Catch-Up

Long time no see, folks. Here's the latest:

School stuff proceeds well so far. I registered for classes last week. Miraculously and contrary to my suspicions, I ended up in Japanese 3B (for mid-intermediate for lower advanced speakers). I honestly don't know how that happened. It feels like I spend most of my time here asking for explanations, so I'm hardly proficient. But that's neither here nor there. In addition to Japanese, I hopefully will be taking History of Modern Japan, Japanese Literature after 1945, and (somewhat inexplicably) English-language Creative Writing.

There actually is a bit of a story there. I've long been a fan of Haruki Murakami, a Japanese author who writes a mixture of primarily dark fiction in the form of short stories and novels and the occasional non-fiction piece.

My first and favorite of his was a book called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was dark, funny, poignant, and thought-provoking. I was in love.



It made me wonder, though, how much was lost in the translation. So I spoke to my Japanese professor about it and asked him what the original Japanese editions were like.

"Oh," he told me. "Haruki Murakami in Japanese is nothing special. His prose is so-so, it's just the plot that is driving. I think he's much better in English than Japanese."

I was totally floored by this. Such an odd thought, that the translation actually improved a book! I did some research on the translators for Murakami. Primarily, his works are translated by either Alfred Birnbaum or Jay Robin. Birnbaum has done the lion's share, and by his translation alone, he's clearly a talented scholar and author.

And guess what? He apparently teaches a Creative Writing class at Waseda.

I don't know how or why I signed up for it, honestly. There were a ton of other good classes to take. But somehow, when I registered, I ended up filling in that bubble on the class sheet and turning it in. I suppose I'll have many opportunities to take creative writing at Knox, but how often will I have the chance to take creative writing with a well-respected author and translator?