2013年6月9日日曜日

Jen reads… 1Q84 (book 3) in Japanese!

So 1Q84 is a bit… slow isn't it? Not in a bad way, at all, but there is a LOT of character building etc. to get through before it starts getting I can’t put it down!!-good. It may just be that I’m more sensitive to this because I read it in Japanese. I definitely read slower in Japanese than I do in English, and as a result I take in EVERYTHING in the book. Which is not a bad thing at all, but it means that I read every single word of the book (and sometimes have to take the time to puzzle out what a sentence actually means, or look stuff up in the dictionary). I don’t know how everybody else reads in English, but I definitely do not stare at every word and try to understand its meaning before going to the next one.

What am I trying to say? Well, it is definitely worth sticking around to the end, because… book 3 is awesome. I think, to be honest, that this might be my favourite Murakami so far. As soon as I finished reading it, I wanted to start again from the beginning. Good thing I have the new Murakami to read! Hehe.
If you haven’t read any Murakami yet… maybe don’t start with this one. It’s huge, and potentially intimidating. But, it is also great.

Bullet points! For the whole thing, not just book 3. If you haven’t read it yet and want to know nothing before going in (which I would recommend) don’t read this!

  • Aomame and Tengo are both awesome. Especially Aomame. I love that it seems that Murakami seems to be able to write convincing female characters now, some of them in previous books have seemed a bit.. lacking. Or a bit too manic pixie dream girly. Which I guess in some ways Aomame could have been (and that Fukaeri is, to be fair), but her character is so filled out, and complex and lovely.   
  • I’m glad I read it in Japanese, somehow the awkward sex scenes aren’t as awkward when they’re not in English! (The line about the cocoa? Not as awkward in Japanese as it is in English. I think the difference is that Japanese doesn't have to be explicit in the way that English does. It comes off as more metaphorical than the English does.)
  • I still can’t get over Aomame's name. Hehe.
  • The whole 空気さなぎ (Air Chrysalis) story is weird. I like it!


And on a Japanese related note… Murakami really stands out to me as a marker of how much my Japanese has improved, as the first book that I ever read in Japanese was Norwegian Wood. I get SO much more out of his books now than I did then, and I can go for whole stretches without coming across any words that I don’t know, which makes me happy. It makes me want to go back and reread everything by him that I read in Japanese up until... about 3 years ago, because I think that I would enjoy them in a completely different way.

I've read Murakami in both English and Japanese, but I definitely think that his stuff is better in the original. Not that the translations aren't good, because they really REALLY are, but there's so much stuff which just can't be put across in English that you get from Japanese. (Obviously it works the other way round too. Harry Potter in Japanese really bored me, but in English it's full of yay!)

Alas, my shelf of unread Japanese books is telling me that I really shouldn't do that.

Writing this has made me realise that I should really try to read more Japanese at the weekends and at night, because I am getting through his new book ridiculously slowly. But then once I've finished it, I won’t have any Murakami lined up to read! And that will make me very sad. 

6 件のコメント:

  1. Have you read... ALL the Murakami, except for the new one? Because that is AMAZING! (I could have done that by now, I realise, but I'm trying REALLY HARD to save his books because otherwise I will read them ALL and then never get to read any of them for the first time AGAIN and ahhhh!!)

    But anyway- I super loved this book. Like, a lot. And I actually whizzed through the whooole thing (I even waited to start until I had book 3 and everything) and stayed up late reading it, you know, all that jazz! But yeah, it was awesome, and you've super made me want to read it again.

    (I still don't entirely get why Aomame's name is so funny! I think that was a thing that was lost in translation haha)

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    1. No I haven't... there's still loads of stuff that I haven't read (mostly short stories/essays/collaborations with other people). There are I think 3 novels which I haven't read yet (Hear the Wing Sing, Pinball 1973, and South of the Border, West of the Sun).. apart from his newest one, which I'm reading now so it doesn't count.

      One day I should make a list of all the Murakami I've read and in what languages! And everyone shall marvel at how sad I am :D

      Aomame is a really really rare surname (I don't even know if it exists as a surname), it literally means green beans, and it's just weird that in a story which is as serious as this one is that one of the main characters would be called green beans. Hehe. But yeah, it's definitely one of those things that gets lost in translation, it's not like the translator could have referred to her as "Miss Greenbeans" all the way through. Or could he? Hmm!

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  2. Wow, I love how this is sort of a milestone book for you! This book is a perfect win-win situation for you: you get to read it in its original language so you won't have translation issues to muddle the meanings, and because you're not a native reader, each word is significant. It's so easy to skim over the dialogue or descriptions when we're reading!

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    1. Yeah, it's nice to actually read everything in a book. I've realised recently that I read wayyy too quickly in English, and sometimes end up confused at the end (I recently read halfway through a book, realised that I'd accidentally skim read too much and had no idea what the hell was going on, so had to go back to the beginning and force myself to read it slowly.. hehe).

      It is good to read it in the native language :D It was worth all of the years of study!

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    2. The only thing that annoys me about reading foreign books or translated novels is that though the paperbacks are nice and portable, you find yourself buying like, 4 or 5 parts to the book! Don't even get me started on Harry Potter!

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    3. That is true! Although I sort of prefer that, as it makes things a little bit less intimidating. There's no way I would have even tried to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Japanese had the book not been split into 3 parts.

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