“Have you ever tried to translate Mount Fuji?”
“‘Translate’…?”
“You translate nature and it all turns human. It’s noble, or great, or heroic…”
         —Natsume Sōseki, Sanshirō

For most of Japan’s literary history, Fuji was a distant, rather mystical presence, only seen by adventurous souls far from the western capital. Take Manyōshū poem #317, by Yamabe no Akahito:

Heaven and earth:
Since the time they parted,
Of manifest divinity,
Reaching the heights of awe,
In Suruga stands
The high peak of Fuji…

…And so on. By the time Japan’s center of cultural mass shifted east to Edo a thousand or so years later, though, Fuji had become a much more everyday presence. Some people reacted to this by taking it more seriously than ever and building religious sects around it. Others preferred to make light of it, like Bashō with his famous bit about it being nice to not see Mount Fuji for once.

It wasn’t until the Meiji restoration, however, that Mount Fuji really attained its current status as national symbol. It was perfect for the job: awe-inspiring yet simple, unique to Japan yet easily-grasped as a concept by outsiders, and convenient to access through public transport. Once the existing body of work in praise of the mountain was retconned into proto-nationalism, Mt. Fuji became the perfect white screen on which everybody could project their agenda.

Yosano Akiko’s short poem “Mount Fuji at the Dawn of the Year” (「元朝の富士」) is a product of this trend. Written while the Japanese body politic was high as a kite on the economic and diplomatic successes of World War I, the poem is as subtle as a brick to the head. It begins with the portentous line “Now, the first sun of 1919 shall rise” and wastes no time in describing Mount Fuji as the “eruption of a new world” at the “edge of the eastern sky.” Then it gets better:

Behold! There stands
The silhouette of some giant Dante,
Colossal in the center of the Heavens.

It is that young poet’s form
As painted on a Bargello wall:
Blue hat, red robes,
Narrow face,
Handsome gaze turned to the skies,
There, there, the Dante of La Vita Nuova. […]

O people, in this first year after war,
If you would you see the mysteries I do,
Lo! Gaze heavenwards with me,
At Fuji in this vermillion dawn.

Yosano’s vision has a striking universalism to it. In one line, Mount Fuji is described as an amalgam of exotic and primitive materials (coral, lava); in another, it is an echo of High Art or an avatar of one of European civilization’s greatest poets. Parallels to Japan’s post-Meiji drive to preserve an unsullied core of “Japaneseness” in the belly of a national machine built on the best ideas of the West could not be accidental.

In retrospect, of course, Japan at the time looks more like the Dante of the Inferno (mi ritrovai per un selva oscura/ ché la diritta via era smarrita) — and once everything went to hell, being hitched to the nation’s bandwagon became a liability for the mountain.

Hence, the backlash: epitomized by Fukao Sumako’s How Lovely For Mount Fuji That She Is Beautiful (「ひとりお美しい富士山」, excerpt here), published in 1949:

Hmph — so you’re Miss Fuji?
How tiresome!
That classic white New Look reflected
In the clear and unkind mirror of mirror
Honestly/ Who are you supposed to be?
From Tokyo with its barrack roofs
You’re a regular “crane on a pile of trash“.

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“It was nearly five years ago now, but I lived next to a baseball field. This was during my third year of college. I say baseball field, but it really wasn’t anything all that spectacular, just a field with some tufts of grass. There was a backstop, a pitcher’s mound, a makeshift scoreboard next to the first base bench, and then there was a metal net that surrounded the whole thing. The outfield, instead of a nice grass, was a bunch of weeds, all dry and crumbly. There was one small bathroom, but there was nothing like a changing room or a locker room. The field belonged to this steel company that had a huge factory close by, and they hung a sign on the entrance that said ‘Unauthorized Entrance Prohibited.’ Whenever Saturday and Sunday rolled around, ad hoc teams of steel company businessmen and workers would come and play baseball. And then there was the official company team, which practiced on weekdays. Besides those there was also a women’s softball division. It looked like the company really liked baseball. But living next to a baseball field isn’t all that bad. My apartment building was just behind the third base bench, and I lived on the second floor. If I opened the window, the metal netting was right in front of my eyes. So whenever I got bored — and during the day I was bored every day of the week — I passed time by just gazing at the games or practices. But watching baseball was not the reason I came to live there. That was for a totally unrelated reason.”

After the young man said that, he paused his story, took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, and took a few drags.¹

Thus begins “Baseball Field,” one of Haruki Murakami’s lesser-known short stories. Part of the story was extracted, edited and expanded into “Crabs,” published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but the entirety has never been published in English. The young man in the story is at a café with Murakami himself. He mailed Murakami one of his short stories (the content of which the real-life Murakami later turned into “Crabs”), and Murakami, charmed by the young man’s interesting handwriting and somewhat impressed with the story itself, read all 70 pages and sent him a letter of suggestions. “Baseball Field” tells the story of their subsequent meeting over coffee. The point of view goes back and forth between Murakami, the young man, and, briefly, the characters in the young man’s story. Voyeurism is a major theme (the young man actually moved to the apartment to spy on a girl he had a crush on), and storytelling as an act of voyeurism, looking into other people’s lives, is the central theme of the collection in which “Baseball Field” was included: Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round 『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』.²

In this collection, Murakami experimented with techniques he used in Norwegian Wood and later in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and by looking at how Dead Heat came into being, we can better grasp the development of Murakami’s thought process. Not only did he gain valuable experience writing “realistic” fiction, he was able to sharpen the point he wants to make with his writing: reality is strange, and humans have little control over the path their lives will take.

Murakami began his writing career in 1979 by submitting a novel, on a whim, to the popular literary magazine Gunzō.³ The novel, Hear the Wind Sing (『風の歌を聴け』, 1979), won the magazine’s prize for new authors, so he decided to write more, but it was not until after his second novel, Pinball, 1973 (『1973年のピンボール』, 1980), that he sold the jazz bar he owned and started to write full-time.⁴ His output expanded dramatically after Pinball, 1973: he wrote essays, short stories, movie reviews, and translations for many different magazines and publishing companies.⁵ In 1982 he published his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (『羊をめぐる冒険』) using the same cast of characters as his first two novels.

These early novels were written in first person, telling the story of an unnamed “I” (boku), his girlfriend, a bartender named “J,” and a friend named “the Rat.” In addition to the boku persona, another notable characteristic of Murakami’s early fiction was the use of the fantastic: girls with magic ears, talking pinball machines, and a “Sheep Man.” Murakami’s short fiction during the period — with the exception of a few stories, notably “A Slow Boat to China” and “Firefly” — was also very surreal.

In the fall of 1983, there were still four more years before Murakami would publish Norwegian Wood — the bestseller that changed Murakami “from a writer into a phenomenon.”⁶ The period from 1983 to 1985 was a formative one for Murakami, in which he can be seen honing his unique version of realism and developing a distinct worldview. He would later note that after finishing the Rat series, he wanted to try and write “a completely new type of fiction using completely different themes.”⁷ Murakami’s next set of stories would depart from his standard first-person narration and fantastic themes to directly address the shared reality around him in Tokyo.

In October 1983 Murakami started to serialize a set of stories in IN POCKET, a new, pocket-sized Kodansha magazine run by his former editor at Gunzō.⁸ The eight stories for the magazine were written under the collective title Views of the City (『街の眺め』), indexed along with other “short serials” (短編連作). The first story of the series, “Poolside” (「プールサイド」), begins in the third person. A man has turned thirty-five and decides that it is the middle point of his life. A recreational swimmer, he looks at life in the same way he looks at swimming laps; his thirty-fifth birthday is a confirmation that he’s halfway through the pool of life. After a few pages, Murakami abruptly switches to first person, addressing the reader directly:
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In Mr. Kawabata’s works, delicacy joins with resilience, elegance with an awareness of the depths of human nature … they are modern yet directly inspired by the solitary philosophy of the monks of medieval Japan. … For many writers in modern Japan, the claims of tradition and the desire to establish a new literature have proved well-nigh irreconcilable. Mr. Kawabata, however, with his poet’s intuition, has gone beyond this contradiction and achieved a synthesis. …I feel honored to recommend him, who more than any other Japanese writer, is truly qualified for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mishima Yukio wrote these words to the Swedish Academy in 1961, officially nominating him for the prize. It was seven more years before Kawataba would win, with the committee citing his “narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind”:

True, of his production only three novels and a few short stories have so far been translated into different languages, evidently because translation in this case offers especially great difficulties and is apt to be far too coarse a filter, in which many finer shades of meaning in his richly expressive language must be lost. But the translated works do give us a sufficiently representative picture of his personality.

Kawabata’s banquet speech also addresses the issue of translation:

In view of the complexities presented by differences in language, and in view of the fact that my works, no doubt more than those of others, have had to be perused in translation, I must indicate my deep and undying gratitude and respect for the resolve shown by Your Excellencies of the Academy. This first award to an Oriental in fifty-five years has I believe made a deep impression upon Japan, and perhaps upon the other countries of Asia as well, and upon all countries whose languages are little known internationally.

Speaking to the Japanese media, he was even blunter:

If I could have been read by the judges in Japanese that would have been best, but … the fact is that I am heavily indebted to translation. (日本文で審査してもらえれば一番ありがたいわけですけども…翻訳のおかげを非常に被っているわけですね)

Kawabata’s love/hate — or, more accurately, want/distrust — attitude towards translation was expressed in many ways. He was, by all reports, very hands-on during the translation process, which is not to say helpful, necessarily. Edward G. Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central: A Memoir contains this anecdote about the translation of Snow Country:

“Do you not, my esteemed master, find this a rather impenetrable passage?” [I would ask Kawabata]. He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: “Yes.” Nothing more.

Similar themes are visible in Kawabata’s correspondence with Mishima Yukio, published in 1997 as Kawabata Yasunari/Mishima Yukio: Ōfuku Shokan (『川端康成・三島由紀夫往復書簡』). As early as 1951, Kawabata asked Mishima for the name of “that American translating Confessions of a Mask,” because he wanted his advice as “a Japan-based foreigner who reads Japanese literature” on the question of which short stories to send to the US college magazines that Wallace Stegner had put him in touch with.
Continued »

“Still laying in bed, I reached out and tried to turn on the stereo at my side.”

Thus begins Tanaka Yasuo (田中康夫)’s debut novel Nantonaku, Crystal 『なんとなく、クリスタル』. Although not a literary treasure by any stretch of the imagination, the short work immediately became a cultural phenomena upon its debut. After winning the Bungei Prize in autumn 1980, Nantonaku, Crystal attracted a storm of media attention for the unabashedly consumerist and materialist nature of the writing. When the book finally hit bookstores in January 1981, the initial printing sold out on the first day and eventually became a “million seller.”

The plot of Nantonaku, Crystal nominally concerns the ultra-chic Tokyo lifestyle of a young college student and part-time model named Yuri. Just as Moby Dick introduces the reader to overwhelming minutia about cetacean biology, Tanaka provides 442 footnotes in 213 pages to explain the brand names, restaurants, neighborhoods, private schools, and clubs that constitute the lexical environment for his protagonist. This technique is not particularly subtle: the book is printed with the novel text on the right page and the numbered notes on the left page. Japanese conservatives had a field day with the book’s obsession with proper nouns: Aha! Proof at last that prosperous post-war society has reduced youth to a bunch of empty materialists! Tanaka rebutted these charges by drawing obvious parallels between youth brand mania and the traditional Japanese tendency to desperately associate oneself with prestigious companies and universities. Really, isn’t the reluctance to recruit anybody outside of Tokyo University for the national bureaucracy also an example of brand loyalty?

Almost every proper noun in Nantonaku, Crystal is marked with a numerical footnote, giving Tanaka (or otherwise omniscient narrator) a chance to explain the item’s cultural significance to those who aren’t in the know. Some notes are essentially straight-forward encyclopedia entries: “29• Salem - American cigarette brand, menthol. They also make a longer size.” Others can be snobby social commentary: “117• Aoyama - Don’t say ‘I want to live in Minami Aoyama San-chome’ in front of people you don’t really know. It’s embarrassing.” Tanaka also provides a footnote in the middle of a sex scene to let us know that Yuri’s euphemism “my little mound” is code for her clitoris. Thanks.

At least half the reason for Nantonaku, Crystal’s popularity was that readers — especially those outside of Japan’s capitol — could functionally use the book and its notes as a style bible for Tokyo and as a primer on the latest trends in music and fashion. Tanaka may have been a sort-of-snotty, 24 year-old professor’s son and elite Hitotsubashi law student, but the immediate success of the book strongly suggests that his tastes reflected the more fashionable pockets of consumer culture at the time. And fitting with the oft-repeated claim that Japanese kids before the late ’90s exhausted allowances solely on music and clothes, Tanaka spends most of the book name-dropping the soundtrack.

Tanaka’s music choices, however, have greatly suffered from later redirections in musical historiography. The impact of punk rock upon future streams completely transformed our linear understanding of rock development, and Nantonaku, Crystal is frozen in time as a tribute to the now-forgotten dominance of Yacht Rock on the entire decade of the ’70s. Objectively-speaking, AOR was a huge force in Anglo music for a good while, and Tanaka’s book demonstrates how much this genre set the standards for proto-hipster snobs in Japan back in the day. Punk and grunge eventually relegated Tanaka’s beloved “smooth music” to footnotes, but Nantonaku, Crystal hit the market right before New Wave and the “London Night” scene started to win more power in setting the o-share agenda in Tokyo, eventually bringing a darker and more rebellious edge to musical sensibilities. The book now perfectly embodies a forgotten aesthetic era — like the last promenade of distinguished young Neo-Classicist painters before Monet threw open the doors to the Bastille.

Besides his parody-worthy devotion to “smooth music,” there are few clear fundamentals of Tanaka’s tastes that are useful for understanding the nature of the cool hierarchy in late 1970s/early 1980s Japan:

(1) Tanaka gains a mean advantage over the average youth from being able to read/understand English. This not only gives him a higher position in the educational hierarchy but means he has greater access to the latest trend information coming out of the Anglo world without being filtered through the Japanese media, and therefore, automatically accessible to a mass audience. Those individuals able to leverage linguistic ability as cultural arbitrage easily rose above “normal” Japanese who still relied on translation only at the time of formal importation. English ability was essential to taste-makers and style leaders of a certain sophisticated urban cultural strain: from Murakami Haruki to Hosono Haruomi to Ozawa Kenji. Needless to say, this particular skill is correlated with socioeconomic class.
(2) Tanaka apparently does not listen to domestic Japanese music and only references popular local musicians in the novel to disparage them. Here again, Anglo culture is automatically seen as vastly superior to Japanese homegrown culture — at least in the realm of pop music.
(3) Tanaka sees Japanese folk music and “nostalgic” magazines like An•An and Non•no as dwelling in an inauthentic “poverty chic.” To him, Japan’s economy has outgrown this kind of melancholy.
(4) Tanaka seems to know about punk rock and new wave, but essentially ignores these genres. He does not show any antagonism, however, leading me to think they had yet to gain enough footing within Japan to require Tanaka to muster up an opinion of solidarity or rejection.
(5) In Note 415, Tanaka explicitly casts himself as the literary equivalent of singer Rupert Holmes and notes that people of “exclusive” class are more reserved in demonstrating self-confidence to the outside world. Tanaka appears to be associating the use of Holmes’ literary technique as part of his own privileged class background.

In order to relay a sense of Tanaka’s work, and more broadly, his particular style moment, I have translated all the references to music in Nantonaku, Crystal’s Notes. This is “fashionable music” in Tokyo, circa 1980.

(The individual entries for song titles may seem superfluous in English, but in Japanese, the katakana name for the song is used in the text, requiring the note to reveal the proper English title.)

NOTES

2• FEN - Abbreviation for “Far East Network.” It’s good background music for those who don’t know English. Those who understand English jokes can enjoy it on a higher level.
4• Willie Nelson - Singer born in Texas who introduced lots of new elements previously unknown to country & western music.
5• “Moon Light in Vermont” - Standard number written in 1927 by Karl Suessdorf.
10• Stephen Bishop - Singer-songwriter who did a pretty good job as an actor in Kentucky Fried Movie.
11• “On and On” [Stephen Bishop song]
14• Kenny Loggins - Originally one half of the duo Loggins and Messina. Currently working solo. The Bob James-produced album Nightwatch is especially good for waking up in the morning.
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The playwright David Pinski’s first novel, Arnold Levenberg, was composed in Yiddish in 1919-1920, published by Simon and Schuster in Isaac Goldberg’s English translation in 1928, and in the original Yiddish only a decade later in Warsaw by the David Pinski Book Committee, Inc. The excerpt that follows takes place at a dinner party where the eponymous protagonist — an effete pacifist handkerchief manufacturer of German-Jewish descent — opines that the high ideals of the downtown Yiddish leftists, whom he meets at a celebration of the 1917 Russian Revolution, are doomed to failure. “Your Socialism will accomplish nothing,” he tells them. He’s answered by Olga Mankoff — a charismatic Socialist leader.

”… When I look into the future, I feel as the old Chinese felt when at sunrise they gazed from their seashore into the distance, where lay Japan. They beheld a fiery sun arise from the ocean — the waves undulating like molten gold, the heavens a burning expanse of every hue. So the distant land that they could not descry became for them the Land of the Rising Sun, mysterious and holy — the land of heroes and gods…”

Her cheeks burned, her eyes glowed with the rays of the rising sun, and her listeners enjoyed a double measure of beauty. Arnold, too, rejoiced in her beauty, but he could not restrain himself from chilling her ardor:

“Well, is Japan a holy land, a land of heroes and gods? How do those Chinese feel who have seen Japan?”

Olga felt truly as if she had been showered with a douche of icy water. The rising sun in her eyes was clouded over, and sorrow overcast her countenance. She made a hopeless, almost imperceptible gesture.

“I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you,” apologized Arnold, noticing the alteration of her features. “But your comparison inevitably provoked my question.”

“I said,” began Olga, as if in pity for this unfortunate pessimist, “that I felt as the old Chinese felt. But the old Chinese were simply indulging in fantasies when they pictured that distant land as the abode of gods and heroes. We are not satisfied with mere figments of the imagination. We want to make our Land of the Rising Sun the abode of gods and heroes. … Why do you wish to persuade us that deep in our hearts we feel the truth of your doubts as to humanity? Mankind is still very young. It has set itself ambitious goals. It would rise to a higher ethic, a higher spirituality. It would climb to sunnier beauties, to a pinnacle of happiness; Isaiah’s visions, the teachings of Christ, Socialism. Do your share, lend a hand, don’t predict at the outset that the effort is useless. That’s just the way man’s flight in the air was ridiculed. But today we fly.”

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