Haruki Murakami fans discussion

The english translation for Murakami's latest work 'Killing Commendatore' is finally upon us!

1. Haruki Murakami’s new novel, Killing Commendatore, will be published in the UK on the 9th October 2018.
2. The novel is a two-part story in one volume – Part 1: The Idea Made Visible and Part 2: The Shifting Metaphor.
3. The novel is centred on art and its creation. The story centres on a painter dealing with his separation from his wife. He goes to stay in a famous artist’s house and discovers a mysterious painting in the attic that shares the book’s title.
4. The subject of this painting is a scene from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, showing the killing of Donna Anna’s father (Il Commendatore, the captain of a group of knights) by Don Giovanni, but set in 7th-century Japan and painted in a traditional style.
5. Murakami’s stories vary widely in tone and style. This haunting and multi-layered novel is reminiscent of his masterpiece, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and takes his narrative art in new and exciting directions.

Product details
Hardcover: 688 pages
Publisher: Harvill Secker (9 Oct. 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1787300196
ISBN-13: 978-1787300194

cover art:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/content/dam...

pre-order:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Comm...

Read the book in dutch around christmas..

Whole different type of reading... still worth while of course.
Still murakami and his weird sense of reality.
But also.. very different.

Loved it.

Enjoy :)

I reposted this btw, because the topics in the general section aren't being shown on the mobile app for some reason

Using mobile app too:)

Hullo folks I am posting here to mark my arrival into the discussion group.
It will be a while until I get to this title as I an trying to read him in order.
If it helps anyone this book is meant to be his take on the Great Gatsby, which hew has also translated.

What has become my main Murakami question, how much is our pleasure in his work his work or his translators?
That is he must be !!:ASN*&xxx hard to translate.

@Phrodrick, a good translator does not only translate the words, but also the essence and context of the book. Murakami himself does speak/write English, I'm quite sure he was closely involved in the English translation of his Japanese works. Therefore I have little doubts what I read in his English works were from Murakami himself. Having said that I've heard that his earlier books were not as well translated as his later ones. I guess the only way to truly judge is to learn Japanese yourself!

"Murakami himself does speak/write English, I'm quite sure he was closely involved in the English translation of his Japanese works."

A very good point, I had not thought of it .

As for me learning Japanese, I have occupied space in lots of language classrooms. Usually the chair learns more of that language than I do.

oops sorry. My excuse is that I am too old to learn... yeah, thats what I'll go with

I know what you mean. I gather it will take myself at least 10 yrs of intensive Japanese course before I can actually read and understand a Murakami novel in his native language 😂

Does anyone know if the paperback version from Penguin Vintage will be released soon? I want it to match my collection... :D

Hmm actually talking to a friend about learning japanese...
When i said: hmm it will takes ages for me to be able to read murakami.
Her response: you would be surprised...


Wondering what i should do :)
Would be fun... but noone to talk to in japanese and no traveling plans either 😂

Are you aware of a discussion guide for the book?

There is something that I found funny about the style of Murakami: the insertion of scenes of sex time to time. When the narration becomes 'heavy' or complex then...SEX with a lot of details to wake up the reader :-)
It's a bit the leitmotiv of most of his books.
I'm at 15% of the book and I like it so far.
Regards,
Marco

Marco wrote: "There is something that I found funny about the style of Murakami: the insertion of scenes of sex time to time. When the narration becomes 'heavy' or complex then...SEX with a lot of details to wak..."

This must be true because others have commented, or more typically complained about sex in these novels.

I sorta remember something like explicit sex in IQ84 (one scene in partic) and his characters do have more or less active sex lives, but :a lot of details, really? maybe the 6 or 8 Murakami books I have read are the exceptions. Details, If you say say so, I cannot.

It's worth plowing through the sex parts to continue with the other parts of the book, lol.

Soo wrote: "@Phrodrick, a good translator does not only translate the words, but also the essence and context of the book. Murakami himself does speak/write English, I'm quite sure he was closely involved in t..."
In the past I was very disappointed with the brevity of the responses in these forums. As time has passed however, I came to realize how difficult it is to write a short, concise response. Soo, you have given a very good answer. I would add that one of the most abiding themes of this and all of Murakami’s work is that there can be no one, right or authorized interpretation of this or any other message. Each of us comes to the book with different experiences and will walk away with a different interpretation. Put another way, the words we use to communicate are, at best, arbitrary approximations of what we wish to express. Words often have multiple meanings (including those you are reading here) and thus subject to misunderstanding. Phrodrick, your question about the efficacy of a translation, it seems to me, are exactly what the author seems to be relating in this novel. Note how our protagonist gives different explanations of the same events to the other characters. In the end, the only translation that really matters is yours.

Henry wrote: "Soo wrote: "@Phrodrick, a good translator does not only translate the words, but also the essence and context of the book. Murakami himself does speak/write English, I'm quite sure he was closely i..."

Nicely said and very apt.

I am about 3 Murakami books away from this one so I cannot make a more than general reply.

Besides the problems of the author's original words being approximates, That is language itself is a limitation; there has to be a additive, (do these problems add or multiply together?) problem of original language and then translations. This just begs my original question.

Then comes is the combined problems of original cultural context and and the cultural context of the reader, analogous to what in science is called Generalizability . What changes in the meaning just by taking the story from one place to another?
Obvious example: changes in the laws about the age of consent.

Then we can get meta. As time passes the late arriving reader has the filters of what they know of the original context and the weight of the modern context.

The truly great writer survives either by writing to universal themes or by having meanings that can be derived by later generations. Left open to all is the question : Are these new meanings legitimately in the original or impositions by the analyst?

A few years back a great deal was made of a Chinese language production of Death of a Salesman(Or something similar ) in The People's Republic. One can only guess what the audience take away was compared to the original American Audience of 1949 NM whatever A. Miller thought he was saying.

Sorry another memory
I got into a lengthy exchange with a translator of Grimm's Fairy tales. He was an advanced German Scholar and was absolute in his conviction that every decision by the translator had to favor the original German. Girls following German could be refereed to as 'He', and he did not translate a word if he did not like the English counterpart. That the result was confusing or failed transmission of meaning was the reader's problem.

His goal was to give the reader a more authentic experience of the original.

"When it came down to it, though, could anything be completely correct or completely incorrect? We lived in a world where rain might fall thirty percent or seventy percent, of the time. Truth was probably no different. There could be thirty percent or seventy percent truth. ..."
pg. 609