Murakami Haruki’s America: Talk, Taste, and The Specter of the Untranslatable

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 particularities of local specificity.  But this article explores a different side of Murakami—a side that attuned to the untranslatable 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,” the analysis focuses on how Murakami reconstructs a conversation about jazz that he had with a Black American interlocutor in New Jersey in the short essay “The Road Home From Berkeley” (Bākurē kara no kaerimichi), which appears in his volume of essays about living in the United States titled The Sadness of Foreign Language (Yagate kanashiki gaikokugo, 1994).  As the article compares the styles of speaking documented in “The Road Home From Berkeley” with those that appear in the English- and Japanese-language versions of Miles Davis’s autobiography Miles (which Murakami discusses in “The Road Home From Berkeley”) and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (which Murakami translated himself), it reveals how Murakami has reflected on the specter of the untranslatable that haunts the global circulations of literature and pop culture.