Jen reads... Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

I finally finished reading Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage　（色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年　in Japanese） by Murakami Haruki. And I'm happy to say that I really enjoyed it! I actually ended up reading it really slowly, to savour it, as I'm getting to the point where there are very few Murakami novels left to read... Also I've been slightly stupidly busy recently, boo! 

The story follows Tsukuru Tazaki, who is an engineer who makes/remodels train stations by day, and... does the normal Murakami main character thing of being alone/cooking etc at night. Surprising! When he was at high school, he was part of a ridiculously tightly knit group of 5 friends, who all suddenly turned their back on him a year or so after everyone had gone to university. This group of friends is the main focus of the story, and spurred on by a new love interest, Tsukuru decides to try to find out exactly why his friends suddenly cut him out of the group. 

I was bound to like this book because... Well, firstly it's Murakami, and I don't think he's written anything that I actively dislike. I also like trains (not in THAT way, but there is nothing better than a good train journey. I really wish that I had more reasons to take the Shinkansen, sigh), so all of the train and station talk was good, and I've been thinking a lot about friendship recently for various reasons, so I enjoyed all of the ruminations on the nature of friendship. Also, as always, I got introduced to some nice classical music! Yay. 

The book is definitely more along the lines of Norwegian Wood, as it's almost completely realistic. There isn't really much surreal stuff going on in the background, and it definitely feels much more grounded in reality than, say, 1Q84 is. Although of course there is a bit of that thrown in, because it is a Murakami. 

I'm really curious about how they're going to pull off some of the translation, as one of the recurring themes of the book is colour (as you can probably tell from the title). This is revealed very early on in the book, so I don't think that I'm going into spoiler territory here, but the reason that Tsukuru is "colourless" is that the other people in his group of friends all have surnames with colours in. 赤松 (red), 青海 (blue), 白根 (white) and 黒埜 (black). Tsukuru, whose surname Tazaki (多崎) literally means many capes (um, not the item of clothing, but headlands - it would be awesome if it meant the item of clothing though!) doesn't have a colour in his name, so he is colourless. Which makes sense. But, that is going to be hellish to translate. If you can read Japanese, it's obvious that the colours are there, but it's either going to need a long winded explanation in English, or something, and I've been thinking about it, but really can't come up with a good way to get it across without just stopping the flow of the book to explain. And this is why I'm not really interested in becoming a literary translator!

I would write more, but I don't want to spoil the book for anybody waiting for the English translation... so  but if you're a Murakami fan I think that you'll like it! Yay! Be excited! And if you're not a Murakami fan (yet), it might be a good one to start with as it's not intimidatingly long, and it's not as weird as some of his other books.

Yayy, Murakami! 

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. 

Jen reads... 1Q84 books 1 and 2... in Japanese!

I try to read a bit in Japanese every day.. and what better to read than some Murakami??


These took me a LONG time to get through... I can remember back in... when was it, 2009??? When they first came out, being really excited, but planning on waiting until the pocket sized version came out. For those who don't know, Japanese paperback books are normally about 10 x 15 cm big, and are the perfect size to fit in a bag... so I wanted that version, so I wouldn't have to cart around huge hardbacks around with me. Normally, the smaller version comes out about a year after the hardcover, but with this, it was so popular that it only came out last year!!! Crazy. So, I'd been waiting for about 3 years to read them, haha. 

As soon as the first paperback book (books 1, 2 and 3 were split up into 2 books each, so 6 books in all) came out, I bought it, and then proceeded to read it VERY VERY slowly. I'm not entirely sure why, but even though I was enjoying it, I didn't really have much motivation to read... 

Recently though, I've been making sure that every time I can sit down on one of my commute trains (I get 2 different trains and sometimes a bus every day, fun!), I would spend the whole time reading instead of messing about on my phone.

So I finally finished the 4th book, the second half of book 2! (This is getting a bit confusing)... And, I don't have book 3 yet! What was I thinking? I should have had it ready! I forgot that it's around halfway when Murakami books tend to get addictive, and the last half of this was making me want to "accidentally" forget to get off at the right stop and carry on reading instead. Hehe. 

Of course, I haven't finished the whole book yet, but I recommend it so far! If, however, you've tried reading Murakami and didn't like it in the past, you're not going to find anything new here. It's still the same kind of characters (although one of them is female, yay!), doing the same kind of things, and then something weird happens to them... But I really like that! :D 

For anybody who has read this in English - how is Aomame's name dealt with in English? Because in Japanese there's a fair bit about how strange a name it is, and I was just wondering how that would have been translated. Because obviously, to somebody who doesn't know a lot about Japan or hasn't lived here, the strangeness of the name doesn't come across at all. 

In terms of Japanese, this wasn't too difficult to read, but I would in no way recommend this to people who aren't used to reading in Japanese, simply because of the length. 

...I must go and buy book 3 now! (paperback books 5 and 6. Heh) Although I really shouldn't as I have a whole shelf full of Japanese books that I haven't read yet. Hmm hmm hmmm...