Travel the Whole World with You
Travel the Whole World with You
Travel the Whole World with You
After reading Haruki Murakami for so many years, I’ve come to feel that his works can roughly be divided into three categories. First, of course, there are the novels. Among bestselling authors, Murakami probably isn’t especially prolific, but his craft is remarkably steady, and he also possesses that distinctly Japanese grit and perseverance—something evident in the way he has kept up his running for decades without interruption. His output has always been consistent and reliable. Although his work reached the peak of commercial success with Norwegian Wood, even after that, every few years he has still managed to produce something substantial and worthy.
The second category is his essay collections, the most famous being the Murakami Asahido series. In them, Murakami records his daily observations and reflections, looking at the world with the distinctive eye of a novelist, often arriving at perspectives that feel refreshingly different. The third major category is travel writing. As I recall, the characters in Murakami’s fiction almost all live in Japan. The only striking exception that comes to mind is the opening of Norwegian Wood, where the protagonist lands at the airport in Hamburg, Germany—and after that, Germany more or less disappears from the story. Murakami’s own life, however, is quite different from those homebound protagonists. He has spent much of his life traveling all over the world, often settling in one place or another for long stretches while writing. So travel writing also occupies a significant place in his body of work.
His recent book If There Were Such a Thing as a Time Machine (the Hong Kong and Taiwan edition uses a direct translation of the original title: Tell Me, What on Earth Is in Laos?) is an especially sincere and substantial work. There’s no need to compare it with slim booklets like If Our Language Were Whiskey or A Sad Foreign Language, each containing only a few pieces. Even compared with earlier travel collections such as Rainy Day, Fine Day and Borderless, Near and Far, this one comes out ahead simply in terms of the number of pieces included and the richness of the material. In this collection, Murakami writes about his travels in the United States, Italy, Laos, Greece, Finland, and Kumamoto in Japan, among other places. The prose is still full of that unmistakable Murakami ease and intelligence. It is very much worth reading.
The Murakami of real life, aside from overlapping deeply with his fictional protagonists in his love of cats and jazz, is in many ways quite different from them in his everyday style. His travel writing is not the conventional sort that carefully records itineraries and routes. Instead, it is filled with intensely personal experiences. He may describe a restaurant that happened to catch his interest, revisit traces of a trip he made more than twenty years earlier, or recount the joy—and anxiety—of receiving from the owner of a vineyard a treasured bottle of wine from 1949, the same year he was born. (Because he didn’t know on what kind of occasion he should open such a bottle, I personally think that if the Swedish Academy ever returns to normal, Murakami might as well save it for the day he wins the Nobel Prize.) In short, the food, scenery, and stories recommended in this book are all enviable enough to make one wish to follow the author around the world.
To be able to inspire such fascination and longing already makes this book a highly successful travelogue. But what Murakami conveys goes far beyond that. Amid these comfortable journeys, Murakami-style wit and insight surface from time to time, and they are consistently moving. There is the quietly delightful humor: “I always come to this island in the off-season, almost like visiting a woman while she is taking off her makeup.” There is also a parting sort of desolation: “When will I visit this island again? No—perhaps I will never return here in this lifetime.” And there are moments of sudden clarity about life itself: “As for whether these landscapes will be of any use, I do not know. Perhaps in the end they will be of no use at all, existing only as memories. But when all is said and done, isn’t that what travel is? Isn’t that what life is?”
So from any angle, If There Were Such a Thing as a Time Machine is a travel book that feels impossible to skip. Very regrettably, however, the version available is still the translation by Shi Xiaowei—awkward to read, yet with no real alternative. Two things about it are hard to tolerate (though perhaps I feel this more keenly because I’ve been reading Murakami for so long). First, the title was changed in translation. If There Were Such a Thing as a Time Machine sounds fine enough, but an author naturally has his own reasons for giving a book its title. What kind of practice is it to change even the title in translation? Second, at the end of the book there is a list of Murakami’s works, but it includes only a handful of Shi Xiaowei’s translations. To a large extent, this could mislead readers who are not yet familiar with the author. I imagine the publisher, Nanhai Publishing, feels somewhat guilty about this itself, which is why both the translator’s name and the publisher’s information are tucked away in places that are hard to find. Even the book design leans deliberately toward the style long associated with Murakami editions from Shanghai Translation Publishing House. But no matter how close an imitation gets, it still cannot compare with the real thing.
Still, being able to read Murakami at all is better than nothing. And besides, the world is so large that there is no need to get too hung up on one book or one place at one moment. If possible, it’s always better to go out and see more for yourself.
