Fandom Pulse has an excellent, in-depth review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, a book I like very much, albeit a review with which I don’t entirely agree even when it’s about the book:
I want to praise one specific thing about the translation as a whole, because it has been under-discussed and it is magnificent. The Commendatore’s voice.
The Commendatore in the Japanese speaks in a way that is instantly recognizable and deeply strange. He uses atashi for “I” — a first-person pronoun associated with women and with a certain old-fashioned formality. He addresses the narrator as shokun, “gentlemen,” in the plural. He says de wa aranai instead of the standard de wa nai for negation — an archaic, almost ceremonial form. He is funny. He is imperious. He is two feet tall and he sounds like a retired general who has been shrunk in the wash and is not entirely displeased about it.
This voice is, in principle, untranslatable. There is no English pronoun that does what atashi does. There is no English form of address that does what shokun does. There is no English negation that does what de wa aranai does. And yet Gabriel and Goossen — and I assume Bloom deserves credit here too — found an English for the Commendatore that works. The Commendatore in English is formal without being stiff, archaic without being ridiculous, funny without trying to be funny. He calls the narrator “my friends.” He speaks in complete, slightly ornate sentences. He has dignity. He is the best thing in the translation and I would read seven hundred pages of him alone.
I said at the beginning of this review that Killing Commendatore is one of the three peaks of Murakami’s career. I want to end by saying what I mean by that, because it is the kind of claim that requires defense.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the peak of Murakami the storyteller — the novel in which his ability to pull a reader into an impossible world and keep them there for six hundred pages reaches its fullest expression. 1Q84 is the peak of Murakami the architect — the novel in which his ability to construct parallel narratives and hold them in tension over a thousand pages is most fully achieved. Killing Commendatore is the peak of Murakami the artist — the novel in which his lifelong preoccupation with what it means to make things, to create something from nothing, to open a door in a wall that has no door, is most directly and most movingly addressed.
It is also the most personal of the three, and the most vulnerable. There is a passage near the end in which the narrator realizes that the painting he has been working on throughout the novel is finished, and that it is good, and that it is the first good thing he has ever made.
While I can’t really testify to the lack of the sense of oku in the second half of the novel, I did notice that the translator’s voice had changed the one and only time I read it. Now I feel as if I’ve got to read it again. I also think that it’s a bit strange to complain about the lack of depth of the female characters when the female characters are, in this particular book, entirely beside the point; a book that dedicates sufficient space to fully-developing the painter’s faithless wife is not going to be a book about painting, and besides, the book is already 700 pages.
But it is an excellent review, particularly in how it says so much about the novel without giving away anything at all. And I really can’t expect to entirely agree with a review by a reviewer whose favorite Murakami novel is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since mine is A Wild Sheep’s Chase.
Anyhow, I’m going to see if we can get a copy of my translation of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto reviewed at some point in the future.
