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.

The Korean Translation of the New Book is Out -- So What Are Those City Walls Like After All?

The Korean translation of Murakami's newest novel appeared on September 7. It has been translated by Hong Ǔnju (Eun-Ju), who also translated Killing Commendatore, and published by Munhak dongne Publishing (https://www.munhak.com/). Korean translations of Murakami always appear soon after the original work, and this one, which came out after just under five months, is no exception to the rule. Apparently, due to numerous pre-orders, the book was an immediate bestseller even before its publication date. According to Yahoo News, it is already in its third printing. 130,000 copies have been printed as of September 7.

 

One thing I am interested in is how different translators will handle the title. The Japanese title is 「街とその不確かな壁」(Machi to sono futashika na kabe), which we assume will become "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" in English, since that's what it says on the book's Japanese cover. When reading the novel (spoiler alert!), it becomes clear that the protagonist is not quite sure - uncertain? - where the city walls are. His attempts to draw a map of the city fail and there is even an occasion when the walls suddenly appear in front of him to block his passage. I take this to suggest that the walls are "uncertain" in the additional sense of being not easily identifiable (as in "uncertain origin"). "Uncertain walls" in English could also be interpreted to mean walls that are not very solid. Yet the walls in the book do appear very solid, and yet (another spoiler alert!) the protagonist is able to go through them. They are not "uncertain" in terms of crumbling easily or seeming unstable. 

 

The New Murakami Novel Is Out - So How Many Pages Is It After All?

My copy of the new Murakami novel arrived today. I am very excited to read it. But before I start, I want to correct something I wrote last week about the page count. 

On the Shinchosha page announcing the novel it said that the text would be "1200 mai long" (mai is a counter for flat things like sheets of paper, plates, etc.). English language internet started talking about "1200 pages" and without thinking about it very much, I wrote the same in the last post. But then I saw the news of the book's release and it looked like it was just one volume, not two - which is what one would expect at 1200 pages (as was the case with Killing Commendatore, for example).

Once I received my copy of the book, though, I found that the book is only 655 pages long, not counting a 4-page afterword. So where does "1200 mai" come from?

By my count, there are about 800 characters per page in the new novel. If we subtract the empty pages between the seventy chapters and three parts of the book, we get a total number of actual pages of text closer to 600. If we then multiply 600 pages by 800 characters, we get 480,000; and if we divide that by 1200 -- the number of mai quoted in the Shinchosha announcement and on the obi (or "belly band," the strip of paper wrapped around the book to help with advertising) -- we get the magic number of 400. Which means that what the publisher is referring to by mai is the number of genkō yōshi in Murakami's manuscript, not the number of printed pages (which I should have realized having read the word mai, not péji for "page...").

In Japan people still count the length of a manuscript using a 400-character page unit called a genkō yōshi 原稿用紙 (lit., "manuscript draft sheets"). Before word processors became popular in in the early 1990s, nearly everything - school essays, novels, PhD dissertations - was written on these standardized sheets, which all were ruled with 20 columns of 20 boxes each, for a total count of 400 characters per sheet. When telling someone how long a given text was, the common measure used was the number of genkō yōshi. 

The pictures below show a clean genkō yoshi and a model I found on Wikipedia instructing people how to properly use this kind of writing paper.

Of course, we know that Murakami writes on his Mac, and not in pen on paper (unlike John Irving, James Patterson, or Lin Shaohua, one of Murakami's Chinese translators, who opt for writing in longhand), and what he delivered to the publisher was almost certainly a manuscript in electronic form. However, old habits die hard. So when promoting the novel to readers, Japanese publishers continue to divide the total number of characters by 400 to get a genkō yōshi page count that they know everyone will understand.

Bottom line: the new novel is more like 600 pages, not 1200. On the one hand, this is good news, because it means that translators just have one (thickish) book to translate instead of two, and that non-Japanese readers will get the book that much sooner. On the other hand, this may come as a disappointment for those readers who were hoping for another two-volume Murakami magnum opus.

On a side note, Polish publishers, like Japanese publishers, have their own old-fashioned unit for figuring out the length of a manuscript. This unit is called an arkusz (or arkusz wydawniczy) which could be translated as a "plate" or "publishing plate" or "publishing sheet." An arkusz (of a work of prose) measures 40,000 characters, including spaces. Although I should be used to it by now, I am still surprised when an editor asks me, "How many arkusz will it come to?"

A New Murakami Novel Coming out on April 13!

It seems as if the pandemic should have been a perfect time for blog writing, but for some reason I abandoned it for almost two years, which seems hard to believe. Sorry if this has created any disappointment. The flip side is that I have many things I want to post about. 

Let me start with the newest: there is a brand new Murakami novel due to appear in two days. This is the first novel since Killing Commendatore, and people are really excited about it. 

Shinchosha, the book's publisher, made the first announcement on January 31 (pictured below, left), which says only that the book will appear on Thursday April 13, that it is completely new, 1,200 pages long and that it is his first full-length novel in six years. Within a few hours of seeing this announcement, I heard from a number of friends who had seen it on different social media and online newspapers. The Polish Murakami publisher, Muza, also wrote to me, quite enthusiastic about the prospect of a new Murakami coming out.

About a month later, on March 1, came the reveal of the title -- Machi to sono futashika na kabe -- and the cover (pictured below, right). The appearance of the English title in the center of the cover, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, doesn't mean that the book is already available in English. It is just that in recent years, when released in Japanese, some of Murakami's new books have had English titles included on the covers. Shown below atr two pictures of the Japanese versions of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and Killing Commendatore, both of which feature a title in English. Of course, it would take a couple of years before the English translations of these books appeared under these titles. One wonders if including the English title on the Japanese cover is in preparation for translation, or whether it is simply to make it easier for people outside Japan to talk about a new book before it is available in English (or any other language). 

 

 

 

 

 

If The City and Its Uncertain Walls sounds familiar to some of you, it is because a short story, or rather a novella, with the same title (with an additional comma after machi to) appeared in 1980 in the literary magazine Bungakukai. It was later included in Murakami's collected works (Murakami Haruki Zensakuhin 1979-1989), but it has not been translated into English. 

 

Because it is believed to be a story from which Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was developed, I am really curious to see in what direction this new novel will go. It's worth noting that in Alfred Birnbaum's translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, machi is translated as "town" (the Town). The new cover uses the word "city." Is it the same machi as in the novella, or a different one? Or has the Town grown into a "city"?  I wonder how this will be handled in English translation. 

The newest teaser from Shinchosha that came this morning (April 11) features a quote from Murakami explaining that he started writing the book in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and that it took him almost three years. He hardly went out, didn't take long trips, and worked steadily on the novel:

 

 

 

Probably a bunch of us Murakami translators will be working on the new novel at the same time. I am already looking forward to the exchange of ideas. 

Enjoying the Playful Poetry in First Person Singular

To continue from the previous post (sorry for the three-month interlude!), here are seven translations of a short fragment of the poem "Outfielders' Butts" from the Murakami story, "Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection." I want to thank fellow Murakami translators Elbrich Fennema, Ursula Gräfe, and Mette Holm for sending these to me!

The original poem again, to refresh your memory:  

    広島カープのシェーン　のお尻の形は
    どことなく考え深く、知性的だった。
    省察的だった、というべきだろうか。
    人々は彼をシェーンブラムと
    フルネームで呼ぶべきだった。
    たとえそのお尻に敬意を表するためだけでも。

Here is the English translation by Philip Gabriel again:
    The butt of the Hiroshima Carp's player Shane 
    Is deeply thoughtful, cerebral.
    Reflective, you might say. 
    People really should have called him by his full name,
    Scheinblum.
    If for nothing else, then to show respect for that one-of-
                                                                                      a-kind butt. 

Below is the German version by Ursula Gräfe, who said that she tried to give the lines a bit of a rhythm:
        Shane von den Hiroshima Carps
        hat ein Gesäß, so klug und weise,
        besinnlich könnte man es heißen.
        Scheinblum sollte man ihn rufen,
        Denn das ist sein wahrer Name.
        Und wenn nur als Hommage an seinen Hintern.

This is the Dutch version by Elbrich Fennema:                                                            
        De vorm van Shane's kont - van de Hiroshima Carps
        is diepzinnig en intellectueel.
        Misschien is bedachtzaam het goede woord?
        mensen zouden hem bij zijn volle naam
        moeten noemen: Scheinblum.
        Al was het maar uit eerbied voor zijn kont. 

And the Danish version by Mette Holm:
        Og Shane fra Hiroshima Carps 
        har tænksomme og intellektuelle baller.
        Ja, de er ligefrem meditative.
        Folk burde kalde ham Scheinblum,
        når det nu er hans navn,
        om ikke andet så for at vise hans baller respekt.

 

The two pictures below allow us to see Shane's butt as it might have appeared to Murakami (on the left in the left picture). 

 

 

Next follows the Norwegian version by Ika Kaminka:                                                            

        Baken til Shane på Hiroshima Carps
        har en form som er ettertenksom, klok og
        sjelegranskende, for å si det sånn.
        Folk burde bruke hele navnet hans,z
        Scheinblum,
        og vise respekt for denne rumpa.

 

and the Italian by Antonietta Pastore:

        La forma del sedere di Shein degli Hiroshima Carp
        Pensandoci bene
        Haqualcosa di intelligente.
        Anzi, dovrei dire di riflessivo.
        Avrebbero dovuto chiamarlo Scheinblum
        Col suo nome intero.                
        Anche solo per mostrare rispetto al suo sedere.

 

The last version is my own, Polish version:  

        Kształt tyłka Shane’a z Hiroshima Carps 

        jest jakby rozważny i inteligentny. 

        Może należałoby powiedzieć – refleksyjny. 

        Ludzie powinni byli używać 

        jego pełnego nazwiska – Scheinblum,

        choćby po to, by okazać szacunek temu tyłkowi.

 

One final image of "baseball butts" to bring up the rear!

 

 On another topic, I have missed the Korean translation, which appeared in November 2020 from Munhak Tongne. The translator is Hong Ŭnju. Usually the Korean version is the one appearing first after the publication of the book, but this time my Polish one beat if by a few days. Not that it is a race - I am just always impressed by how fast the Korean translators, editors, and publishers manage to get Murakami translatiions to Korean readers. Here is the very pretty cover (with no monkey! - or is it a monkey in the top left corner?). 

 

 

Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, or Not Just Another Monkey

The American version of First Person Singular came out today from Knopf in Philip Gabriel's translation. When I saw the book, I thought to myself, "Oh, another monkey," remembering the many European cover designs featuring monkeys that I shared in a previous post. I had seen the cover on Amazon before, but holding the book in my hands, I discovered that there are in fact even more images of monkeys on the back cover and inside.

 

Having checked that the book was designed by the very creative Chip Kidd, I was a little disappointed until I took off the dust jacket. This is what is underneath:

This is in fact the jacket of the non-existent album Murakami made up in the story "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova!" I love this cover - and I loved the story. It turns out I was not the only person who loved it. 

The Polish translation inspired composer and producer Miłosz Konarski (picured left) to create a new album with saxophonist Wojtek Rejdych (pictured below). The album has the same title and was released today, on the day the English version of the book came out. You can read more about the album or stream it at: https://charlieparkerplaysbossanova.com/ (which is where the pictures came from).

What I probably enjoyed most when translating this collection were the poems from the story "The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection." These funny, clever compositions were supposedly written by the narrator - Murakami - when watching games played by his favorite team, the Yakult Swallows. The poem I found most amusing was titled "Outfielders' Butt," and I was thinking that maybe some baseball-related element would make it to the cover. 

The poem includes some great lines, like these: 

        The butt of the Hiroshima Carp's player Shane
        Is deeply thoughtful, cerebral.
        Reflective, you might say.
        People really should have called him by his full name,
        Scheinblum.
        If for nothing else, then to show respect for that one-of-a-kind butt.

For the next post, I will try to collect translations of these lines into a few languages. 

Incidentally, it seems that Murakami is not the only one pondering on outfielders' butts during boring games. A simple Google search under "baseball butts" produces quite a lot of results with ranking lists of "best butts in baseball," "10 best butts in baseball," or "major league baseball best butts." I didn't know baseball butts were a thing...  .

Murakami Monkeys in Europe: First Person Singular out in a Few European Countries

Murakami's latest short story collection, First Person Singular, has been published in several European countries. The new translations include German, Norwegian, Italian, Dutch, and Danish versions.

The first two, which appeared in January, were the German translation by Ursula Gräfe (Dumont) and the Norwegian version by Ika Kaminka (Pax). The Norwegian cover seems to be inspired by the story of the Shinagawa monkey.

  

 

 

March brought three more translations, all of them featuring monkeys on their covers, albeit each quite different in terms of color and style. The Italian version came out on March 9. The translator is Antonietta Pastore and the publisher Einaudi. The Danish translation appeared just a few days ago, on March 26, in Mette Holm's translation from Klim. Mette says that the first reviews are good.

 

 

The translator of the Dutch version, Elbrich Fennema (Atlas Contact), decided to promote the book herself; with the help of a grant from the Dutch Literature Foundation, she produced a book trailer. The purpose was to explore new ways of reaching readers during the pandemic. Here is the link to the trailer on Vimeo and the front and back covers of the Dutch version. 

 

The Vimeo page also gives a link to Elbrich's webpage, where one can find information about her writing, translations, etc. as well as her reactions to reviews (they can be read using Google Translate!).

The English version, translated by Philip Gabriel, is due to come out on April 6.