{"id":1529,"date":"2022-12-12T11:17:46","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T02:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/?p=1529"},"modified":"2022-12-12T12:30:13","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T03:30:13","slug":"memories-of-things-that-never-happened-to-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/essays-en\/1529","title":{"rendered":"Memories of Things That Never Happened to You"},"content":{"rendered":"

To accompany the opening of the Haruki Murakami Library in November of 2021, we published a series of essays on the Waseda International House of Literature Annex website called Encountering the Literature of Haruki Murakami<\/em>. This series is a forum for people involved with Murakami\u2019s literature in a variety of ways to talk about their \u201cencounters\u201d with his writing, and what \u201cconnections\u201d they feel to it. This November, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Museum\u2019s opening, we are continuing the series with a new batch of essays.<\/p>\n

On the celebratory occasion of beginning the second year of this series, we asked the author Hideo Furukawa to contribute the first essay.
\n\u3000\u3000My first encounter with Furukawa\u2019s work was reading his novella Slow Boat to China RMX<\/em> (Media Factory; translated into English by David Boyd as Slow Boat<\/em> [Pushkin Press, 2017]). As many of you know, this novella is part of a series of works by young authors written as tributes to famous pieces by Haruki Murakami. It portrays the growth of the first person narrator boku<\/em>, a story that of course brings to mind the boku<\/em> of Murakami\u2019s original, but that also evokes a feeling in the reader all its own. Reading this text that feels like being told a story, I couldn\u2019t help but want to read it aloud myself\u2014I found it so memorable, and I\u2019ve been a Furukawa fan ever since.
\n\u3000\u3000When we opened the Haruki Murakami Library in 2021, we asked Furukawa to recommend five books related to world literature (please see the end of this essay for these recommendations), and I remember feeling even closer to him as I saw four books I dearly love appear on his list. I was happy that when I later requested that he contribute an essay to this series he immediately agreed.
\n\u3000\u3000Without further ado, let us hear from Furukawa himself about his experience reading Murakami literature!<\/p>\n

Quan Hui (Editorial Director, Waseda International House of Literature)<\/p>\n

Memories of Things That Never Happened to You<\/strong>
\nHideo Furukawa<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Whenever I write fiction, I find myself facing memory in a strange way. As Murakami himself has also said, it is not like there are only writers who write with a clear idea of \u201chow it will all turn out.\u201d But writers like us are able to follow the right track as we write even if we don\u2019t quite know where we\u2019ll end up. If we\u2019re able to keep a firm sense of \u201cthe direction my writing is heading is not wrong,\u201d then our writing will keep advancing until the story reaches its natural conclusion.
\n\u3000\u3000When I\u2019m immersed in this sort of writing, I feel I\u2019m somehow excavating my own memories.
\n\u3000\u3000It\u2019s as if I\u2019m being told that the yet-unwritten story is already there, at the very bottom of my subconscious, and that I just need to plunge down to the deepest point and recover these lost memories….
\n\u3000\u3000These lost memories\u2014they\u2019re yours already.<\/em>
\n\u3000\u3000They\u2019re the memories you have of this story.<\/em>
\nOf course, in reality, these are not memories at all. Yet I find myself\u2014or rather, writers like me who have a certain inclination find themselves\u2014knocking\u2014toc toc!<\/em>\u2014 at the door of these \u201cmemories\u201d quietly sleeping at the bottom of our souls to awaken them. Or, sometimes, we use an excavating machine to dig them out by force.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another strange thing in this vein that I want to bring up. There are a couple of dozen books I\u2019ve read three, four, or even more times. The kind of books people call \u201cwell-loved favorites,\u201d I guess. Whatever the case, there are several Murakami novels that have become this sort of book for me. So, I want you to imagine something like this. You read a book for the first time at the end of your teens, then you read it again in your mid-twenties, then again in your late thirties, then again in your early forties, and then there you are, now in your fifties, and you pick it up yet again: what sort of feeling comes over you as you turn that first page?
\n\u3000\u3000First, you think, \u201cOh? I\u2019ve forgotten everything!\u201d
\n\u3000\u3000Even though you\u2019ve read it so many times before, you can\u2019t seem to recall how the story goes…
\n\u3000\u3000And then, you think, \u201cAhh, I\u2019ve seen this before.\u201d
\n\u3000\u3000Yes, I remember the streets the protagonist wandered through, the description of them, it\u2019s all coming back. It\u2019s just the way I wandered about in my twenties (or thirties, or whatever)….
\n\u3000\u3000And finally, you think, \u201cWait\u2014this isn\u2019t my<\/em> story!\u201d
\nThese are streets I\u2014or she, or we<\/em>\u2014have never actually seen. You realize this and are astonished. The \u201cstory\u201d of this novel has burrowed its way into the core (or the corner, or the bottom) of your memory as if it were something you yourself experienced….<\/p>\n

When the protagonist of the story is absolutely, completely different from you, the slippage in memory makes it feel almost like you\u2019re reading about experiences from a past life. I am a man, both physically and mentally, but the Murakami short story \u201cSleep,\u201d which has continued to leave such a strong impression on me from the first time I read it, is written from the first-person perspective of a woman. This woman is someone who can\u2019t sleep. She has been sleepless for seventeen days straight. But in fact, not only is she someone who can\u2019t<\/em> sleep, she\u2019s also someone who doesn\u2019t<\/em> sleep.
\n\u3000\u3000This predicament, as well as the woman\u2019s interiority, are conveyed in the first person.
\n\u3000\u3000In this case, it becomes impossible for me to internalize this female first-person narrated story as my own memory, and yet the vivid \u201cexperience\u201d remains in the core (or the corner, or the bottom) of my memory, as if in a former life I\u2019d been the wife of a dentist myself, and I will casually think to myself, \u201cI remember when my husband was a dentist, I didn\u2019t sleep and had a terrifying experience,\u201d and then a second later realize that this in fact never happened to me and I end up astonished once again.<\/p>\n

But I did<\/em> have a terrifying experience. For example, I experienced sleep paralysis. This is something that happens in Murakami\u2019s \u201cSleep,\u201d and this is a story I\u2019ve read over and over again, four times, eight times….perhaps nine times now altogether. Each time I reread the story, it becomes more and more adept at playing the part of being one of my memories, evoking a feeling in me that I am opening up an old diary, except I\u2019ve never kept a diary like that in my life, which would make it a diary from a previous life.
\n\u3000\u3000So what is this terrifying experience I\u2019m talking about?
\n\u3000\u3000First: I had a nightmare….
\n\u3000\u3000Second: I opened my eyes, but I found I couldn\u2019t move….
\n\u3000\u3000Third: I looked down toward my feet and saw an old man I\u2019d never seen before standing there\u2014I clearly saw<\/em> this….
\n\u3000\u3000Finally: This old man held a pitcher of water and was pouring it. On me!
\n\u3000\u3000On her<\/em>.
\n\u3000\u3000On us<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cycling through Japanese first-person pronouns like this\u2014ore<\/em> for me, atashi<\/em> for her, watashi<\/em> for anyone\u2014I am trying to show how the narrator transcends gender or creates a common space where personalities cross over, which is a feature of Japanese. Murakami\u2019s literature is frequently translated, which makes me wonder what happens when it\u2019s read in a context robbing it of that particular me<\/em>-ness, her<\/em>-ness, anyone<\/em>-ness that comes from using ore<\/em> or atashi<\/em> or watashi<\/em>. Though perhaps saying \u201crobbed\u201d is a bit extreme. But there is an unruly richness to the variety of first-person pronouns available in Japanese. In fact, perhaps it\u2019s precisely the erasure of the original\u2019s \u201codd taste\u201d in this way that constitutes the fundamental meaning of \u201cmade into a translation\u201d at all. Whenever I start to think about this problem, I end up concluding that, at least in the case of the translation of Murakami\u2019s literature, the principle by which \u201csomething from the original language is lost, but something is also gained by the target language\u201d means that Murakami is being read properly even in translation.
\n\u3000\u3000I\u2019m talking about subtraction and addition here.
\n\u3000\u3000The calculations of fiction.
\n\u3000\u3000The arithmetic of storytelling.
\n\u3000\u3000For example, I just talked about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis as it appears in \u201cSleep.\u201d I briefly explained how this phenomenon is described in the original Murakami short story. But I have no way of really knowing if sleep paralysis is understood as a spiritual phenomenon (as the experience definitely is in the Japanese context) elsewhere, or if, in the context of another country or culture, it would be understood primarily as a physical symptom. If the latter is indeed the case, then when the story is placed into the other language, the \u201cspiritual\u201d aspect is subtracted, which would have the effect of augmenting the feeling that the phenomenon is extremely \u201csymbolic.\u201d
\n\u3000\u3000This process is extremely dynamic as well.
\n\u3000\u3000For a reader in a cultural and linguistic context where this phenomenon is not equally spiritual, after the process of addition and subtraction is completed, what will appear in its place on the right side of the equal sign?
\n\u3000\u3000The symbol of the pitcher.
\n\u3000\u3000The phantasm of the old man.
\n\u3000\u3000Sleep paralysis is a physical state expressing the absolute lack of voluntary movement, a state under a certain authority. Showing you on the side of being acted upon by<\/em> authority…
\n\u3000\u3000In this way, this \u201cspiritual\u201d episode or story transforms\u2014it becomes symbolic, then fantastical, then even political<\/em>, as it swoops toward you. Like a specter.
\n\u3000\u3000A dynamic monster.
\n\u3000\u3000This is what translation is.<\/p>\n

This is also what memory is. You, as a reader, encounter sleep paralysis, and then a phantasmatic something<\/em> that is not<\/em> sleep paralysis swoops toward you, and the nightmare continues on and on, even into the realm of the real: these facts can take any form at all, but if you, as the reader, internalize them as something like your \u201cown\u201d experiences, once they enter your memory like that, then voila, a tautology arises: this memory has produced a memory.
\n\u3000\u3000We tend to think of memories as things that happened in the past, but they exist in the future too.
\n\u3000\u3000There are memories acquired only in retrospect. The kinds of things you revise your awareness of, astonished, as you encounter them in the future, thinking, \u201cWait\u2014I remember that…\u201d Murakami\u2019s novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World<\/em> is one I\u2019ve read however many times during my five decades on this earth. The protagonist of the End of the World part has his eyeball sliced by a knife (its point heated in fire to sterilize it) so he can \u201cread old dreams,\u201d and in the end, both eyeballs get sliced, which acts as a kind of \u201clicense\u201d allowing him to act as the Dreamreader. But if he doesn\u2019t avoid contact with the sun, his daily life becomes unmanageable. For when sunlight falls upon him without warning, he is punished.
\n\u3000\u3000The punishment takes the form of tears endlessly streaming from his eyes.
\n\u3000\u3000That, and great pain.
\n\u3000\u3000In other words, the protagonist of the End of the World part of the novel is someone possessing \u201cteary eyes.\u201d
\n\u3000\u3000Later, in March of 1995, the sarin gas attack struck the Tokyo subway system, and victims reported that the way they initially realized, \u201cHey, something strange is happening to my body…\u201d\u2014the first symptom that something was wrong\u2014was the feeling that something was stinging their eyes and their vision was obscured.
\n\u3000\u3000This poisonous gas, sarin, is invisible to the human eye.
\n\u3000\u3000It\u2019s invisible to the human eye, but it strikes it. Stings it.
\nAnd soon, the victims of the attack became people possessing teary eyes.
\n\u3000\u3000Haruki Murakami published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World<\/em> more than ten years before the sarin gas attack, and the fact that the attack was portrayed \u201csymbolically\u201d in it\u2014that is, when readers realized that this was a symbol of the attack\u2014this was something that surely occurred years or even decades after the attack took place. That is, in the future<\/em>.
\n\u3000\u3000A \u201cmemory\u201d that can only be recognized in its initial retroactive discovery is something that does not exist in the past.
\n\u3000\u3000Your memory of it as a reader\u2014as well as my<\/em> memory of it, also as a reader\u2014always existed in the future.
\n\u3000\u3000This experience itself is a type of phantasm, or is perhaps half-fantastical and half-spiritual, but the important thing is the dynamism enfolded within it.<\/p>\n

You hold memories within yourself, and when you read books, these memories reveal their truer, more dynamic forms. Their truest functions. This is what the literature of Haruki Murakami has taught me.<\/p>\n

(Translated by One Transliteracy, LLC)<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"
\nProfile<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hideo Furukawa was born in 1966 in Fukushima Prefecture. Since his debut in 1998, he has written all types of fiction, from short-short stories to lengthy novels, while also writing theatrical scripts, critical essays, and non-fiction. He also collaborates with performers from a variety of fields to co-present and co-create works with an emphasis on oral storytelling. His 2003 tribute to Haruki Murakami, Slow Boat to China RMX<\/em> has been translated into both English and Italian. His most recent publication is the novel Mand\u0101rav\u0101 X<\/em>, which came out in March 2022.<\/p>\n

His personal website, Furukawa Hideo no mukashi to mirai<\/em> [The Past and Future of Hideo Furukawa<\/em>], can be found here: https:\/\/furukawahideo.com.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Hideo Furukawa\u2019s Selected Works of World Literature for Connecting the Present to the Future<\/strong>
\nOne Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez
\nImmortality<\/em> by Milan Kundera
\nin August<\/em> by William Faulkner
\nLenin\u2019s Kisses<\/em> by Yan Lianke
\nTours of the Black Clock<\/em> by Steve Erickson<\/em>
\nFor more details, please see the Murakami Library Staircase Bookshelf Database:
\nhttps:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/culture\/wihl\/en\/exihibitions\/collection<\/a><\/p>\n

One TransLiteracy, LLC, is a boutique translation and cultural consultation agency founded by Miyabi \u201cAbbie\u201d Yamamoto, Ph.D. We are a team of highly educated native or native-level bilingual and bicultural experts who provide meticulous translations with linguistic acuity, hone texts for precision and elegance, and provide concise explanations of cross-cultural exchange. The founder, Abbie, grew up in Tsukuba, Japan and received her Ph.D. in Japanese and Korean literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is passionate about promoting cross-cultural exchange and everyday practices of intentional inclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first encounter with Furukawa\u2019s work was reading his novella Slow Boat to China RMX (Media Factory; translated into English by David Boyd as Slow Boat [Pushkin Press, 2017]). As many of you know, this novella is part of a series of works by young authors written as tributes to famous pieces by Haruki Murakami. It portrays the growth of the first person narrator boku, a story that of course brings to mind the boku of Murakami\u2019s original, but that also evokes a feeling in the reader all its own. Reading this text that feels like being told a story, I couldn\u2019t help but want to read it aloud myself\u2014I found it so memorable, and I\u2019ve been a Furukawa fan ever since. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1494,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-en","ja"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1529"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}