Murakami Articles - Oscar

 Reading these articles got me thinking about an author's image and how it's perception changes between readers, and how it is shaped or diluted further when you add translators to the mix. Emmerich's interview talks about this shaping of an author's image and feel - he says that “if I’d been reading the Kodansha books first, my sense of Murakami and the kind of aura he has would have been different", with regards to Murakami's style of covers. He notes how he expects his students to say that Murakami is "really cool" or "surrealistic", but instead gets "realistic" and "difficult", markedly different from the perception of native Japanese readers. 

The establishment of this perception is muddied further when considering Murakami's "voice" and how it's shaped by his three chief translators - in Chang's interview, Philip Gabriel says that he doesn't align himself with the author in order to communicate subtleties, and that one should be learning the language and reading the original to get to those subtleties. He goes further in Hoyt's interview, saying that "I just do my own thing, my own take on what Murakami should sound like in English", regardless of Jay Rubin's or Alfred Birnbaum's work. 

So here we have three doors through which we find different images and interpretations of Murakami's true voice, and how they might shape a reader's perception and enjoyment of his novels. Lesser's editorial mentions how it took until Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations to find a missing piece of Dostoyevsky’s voice that was theretofore missing. What parts of Murakami are we missing by reading Birnbaum? How might my image of Murakami as an author change if I read Rubin's first, or maybe even the original Japanese? What if Murakami himself decided to translate or write directly in English?