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.