Monday, July 13, 2009

Book: Norwegian Wood

(I read it in English.)

About a month ago, I heard Norwegian Wood written by Haruki Murakami will be made into a movie, though he had refused it for a long time.
When I heard this news, I somehow realized I have never read any of his books, they are Very popular not only in Japan but also in other countries though.

So I decided to read Norwegian Wood, and even in English.

Whenever I read books in English, I feel stress because I can't read in English as fast as in Japanese. I can hardly go ahead. I need to be patient.

While I was reading it, I was wondering why this book became a bestseller around the world. Nothing special. And there are too many people who died in the story. Besides, most of them killed themselves. Suicide tends to become a shocking and surprising matter in a story, but because of too many suicide, when I found third suicide person, I thought "Ah, again."

Reading what the characters in the book said, I guessed those must have expressed much more subtle nuance in Japanese. English tends to be simple.
And I found that my guess was correct. After reading it, I checked Japanese people's impression about the book on the Internet. They said, for example, "the choice of words is extremely great!", "I felt that it was good for me to be born as a Japanese because I can read it as my mother language." and so on. Ah---! I should have read it in Japanese. I seemed to miss the greatest part of this book. So I will try reading it in Japanese.

During reading it, I didn't think the book was so good, but after finishing it, I thought it was quite good. But I still can't understand why it became a bestseller around the world.

2 comments:

Herm said...

The same thing happens when a book is translated from English to Japanese I think. . .

With a lot of things, if you translate them literally, they will make no sense to the reader, because the same idea is expressed in a different way in the other language. But if you express the same idea the way it would be done in the other language, then you lose those linguistic nuances in the original . . . so yeah, probably in almost all cases its more interesting to read a book in its original language. . .

sand said...

Yeah! It's the best to read a book in its original language! So I really think I should have read Norwegian Wood in Japanese.

Thank you for your comment.