Japanese Language and Literature

Murakami Haruki’s America and the Specter of the Untranslatable

Brian Hurley — 2024-04-05

The world-famous Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki (1949-) has been said to write universally legible, made-to-be-translated fiction that is designed to circulate through the channels of global cultural commerce unimpeded by the thorny details of local specificity. But this article explores a different side of Murakami—a side that is attuned to the particularity of socially contextualized language as he heard it spoken around him during his time living in the United States in the early 1990s. Drawing on the scholar of comparative literature Michael Lucey’s approach to reading “the ethnography of talk,” my analysis focuses on how Murakami reconstructs a conversation about jazz that he had with a Black American interlocutor in New Jersey in the essay Bākurē kara no kaerimichi (“The Road Home From Berkeley”), which appears in his volume of essays about living in the United States titled Yagate kanashiki gaikokugo (The Sadness of Foreign Language, 1994). As I compare the styles of speaking documented in Bākurē kara no kaerimichi with those that appear in the English- and Japanese-language versions of Miles Davis’s autobiography Miles (which Murakami discusses in Bākurē kara no kaerimichi) and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (which Murakami translated himself), my analysis reveals how Murakami has reflected on the specter of the untranslatable that haunts the global circulations of literature and pop culture.

The Encoding of Emotions in Ogawa Yōko’s Works: Sensory Narration and Mood Tableaux

Elena Giannoulis — 2024-04-05

The present article investigates in what way emotions are encoded in the works of Yōko Ogawa and reveals how their potential impact on affect and feelings unfolds. It argues that emotions predominantly occur in their pre-reflective form, i.e. as affects that are expressed by sensory narration. The study demonstrates that protagonists cannot verbalize or thematize reflected forms of emotions, i.e. feelings, or they stop at the affective level, primarily at the perception of physiological reactions. Sensory narration is embedded in the fairytale-like and yet uncanny-seeming basic mood that characterizes Ogawa’s writing. This mood is largely generated by sequences that will be defined in the present article as mood tableaux. After a clarification of the issue of the quality of mood in the text and the textual encoding of emotions (both affects and feelings), text-based and empirical approaches from the field of literary studies will be incorporated in an outlook on future research on this topic. The hypothesis is that due to the sensory and affective narration style, readers subconsciously shift to an affective perception mode, which subsequently turns into a mode of perception based on feelings. This is because, in contrast to the characters, the reader cannot stop at the affective level and cognitively steps in for the protagonists, i.e. the reader reflects on the affective during the reading process and is moved by the feelings that the protagonists lack; he or she fills the psychological void in the text. This affect-reaction model can also be applied to the works of other authors and, through its symbiosis of text-based and empirical approaches, has great potential for the affective sciences within the field of literary studies.

Front Matter and TOC

Hiroshi Nara — 2024-04-05

Tobira Beginning Japanese

Junko Tokuda Simpson — 2024-04-05

Meshiagare: A Culinary Journey through Advanced Japanese

Mayumi Ajioka — 2024-04-05

Contributors

Hiroshi Nara — 2024-04-05

Back Matter

Hiroshi Nara — 2024-04-05