No translator is an island: the changing dynamics of Murakami Haruki translations around the world

Abstract

Tim Parks has included Haruki Murakami among the group of authors writing ‘dull global novels’, a perception that is in part the result of an exclusive focus on English-language translations of Murakami. By turning attention to translations in other languages, this essay reveals a more nuanced and complex picture, showing that depending on where and by whom he is translated, Murakami in fact emerges differently than in English, and arguing that his writing is perhaps not so ‘dull’, after all. After briefly describing the history of Murakami translations in North America, the essay examines the history of translations in East Asia, using the example of greater China, where the two main translators, Lai Ming Chu (Taiwan) and Lin Shaohua (China), produce strikingly different versions of his writing. The essay then goes on to trace the main patterns of Murakami translation in Europe and into some Middle Eastern languages and Persian. In Europe there is a gradual shift away from indirect translations through English toward direct translations from the Japanese, and a greater degree of collaboration among translators. The essay analyzes the effects of these changes, offering a few examples from Murakami’s latest novels.     

The problem of tatemashi in Murakami Haruki’s work: comparing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84

Abstract

This article investigates a problem that has been underexamined in Murakami scholarship so far, namely what I will call tatemashi (stacking), a method of novel-writing which Murakami Haruki used twice in his career, first in Nejimakidori Kuronikuru and later in 1Q84. In both cases, Murakami first published a shorter, two-volume version, but later stacked up the novel with a third volume. This article studies the various problems surrounding this writing method. I suggest that edits during the translation process of the two novels into English have made it impossible to detect why tatemashi was carried out. By studying the Japanese versions, I identify that a main reason for tatemashi to happen is the thrust of a storyline that calls for the development of a ‘smaller-scale’ story of personal self-discovery into a ‘larger-scale’ tale of commitment to an ‘other’.     

The artist as a medium and the artwork as metaphor in Murakami Haruki’s fiction

Abstract

In many of Murakami Haruki’s works, the protagonist is in a profession close to the world of literature, although usually not exactly a writer. In their role as translators, advertising copywriters, journalists, or editors, Murakami’s protagonists are invested with the task of rearranging fragments of reality into narrative or artistic form, and/or of transmitting a message. This process is emotionally charged, often involving a supernatural dimension. While the process of reconstructing a narrative is largely unconscious, the narrator’s choice to act in this capacity is deliberate, and is presented as a way of fulfilling his responsibility towards others. I read this element as an expression of Murakami’s vision of the role of a writer in society. The figure of the artist-narrator takes an interesting form in Kishidanchō-Goroshi (Killing Commendatore, 2017), where the protagonist, a visual artist specialising in realistic portraits, decides to pursue a more creative approach to painting that leads him to a series of supernatural adventures. Through a close reading of the novel, this article investigates how Murakami’s portrayal of the artist as a shaman-like figure functions like a metaphor for the role of the literary author as a catalyst that enables people to connect with their inner self and with each other.     

Madness,mystery and abnormality in the writing of Yumeno Kyūsaku

Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889–1936) has been labeled a writer of henkaku detective fiction since submitting his debut story, ‘Ayakashi no tsuzumi’ (‘The demonic hand drum’), to Shinseinen magazine for a competition in 1926. The term henkaku is rooted in the historical context of the 1920s and 1930s as a modifier of a subgenre of mystery fiction that eschewed puzzle-solving in favor of gothic atmospheres and strange happenings. This article considers the relationship between henkaku and gendered, early twentieth-century discourses of hentai (abnormality). Transitioning from an early emphasis on ‘abnormal sexology’ to ‘abnormal psychology’, Kyūsaku used the affective potential of visceral henkaku narratives to not only entertain readers, but to shock them into an examination of their own psyches and the limits of modern, rational thought. Kyūsaku's skepticism toward the ‘isms’ of his day resonated with a new audience, bringing the spirit of henkaku into the post-Second World War period when his works were rediscovered in the context of 1960s sub- and counter-culture.     

创造超越死亡文学的新视点——川端康成新感觉派时期的文学主张

新感觉派运动在日本文学史上只是昙花一现,很快就消失了。但川端康成却被认为是完成新感觉主义的唯一的一位作家,获得了极高的评价。川端康成把新感觉派贯穿始终、成为新感觉派最为成功的作家的主要原因是:川端寄予新感觉派运动的期望主要是在思想方面。即在新的表现当中寻求人生新的救济、找到人类超越死亡的方法。这与新感觉派的其他成员一味地在感觉的表现当中寻求文学的意义从根本上不同。贯穿整个新感觉派时期的川端的文学理念是对人类生命的关注,是对人类超越死亡问题的关心。纵观川端的整个创作生涯,这也是川端文学的核心。     

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's uncanny travels in Republican-era China

This study focuses on Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Shina yūki (Travels in China): an account of a four-month journey through eastern, central, and northern China in the spring and summer of 1921. Due to Akutagawa's reputation as a writer and the account's vantage point on a transitional period in Japan's expansion abroad, Travels in China has traditionally enjoyed a prominent place in the canon of twentieth-century Japanese travel writing. What has received less attention, however, is the relation of the work to the rest of Akutagawa's literary corpus. In this paper, I situate Travels in China within the larger context of Akutagawa's ongoing interest in Chinese fiction and drama. Rather than reading Travels in China as a work of journalism, as Akutagawa initially invited his readers to do, I argue that the work is an extended exploration not only of the relationship between ‘New China’ and Akutagawa's beloved traditional Chinese culture, but also of the boundaries separating journalism, fiction, and other literary genres. Ultimately, I connect Travels in China to Akutagawa's later work: texts that similarly interrogate and deconstruct the distinctions between genres and modes of narrating experience.     

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.     

Making Sense of the Sacred

In this note I examine the concept of sacred values. Some commentators have recommended avoiding the question or postponing negotiations until other issues have been settled, whereas others have suggested that few sacred values cannot be rendered into some form of trade‐off (i.e., they are pseudosacred). Here, I follow Scott Atran and Robert Axelrod and argue that ritual and the sacred can be an important component of negotiation and, when addressed effectively, have great potential to break impasse. I first examine the notion of the sacred and its near synonyms, the priceless and the intrinsically valuable. I then look at the issue of valuing life and show that although society places limits on lives as a matter of policy, it paradoxically funds heroic acts, such as mine rescues, which defy economic justification. These acts turn out to fulfill an important symbolic and ritualistic function. Finally, I draw out three implications of the framework for negotiators: negotiators should engage in some form of values clarification among the parties, material compromise by one party does not necessarily indicate that that party's values were not ultimate or that these have been relinquished, and considerable weight should be placed on ritualistic and symbolic gestures with regard to values.     

Handle Him with Care: The Importance of Getting Thucydides Right

Scholars from numerous disciplines continue to study, debate, and value Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. This review essay first explores and elaborates many of the enduring and vital contributions of Thucydides for IR theory. It then assesses and engages three new books, including a major, wide-ranging collection of new essays and a very influential (and deeply flawed) attempt to apply the lessons of that work—one that warns of a “Thucydides Trap” that might unwittingly ensnare the United States and China, resulting in an unwanted and catastrophic war between the two. This review essay argues that, as illustrated by the books under consideration here, contemporary IR scholars would be very well served by taking Thucydides seriously and would benefit from reading and considering his History with great care; at the same time, there are enormous, perilous analytical dangers inherent in attempting to draw conclusions from a superficial reading of The Peloponnesian War.     

“Only the USSR Has… Clean Hands”: The Soviet Perspective on the Failure of Collective Security and the Collapse of Czechoslovakia, 1934–1938 (Part 2)

The second part of this two part essay focuses on the Czechoslovak crisis in 1938, based on papers from the Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii in Moscow and the recently published journals of Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiskii. The essay is also grounded in British, French, and Romanian archives, and the standard document collections, including the American and German series. The Soviet Union did all that it could do, given Anglo-French abdication, to help the Czechoslovak goverment defend its independance against Nazi Germany. The British and French portrayed a manipulative Soviet Union, seeking to abandon treaty commitments to Czechoslovakia, while at the same time they fled from obligations to Prague and projected their own evasions onto Moscow. In spite of everything, the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Bene?, might have held the fate of his country in his own hands. Would he do “something crazy”, would Czechoslovakia fight alone at the outset, hoping that public opinion would force France and Great Britain into war? Tragically, Bene? would not bid va banque and indeed was complicit in the Anglo-French abandonment of his country. By its reckoning, the Soviet Union escaped the crisis with “clean hands”, though a clear conscience was no consolation in Moscow, where the government had to contemplate the ruin of collective security and its own isolation in Europe.     

Visualizing emotion and seeing change in science fiction manga: political potential in the expression of emotion in 7 Billion Needles

This article analyzes the science fiction (SF) manga 7 Billion Needles in order to show how an overt visual and narrative emphasis on character emotions and psychology can contribute to science fiction's political potential by emphasizing the similarities between dialogue as a form of emotional therapy and the act of exploring alternative environments. This article also demonstrates how science fiction manga provides a template by which character emotion can become so integrated into the SF narratives and worlds that emotion itself becomes ‘science fictional’.     

Evaluating the influence of international norms and shaming on state respect for rights: an audit experiment with foreign embassies

ABSTRACT

How do international norms affect respect for human rights? We report the results of an audit experiment with foreign missions that investigates the extent to which state agents observe international norms and react to the potential of international shaming. Our experiment involved emailing 669 foreign diplomatic missions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom with requests to contact domestic prisoners. According to the United Nations, prisoners have the right for individuals to contact them. We randomly varied (1) whether we reminded embassies about the existence of an international norm permitting prisoner contact and (2) whether the putative email sender is associated with a fictitious human rights organization and, thereby, has the capacity to shame missions through naming and shaming for violating this norm. We find strong evidence for the positive effect of international norms on state respect for human rights. Contra to our expectations, though, we find that the potential of international shaming does not increase the probability of state compliance. The positive effect of the norms cue disappears when it is coupled with the shaming cue, suggesting that shaming might have a ‘backfire’ effect.     

Narrating the cultural trauma of 3/11: the debris of post-Fukushima literature and film

Abstract

Images of debris dominate our understanding of the 3/11 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown – that took place in Japan on 11 March 2011. They have been effectively used to rewrite the story of individual suffering into one of collective tragedy. In this article, debris is a locus for examining the construction of the narrative of 3/11 as cultural trauma. The article analyzes three texts that deal directly with images of 3.11 debris: Fujiwara Toshi's documentary film No Man's Zone and two short stories: Murakami Ryū's ‘Little eucalyptus leaves’ (Yūkari no chisana ha, 2012 Murakami, Ryū, 2012b. Yūkari no chisana ha. In: Sore de mo sangatsu wa, mata. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 245–60. [Google Scholar]) and Saeki Kazumi's ‘Hiyoriyama’ (2012) Saeki, Kazumi, 2012a. Hiyoriyama. Trans. Jeffrey Hunter. In: Elmer Luke and David Karashima eds. March Was Made of Yarn. New York: Vintage Books, 163–81. [Google Scholar]. Fujiwara interrogates the position of the viewer via images of destruction, Murakami connects 3/11 to the multidirectional memory of other global traumas like Auschwitz, and Saeki constructs a local narrative that contrasts the personal experience of the disaster with a televisual or filmic representation. These texts are engaged in the cultural work of constructing 3/11 as collective trauma. They create a collective identity, a ‘we’, for this trauma that speaks both for and against the national narratives of recovery. This article examines images of debris around the one-year anniversary of 3/11 and speculates on the concurrent lack of images of bodies.     

Persuasive Narratives and Costly Actions

Persuasive narratives can induce some individuals to engage in costly actions. Entrepreneurs of suicide missions frame the necessity of violent behavior within the context of persuasive narratives to attract potential recruits. Herein we report results from an experiment to test factors involved with costly action linked to a persuasive narrative. We recruited 164 participants (M = 21, SD = 5.20) and measured hormones, electrodermal activity, and personality to predict who would be influenced by the narrative's message. We found that the persuasive narrative we tested resulted in costly action by those who are high-perspective takers and are more physiologically aroused by the narrative. The findings fill lacunae in the literature, providing a novel approach to examine costly behavior (like martyrdom missions) in the laboratory.     

The remythologisation of white collective identities in post-apartheid South African film by myth and counter myth

Abstract

Since 1994 a collection of films, referred to here as post-apartheid South African history film, has thematically represented South Africa's apartheid history, and in so doing has engaged with the representation of the white figure in ways which suggest a reformulation of collective South African white identity construction. Part of this process is the phenomenon of the remythologisation, or the counter myth construction, of whiteness as an identity on film. Such mythic representations frequently describe the white figure as connected to aspects of guilt (whether individual or collective), remorse and forgiveness. Often the mythic construction of whiteness on film is delivered in a seemingly oversimplified binary fashion, reducing the representation of white identity in the post-apartheid South African situation to one that is robbed of complexities and nuances.     

The political use of victims: The shaping of the challenger disaster

This essay applies Kenneth Burke's concept of victimage to analyze Ronald Reagan's handling of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. The deaths of the Challenger seven could have served as powerful symbols of failed policy and flawed leadership. Yet Reagan reconciled the failure of the shuttle and renewed U.S. commitment to the space program by sanctifying the crew and offering Americans consolation and purgation through sacrifice of the seven in victimage.

Through interpretive textual analysis, the essay makes clear the process by which Reagan enacted the drama. Implications are drawn for the U.S. space program and for understanding the political use of victimage.

The essay suggests that political victimage now must be a reflexive process, enacted after the death, after the fact. Often in our times, ordinary people are slaughtered by forces as random as they are terrible. In order for the drama to give meaning and purpose to their passing, victims must be transformed in and by the drama. Purified and perfected, victims are sanctified and sacrificed after the fact in the dramas created about them.     

Global Collective Memory: Conceptual Difficulties of an Appealing Idea

The idea of “collective memory” has attracted substantial attention since Maurice Halbwachs’ path-breaking work in the 1920s. Recently we have started to notice references, at an increasing pace, to a global(ised) version of collective memory. This essay argues that “global collective memory”, especially in light of Halbwachs’ original understanding, is not a particularly strong or promising concept. First, the essay discusses three kinds of memory, namely individual, organisational, and institutional, and juxtaposes them with the idea of collective memory. Then it turns more specifically to a discussion of the global scale, and suggests that the intricate connections between these different types acquire a new degree of complexity when transposed to the global level due to the questions of politics and identity. The essay suggests further that a global memory, conceptualised with reference to its institutional rather than collective characteristics, may well be in the making.     

Kawabata's views of language and the postwar construction of a literary genealogy

Abstract

This paper shows the ways in which, in the immediate post-war period (1945–1951), Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) reflected on his earlier, pre-war literary career and re-envisioned his postwar literary trajectory by constructing a new genealogy of the modern novel in Japan, in relationship to the intricate issues of the literary styles of the modern novel, ‘national language’ (kokugo), and the literary tradition. By examining his Shin bunshō tokuhon (New Guide to Literary Language, 1950), which presents Kawabata's past and present views of literary language, I will argue that Kawabata's changing views of language and literary style must be understood in the context of contemporary debates over national language policy and language reform movements. I will show the manner by which Kawabata formulated his views of language in dialogue with his two rival writers: Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) in the prewar period and Tanizaki Junichirō (1886–1965) in the postwar period. As we shall see, the death of his close literary colleague Yokomitsu in 1947 and Tanizaki's unflagging literary exploration during and following the war prompted Kawabata to position himself in a genealogy of modern Japanese literary writers as well as in relationship to the linguistic and literary tradition of Japan.