Murakami Haruki’s America: Talk, Taste, and The Specter of the Untranslatable

The world-famous Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki (1949-) has been said to write universally legible, made-to-be-translated fiction that is designed to circulate through the channels of global cultural commerce unimpeded by the thorny details of local specificity. But this article explores a different side of Murakami—a side that is attuned to the particularity of socially contextualized language as he heard it spoken around him during his time living in the United States in the early 1990s. Drawing on the scholar of comparative literature Michael Lucey’s approach to reading “the ethnography of talk,” my analysis focuses on how Murakami reconstructs a conversation about jazz that he had with a Black American interlocutor in New Jersey in the essay Bākurē kara no kaerimichi (“The Road Home From Berkeley”), which appears in his volume of essays about living in the United States titled Yagate kanashiki gaikokugo (The Sadness of Foreign Language, 1994). As I compare the styles of speaking documented in Bākurē kara no kaerimichi with those that appear in the English- and Japanese-language versions of Miles Davis’s autobiography Miles (which Murakami discusses in Bākurē kara no kaerimichi) and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (which Murakami translated himself), my analysis reveals how Murakami has reflected on the specter of the untranslatable that haunts the global circulations of literature and pop culture.