand, is a working-class dialect containing a great deal of distinct vocabulary, partly due to the influence of German. As a result, a sentence written in the Poznan dialect may sometimes include a number of words that a speaker of standard Polish will simply not understand, though usually one can figure the meaning out just fine. Here are some pictures showing the Poznan dialect word in capital letters, and the standard Polish one below. The difference is striking. 

http://poznan.naszemiasto.pl/artykul/patriotycznie-zakreceni-projekt-mowtej-najciekawsza,2186032,artgal,8417960,t,id,tm,zid.html

Fortunately, the way the story is written, the reader can always understand (with one exception, where I had to repeat a word in standard Polish) what Kitaru is saying, if he or she reads what comes before or after. Below is the first exchange between Kitaru and the narrator quoted in the previous post runs as follows: 

   「木樽というのは珍しい名前だよね」と僕は言った。
   「ああ、そやな、かなり珍しいやろ」と木樽は言った。
   「ロッテに同じ名前のピッチャーがいた」
   「ああ、あれな、うちとは関係ないねん。あんまりない名前やから、まあどっかで ちょこっと繋がってるのかもしれんけどな」(p.68)
     

      “Kitaru is an unusual last name,” I said one day.

      “Yeah, for sure,” Kitaru replied in his heavy Kansai accent.

      “The Lotte baseball team had a pitcher with the same name.”      
      “The two of us aren’t related. Not so common a name, though, so who knows? Maybe there’s a connection somewhere.” 
("Yesterday," tr. Philip Gabriel, The New Yorker, June 9, 2014) 

In Polish, I translated the passage like this:

    – Kitaru to rzadkie nazwisko – powiedziałem.
    – Nie za czynste, co nie? – odpowiedział Kitaru.  [Ain't so common, I reckun, eh?]
    – W drużynie Lotte był pitcher o takim nazwisku.
    – Łe, to żadna famuła, tej. Ino mało wiary sie tak nazywo, może dzieś dalij jest jakaś krewność, nie. [Nah, they hain't no kin. 'Course, not too many folks usin' that name, so I s'pose way back mebbe we got some o' the same rellies.] (p.62)

The above passage is fully understandable to a speaker of standard Polish, but a more difficult phrase was "wyćpnąć bejmy w glajdę" (lit. throw money in the mud, as in "throw money away"), which has little in common with the standard Polish equivalent, "wyrzucić pieniądze w błoto." For the English reader wondering what this effect might be like, the Poznan phrase "wyćpnąć bejmy w glajdę" might sound something like "hench welties in the flumber."  Given the right context, you could probably figure this out!

Overall, I felt pleased that this operation has achieved a result somewhat similar to the Japanese original: when Kitaru opens his mouth for the first time (and throughout the story) the reader is surprised and continues to feel somewhat alienated. But I was a little worried how Polish readers would react and decided to write a short introduction to explain my choice of Poznan dialect, something I have never done before. 

When the book came out, I was interviewed by the Poznan edition of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's biggest daily newspaper. The interviewer was very interested in why I chose that particular dialect. When I asked her how the story read, she said that to her it "felt weird." I am hoping that this was because she was from Poznan and the dialect felt too familiar. I also got an e-mail from a reader who wrote, "The idea of using Poznan dialect in the story 'Yesterday' was great. The piece became so funny and whimsical in its feel that it is unforgettable."

Maybe that whimsy is captured in this rather pretty view of Poznan's Old Town. 

photograph from: http://www.careersinpoland.com/city/poznan

More About Dialect and the Chinese Translation by Lai Ming Chu

Lai Ming Chu kindly sent in her comments elaborating on dialect-use-related matters in the Chinese (Taiwan) version of "Yesterday." She wrote:

"To translate a dialect into any other language is not easy — it is, in fact, a challenge. I tried to do it in different ways, but did not get a satisfying result.  In Chinese, dialect is too complicated.  The difference between Peking speech and Nanking speech is not similar to the difference between Tokyo speech and Osaka speech, in Japanese.

In the Chinese language, we can use different dialects to read the same simple sentence; magically it will sound very different, because each character’s pronunciation and accent are different in different dialects.  So finally, I realized that there was no need to translate it [i.e. it was enough to say that Kitaru is speaking in Kansai dialect for the reader to read it differently].

I agree with the opinion of Edward Seidensticker and I also admire the translation of Philip Gabriel:

 “Yeah, for sure,” Kitaru replied in his heavy Kansai accent."

More on Dialect Translation

In the previous post I wrote about my doubts as how to translate kansai-ben (Kansai dialect) in Murakami's story, "Yesterday."

After looking at other language versions, I discovered a range of choices made by other translators:  some did not differentiate between Kitaru's and Tanimura's speech, others differentiated somewhat, and then there were those who decided either to use an existing dialect or invent one. 

Clearly, there is no correct answer here! 

On the one hand, one can argue that a dialect (or some form of differentiation) should be used in order to reflect the impossible-to-miss difference in Kitaru's kansai-ben speech; on the other hand, one can also make the case that using an existing dialect ends up localizing the translation in a way that readers may find hard to accept.  

Let's look at a few examples to see how different people have handled this difficult challenge.

Here is the fragment (quoted in the previous post) translated into German by Ursula Gräfe (hers is I believe the first European translation - Dumont 2014):

 »Kitaru iste ein seltener Name«, sagte ich.
 »Ja, ziemlich selten«, erwiderte er.
 »In der Baseballmannschaft von Lotte gibt es einen Werfer, der so heißt.«
 »Ach ja, der. Wir sind nicht verwandt. Aber bei einem so seltenen Namen könnte es doch trotzdem sein, dass es da irgendwo eine Verbindung gibt, was?«
(Von Männern, die keine Frauen haben, p. 50)


Ursula used a gentle touch here. She showed the difference between the two styles of speech by adding was? at the end of Kitaru's second line.  To further highlight Kitaru's idiosyncratic speech habits, she also used ja? at the end of many of Kitaru's sentences in the rest of the story. She explained: 
"I intended to give Kitaru's speech an emotional quality, which relates stronger to the person he is talking to than it generally would be the case. Also "ja?" und "was?" create a rising intonation. This in combination with the use of so-called "modal particles" (like "doch" - blue in the last sentence of the quote) would give - or so I hoped - the impression of a casual politeness. German modal particles - like sentence-final particles - mark the speaker’s mood or attitude towards the statement expressed. Also they create a common basis for continuing a conversation by the speaker’s appraisal of the mutual knowledge. Both features are characteristics of spoken German and seldomly used in written language."

Next, let's look at the Spanish translation by Gabriel Álvarez Martínez (Tusquets 2015):

—Vaya apellido más raro, Kitaru, ¿no? —dije.
—Sí, la verdad es que es bastante raro —dijo Kitaru.
—Había un lanzador en el Lotte Orions que se apellidaba igual.  
—Ah, sí, lo recuedo. No, no tiene nada que ver conmigo. Aunque es un apellido tan poco común que quizás estemos emparentados. (Hombres sin mujeres, p.56)


My friend Noemí Martín Santo, a scholar of Spanish literature who also knows Japanese, tells me that Kitaru does not use any dialect here. She also suggested that, had the translator chosen to use a dialect, it would have been possible to have used Andalusian, though she acknowledged that doing so would have caused other kinds of complications and potential misunderstandings. 

Here is a quote from the Taiwanese translation by Lai Ming Chu (Reading Times, 2014):

「木樽這個姓好稀奇啊。」我說。
「喔，是嗎，相當稀奇吧。」木樽說。
「羅德隊有一個投手也姓木樽。」
「哦，那個啊，跟我們家沒關係。因為這種姓很少，所以說不定在什麼地方有一點點關係。」
（《沒有女人的男人們》, p. 62)

Lai Ming Chu told me that she decided not to make Kitaru's speech different in any way, but to simply rely on the explanation in the narrative that he speaks in a "perfect Kansai dialect."  

Now, for the Danish version. Mette Holm (Klim 2015) translated these four lines like this: 

“Kitaru er da ikke noget almindeligt navn,” sagde jeg.

“Nej, det’ det ik’,” svarede han med kraftig kansai-dialekt.

“Baseballholdet Lotte har en pitcher, der hedder Kitaru.”

“Ja, men vi er ik’ i familie. Eller hvem ved, der’ ik’ mange

med det navn, så måske er der en forbindelse.”

Mette said she was inspired by the way Mr. Gamfield spoke in Oliver Twist! Apparently her editor had suggested that she consult the Dickens work, although her Kitaru dialect is "less exaggerated." 

She wrote to me: "I invented my ‘accent’ – and I did it with a lot of abbreviations … using apostrophes instead of letters. And I left out the verb in several places. At first I did more – but then I simplified it and did it very consistently."

The two lines Kitaru says in the above exchange would look like this in standard Danish (the syllables marked in blue were shortened).

“Nej, det er det ikke,” svarede han med kraftig kansai-dialekt.

 “Ja, men vi er ikke i familie. Eller hvem ved, der er ikke mange

med det navn så måske er der en forbindelse."(Mænd uden kvinder, p. 42)

Mette tells me that critics' were divided on this. One critic, Søren Kassebeer, liked the book very much, but wrote this about "Mette's dialect": 

En tekst, som han i øvrigt har forfattet på den japanske dialekt kansai-ben, som han har lært sig selv og konstant ævler løs på (og hvis den dialekt lyder meget specielt på japansk, så er det ikke rigtig lykkedes den dygtige oversætter at få den oversat til noget overbevisende dansk, men det er måske også umuligt, for man kan jo ikke lade en japaner tale jysk, vel?) [Berlingske, 7 September 2015]

In the translation kindly provided by Mette: "Part of Murakami's text is written in the Japanese dialect kansai-ben, which Kitaru has taught himself and he is always always blabbering in that manner.  If the dialect sounds very characteristic in Japanese, the skilled translator did not manage to translate it into convincing Danish, but perhaps it is also impossible, because you cannot let a Japanese speak Jutlandish (a Danish dialect), can you?"  

He did give the book 5 out of 6 possible stars though.

However, another critic, Christian Møgeltoft, wrote:
(in Mette's translation)
"I never get tired of praising Mette Holm’s faithful way of transferring Murakami’s imaginative prose into Danish. There is no doubt that the guy is good in his own language, but in Danish he is unequalled. The writer would be happy to see his ideas incarnated so convincingly. As a translator, Mette Holm is living proof that male writers without a mediation of a wise woman are an unfulfilled race." (Jyllands-Posten, 8 September 2015) 

(Note the nice word-play on the title of the book!) 
Møgeltoft also gave the book 5 out of 6 possible stars.

You can't please everybody all the time, but as long as we manage to please some people some of the time .... 

More posts on translating dialect to follow!