The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

Murakami's The Strange Library appears designed for younger readers but few of them would recognise a library as it's depicted: borrowing cards, inked date stamps, stacks of books teetering over the door. The book is designed by Suzanne Dean, whose credit is tucked at the foot of the credits. An endpaper note explains that many of the illustrations have been sourced from The London Library and visually the enterprise has the charm of an English storybook but the story, translated by Ted Goossen, is less attractive. A boy researching the Ottoman Empire becomes imprisoned by a extremely threatening old man; his fellow inmates are a girl who speaks with her hands, and a sheep man – a recurring Murakami character who appears in Dance Dance Dance. The combination of inventive design and lurching narrative renders the experience either more frustrating or engaging, depending on your tastes. The final effect is subversive: looks like a children's book, freaks you out.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2014

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru Tazaki is an engineer who designs railroad stations. Professionally concerned with ensuring the flow of commuter traffic, he has been personally devastated by the passing of relationships in his formative years. While growing up in Nagoya, he and four other high school students became as close as platonic friends could be. Aka ("re"), Ao ("blue"), Shiro ("white") and Kuro ("black") and Tazaki ("the only last name that did not have colour in its meaning") lived in each others' pockets until the day when the others expelled Tsukuru from the group. "They gave no explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement. And Tsukuru didn't dare ask."

Banished to Tokyo, Tsukuru falls into depression before, as per his aptronym ("Tsukuru" is written with the Chinese character that means "make" or "build") he sets about rebuilding his life. After a series of unfulfilling relationships he meets Sara, who prompts him to confront the mystery he has been trying to avoid: why did his friends reject him?

The premise of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is as direct as its prose. The novel was translated by Philip Gabriel, who also worked on South of the Border, West of the Sun. Any effect that he or fellow translators Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum has on Murakami's prose is a larger discussion: it's my impression that Gabriel smooths things out but the author's frankness still startles. Tsukuru can't picture Shiro "sticking her hand up the anus of a horse"; later, "These insistent caresses continued until Tsukuru was inside the vagina of one of the girls."

Tsukuru's dreams are also shockingly vivid and anthropomorphic, like manga. But it is only when the locale shifts to Helsinki that he becomes a foreigner. "Are you Chinese?" asks a local. "I'm Japanese," he replies: "It's nearby, but different."

Murakami's Finland is like Shusaku Endo's France in Foreign Studies (1965): uninformed, quaint, filtered through other fictions. The methodical tone of the action and the protagonist's tendency for conjecture and tangential self-examination is more than a little Auster-esque, as is the naming of characters after colours and the incidental mysteries. (What is in the box the jazz pianist carries with him everywhere? The answer may be a symbol of Tsukuru's ostracism.)

In a story of colours, music also assumes significance but, like a crime writer, Murakami makes easy reference to art and literature that may well have been enjoyed by someone not unlike himself. It's another casual touch in a novel lacking the conventional turns a marketing department might demand from someone whom the Observer describes as "the best author on the planet." Colorless Tsukuru has been written in spite of such hype. It's a graceful story of a life in transit. The novelist watches: his subject passes by.

– Sunday Star Times, September 2014

I hurt somebody's feelings once

As a young man you were influenced by the music and writing coming from America, rather than Japanese culture. What were these influences?

I think this is like asking an Englishman like Eric Clapton why he’s so drawn to the blues. If you asked Clapton the same question, I have a feeling he’d shrug his shoulders and say he isn’t sure why.

Haruki Murakami interviewed in 2004, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. Full interview here.

Pictured: Ronin (1998). That third car chase here.

The change it had to come / We knew it all along

Michael A. Stackpole has written about the end of the publishing industry in the Huffington Post. It's a great article, and exciting because he's put a date on it. Afghanistan and oil will last forever and the bets are off for polar ice but publishing, Stackpole proposes, has 24 months left:

Michael Shatzkin, a book industry consultant who is widely read and respected, weighed in with an interesting article about how soon the publishing crash could come. His analysis is fairly solid and he sees a "serious disruption" in book distribution as early as November, 2012.

His thinking runs thusly: once ebook sales hit 20-25% of book sales, print run numbers will fall to a point where the current consignment system for sales will break down. Under the current system, most books can be returned for credit, so for every book sold, two are printed. Those "returned" books have the covers torn off, and the guts discarded, so they cannot be put out into the market again. Ebook sales will create smaller print runs, driving up the unit cost, forcing higher prices which, in turn, will kill sales. Game over.

I don't know enough about business to do the maths on this but I visit a lot of bookstores, and my experience in recent years has been that the major chains offer more and more choice of things people don't want.

When Borders folded in the UK I spent hours pushing through crowds in the Charing Cross branch and emerged with exactly one title. (A Murakami bio.) There was nothing else in the store I wanted that I didn't already have, and the majority (99 per cent) was manifest crap: ghostwritten titles by celebrities no-one outside of England would have heard of; franchise serials that had been churned out at two a year; generic machine-written doorstep-sized fantasy series of the World Quest variety; sporting titles thinner than a Sunday supplement; every other History masters' student's thesis packaged with a sexy / arch title (ditto for Science); bawdily captioned photo titles and joke compilations; I-Was-There travel bunf; and music titles on subjects that warranted little more than a Wikipedia page.

There were queues at the check out. Other people were buying more than me, but not a lot, and the stacks of books that remained on the shelves and in the bins - I wouldn't have put it out if it had caught fire.

Don't get me wrong - I like Borders. (Auckland's Queen Street store stocked more of my novels than Whitcoulls or Dymocks, but less than Unity Books.) My point is that before discussing the death of publishing one should ask for a specified diagnosis.

In the case of newspaper and magazine publishing, Gawker points out that Apple is now positioned as the new Gutenburg. (Their conclusion, in The Who's words: "Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.")

When I talk about "publishing" I'm thinking of "literature" but a visit to any bookstore shows what a tiny slice of the pie that is. The publishing industry has become as vast and sprawling as the music industry -- industry being the key term. It's about shipping as much stuff as possible: books as lumber. Publishers want to make money out of printed paper in the same way that Coca-Cola wants to make money from sugared water. That's not going to happen, and it's ludicrous that it ever reached a point where that seemed possible.

Stackpole goes on to posit:

Publishers, because of their sloth in contracting electronic book rights, own ebook rights to maybe the last fifteen years of their output. Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers' don't own. Authors will make far more on those ebooks through direct sales than publishers are offering. There is no incentive for authors to sell those rights to traditional publishers which means, in the fairly short term, publishers run out of material to sell. Their backlists will vanish as authors sell the books themselves.

If you will, the publishers' gold mine will have played out.

This part of the prediction is more interesting. Literature has always been cheap. Writers pay themselves to create it, and a lot of the time it goes on to make a profit long after they have died. It's these profits which have created the status of different publishing houses as well as their business. It's the over capitalisation of that business which has created the problem. Says Stackpole:

The second point which Mr. Shatzkin doesn't seem to appreciate fully, in my opinion, is the sheer ease with which authors can themselves create and market ebooks.

It's true. In less than two years, I'll probably be creating and selling my own ebooks via this blog and my author site, or via some similar online mechanism. The notion is empowering but more than a little melancholy. Writing is already a lonely business: when the publishing model changes, it will become even lonelier.

iPlot

When you are writing it becomes harder to find new things to read so I was pleased to discover novelist Shusaku Endo, a stranger to me despite being translated into twenty-eight languages (I read only one) and being nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize. Endo was one of Japan's post-war 'Third generation' authors, a group identified with the Japanese tradition of the autobiographical "I-novel". He was Catholic and as a student in 1950 spent several years studying in Paris. Foreign Studies is a collection of three associated stories about a Japanese student and a university lecturer finding their respective ways through Normandy and Paris.

In Haruku Murakami and the Music of Words, translator Jay Rubin writes much about the form of the "I-novel", describing Murakami as Japan's "first genuinely 'post-post-war writer', the first to cast off the "dank, heavy atmosphere' of the post-war period." If Rubin is correct, then Endo must be one of the authors to whom Murakami stands in contrast. Endo's tone reminded me of Graham Greene; only after I looked it up did I learn that the two authors were often compared. Greene was a fan or at least wrote as such on the blurb for Endo's novel Silence. Well, duh.

I'm enjoying the outsider tone and locale of Foreign Studies. The Catholic thing doesn't sit with me: after years of art study I find Christian imagery depressing. I can only enjoy Greene's The End of the Affair by mentally running a red pen through the "saint" sub-plot, a hasty add-on that kills an otherwise modern novel, and Foreign Studies' first section, 'Summer in Rouen' suffers from the same dry work. (Crucifixions and tea cakes, one thinks: he gave up Shinto imagery for this?) The second, 'Araki Thomas' is a non-fiction jolt and a very post-modern shift in tone but part three about the Professor in Paris, 'And You, Too' lifted off. It has many things in fiction that I like: a stranger in the city, a sense of helplessness and disconnection and an atmosphere that all is not what it seems. I've yet to finish but with a set-up like that I'm sold. It's simple and resonant with possibilities.

Thank you notes #2: General consumption

1. Marion Cotillard.
2. James Ellroy, Blood's A Rover.
3. Editions Christian Bourgois.
4. Lady Gaga.
5. Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.
6. Michael Mann, Public Enemies. (Based on the book by Bryan Burrough.)
7. Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna.
8. Bob Woodward's, Plan of Attack, Bush At War and The War Within.
9. Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules.
10. David Bowie, Aladdin Sane.
11. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen.
12. Neu! 75
13. Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So. "When you do something, you should burn yourself completely like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."
14. PBS podcast: Shields & Brooks.
15. Garrison Keillor and The Writers Almanac.
16. The Royal Academy of Arts for Kuniyoshi (21 March - 7 June 2009).
17. John & China, Los Angeles, CA.
18. David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and The Birth of Modern Warfare.
19. The International Herald Tribune. Special Merit Dept: Nick Shortz.
20. Jane for tickets to the lectures by Martin Scorsese and Nick Cave. I mean, wtf. Really. Jane. Rlly?
21. Californication, season 2 on a very legal DVD from Shanghai. Thanks: HH.
22. Martin Cruz Smith, Stalin's Ghost.
23. David Howarth, A Brief History of British Sea Power.
24. Wilshire Plaza Hotel, CA.
25. La Fusée, Paris.
26. Monty's, London.
27. iTunes for "stocking" The Velvet Underground & Nico. (Phew.)
28. Muji, for the notebooks.
29. Lapsang souchong, Houjicha, Rioja.
30. Werner Herzog, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans.

Translation

I've yet to meet every one of my translators. Strangers assume that the process of having your words swapped into a different language is intimate but I've found it's almost the opposite. The publisher gives the translator the novel and the translator comes back to the author with questions, and even then only sometimes. My French translators have had many questions, the Italians a few and the Germans hardly any. The biggest sticking problems with language have been those between editors in the UK and the US but even these have been merely a matter of a few words or a local phrase. In such cases the most important language becomes that of the printer, "STET" and "COLLOQ" being two useful examples.

Overall the experience of having my work transformed so efficiently and without fuss has been a nice reality check. No matter how much you sweat over a novel, in the end that's all it is: just another book.

My French translators Anouk Neuhoff and Isabelle Chapman speak English as well as I do plus a few other languages besides. I blame them for my dismal French because they are excellent conversationalists and even better hosts. Whenever I've attempted a few phrases in their presence their comments are nothing but kind. Anouk translated Shirker and Electric for Christian Bourgois in Paris, and Isabelle translated Departure Lounge. It's my impression that each has imparted her own style to my work but I don't know what that might be. I do know that in France even readers of popular fiction can pay as much attention to the translator's name as they do to the author's. Which is logical if not sobering.

The effects of translation on a writer's work can of course be radical. A good modern example is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami whose novels lurch in accessibility depending on whether his translator is Jay Rubin or Alfred Birnbaum. Rubin's English language version of Murakami is poetic and calm but Birnbaum's, I'm told, is "more Japanese." If readers of Lugenspiele (Pack of Lies - Aus dem neuseelandischen Englisch von Dietmar Hefendehl) or Fuori dal tempo (Shirker - traduzione di Massimo Ortelio e Annamaria Raffo) are experiencing a similar disjunction I can only be thankful to be in such company.

As a writer I owe a great deal to works in translation. When I was growing up in south Auckland the local cinema screened Italian spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong martial arts pictures in which the overdubbed dialogue or subtitles was an integral part of the viewing experience. Similarly the local library held an oddly comprehensive collection of French and Japanese novels which I enjoyed as much for the clarity of the translator's prose as I did for the stories. There were doubtless gaps in meaning but like scratches in a favourite vinyl LP or reflections in a painting's glazing the disjunctions seemed a natural part of the work.

Subsequently the thought that a novel might be translated has encouraged me to focus not on the details of language so much as the broader story. Even if my words will be changed I know the brute narrative will survive. The first question an author is always asked is "What's it about?" so it helps to be able to say in English or any other language. Travellers to foreign lands know how far they can spin out simple phrases such as "Do you have a table?" and "What time is the ferry?" Authors likewise could do well practicing the sentence beginning "My novel is..." Try it some time. Translating the words is easy: finding them in the first place is hard.

(Sunday Star Times, 2004)