Murakami was the writer who got me started on Japanese. I read Wild Sheep Chase in English; the author’s biography said he had translated writers like Chandler and Hammett into Japanese, and the translator had translated the Japanese back into a kind of hardboiled English, but I kept wondering what this could possibly be like in Japanese. The book had a scene, anyway, that I loved: a gangster’s driver comes to pick up the narrator’s cat, which will be looked after while the narrator does a job, and the driver, narrator, girlfriend and cat go off in the car. ‘What’s his name?’ asks the driver. ‘He doesn’t have a name.’ The driver and girlfriend are appalled because he failed to give his cat a name. The driver proposes a name for the cat. There is a discussion of why some things have names and others don’t. The driver suggests that towns, parks, stations and so on are given names to compensate for their fixity on the earth. Narrator: Well, suppose I utterly obliterated my consciousness and became totally fixed, would I merit a fancy name?…Driver: But you already have a name. Narrator: Right you are. I nearly forgot.
Anyone who has studied analytic philosophy would find this passage hard to resist. I found myself ordering the Japanese text through Books Nippon, buying Halpern’s Kanji Dictionary, buying a Romaji Dictionary, buying a grammar, working doggedly through various favourite passages… So the Japanese I know is heavily influenced by
Murakami (ear, cat, cheese snacks, name). (Books Nippon had been so helpful in ordering books not in stock that I was encouraged to order Kurosawa’s Autobiography, so I am very much in Murakami’s debt.)
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