"The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami", Sam Anderson

I was glad to read the New York Times magazine's profile of Murakami, because I knew nothing about the celebrated author. A good friend loaned me South of the Border, West of the Sun several years ago; while I remember nothing specific about the book, it left a good impression and I've been meaning to check out more of his work. Murakami's most recent novel, 1Q84, is out in English translation.

Murakami's voice is unique, in my experience, but I've often wondered how much of my perception could be attributed to the inevitable compromises of translation.

When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up with an unorthodox solution: he wrote the book’s opening in English, then translated it back into Japanese. This, he says, is how he found his voice. Murakami’s longstanding translator, Jay Rubin, told me that a distinctive feature of Murakami’s Japanese is that it often reads, in the original, as if it has been translated from English.

This shouldn't have surprised me (though it did). South of the Border, West of the Sun, like all of his works (or so I'm told), is steeped in Western influences. Murakami's worlds are odd melanges of Japanese and Western bits jostling up against one another. They're this close to our reality, but definitely aren't.

(As an aside, Murakami calls Jorge Luis Borges "a hero". Again, this is no surprise. Both Borges' and Murakami's works induce disorientation, a vertigo of the rational mind, while somehow making one yearn for more.)

My one criticism of Anderson's piece is that he tried to make his journey to interview Murakami sound like an episode out of a Murakami novel. It's a tired gimmick found in too many long-form profiles: "Let's exemplify the subject's oeuvre!" Moreover, Anderson held on to the conceit too long in his piece, perhaps in an effort to convey the strangeness of Murakami's fiction. If so, it didn't work. You have to read Murakami himself to get that sensation.