Murakami's Intercultural Stories

     As we've seen through reading Murakami's short stories, he was inspired by a great cohort of western writers like Salinger, Fitzgerald, and Brautigan. He often borrows elements like dialogue, plot lines, and pacing from these authors to create stories of his own. However, Murakami writes in his native Japanese, yet emulates the styles of these authors. In class, we discussed Murakami's liberal use of katakana in order to illicit a foreign feel to his work. I believe that this directly correlates with his adaptations of famous writers' stories. Evidently, as Murakami has translated a great number of works from English into Japanese, he has a naturally good feel for how the writing would sound in Japanese. For example, in "Cooking Spaghetti Dinner in Japan," Brautigan's listing of the ingredients in Japanese would look very similar to Murakami's listing of the different types of spaghetti in "The Year of Spaghetti." Having read Salinger's iconic "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Murakami sought to incorporate that style of natural yet unnerving dialogue in his "A Perfect Day for Kangaroos." The suspense and mystery in "A Small, Good Thing" rears its head again in "The Second Bakery Attack." By using similar modality for his stories, Murakami takes elements from stories he enjoys and recreates them in Japanese, unwittingly blending the cultures together in a cacophony of stories. 

    A testament to Murakami's writing is the fact that when his Japanese is translated into English, those same elements he took remain. That recreation of western literature in Japanese, which is then back-translated into English, should, in theory, be ruined, lost in translation. However, clear stylistic choices are still present and still clearly allude to the source texts. The ability to be compared to its counterpart through the language barrier is a tall task, and yet Murakami seems to do it effortlessly while creating his own new style through katakana. He understands the essence of what makes each story so gripping, and then he uses it in his own writing in Japanese. And yet, when we translate it into English, that essence is not lost; rather, we can begin to appreciate the effort Murakami makes to almost pay respect to those great authors. Japanese and English are two starkly different languages, and being able to incorporate elements from both languages and writing cultures makes Murakami an extremely unique and talented writer. 

-James