New fiction fromJapan

　　來自日本的新小說

　　Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side;

　　嗨，去野外散個步吧;

　　A black cat, two moons and a host of nocturnallittle people populate Haruki Murakami s new novel.But has he become more conventional?

　　在村上春樹的新書里，他將一只黑貓、兩輪月亮以及一群夜晚小小人擬人化。但他是否變得更保守點了呢?

　　Haruki Murakami filches from George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the title of his newnovel, 1Q84, making a play on kyu, the Japanese word for nine, by transposing the letterQ for the number 9. Significantly, the action also takes place over the last nine months of1984. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Japan s magical postmodernisthas spent nearly 1,000 pages writing about a dystopian world where couples make love in anash glade, hardly daring to speak because of the all-listening microphones in the trees. MrMurakami s main influence here is not so much Orwell as Philip Pullman; his 1Q84 less astairway to another world than a heave-ho into a whole new universe.

　　村上春樹的新書《1Q84》書名的靈感來自于對喬治奧威爾《1984》一書的借鑒。此外，值得注意的是，書里故事發生的時間也是1984年最后的9個月。因此，如果錯誤地認為這位日本后現代魔幻大師花了近1000頁的筆墨，只為描寫一個情侶在野外做愛，并由于樹上裝有所有人都能聽到的竊聽器而不敢發出絲毫聲音的反烏托邦世界，這就錯了。但是村上春樹在這里的主要影響并不像奧威爾或是菲利普普爾曼一樣，他的《1Q84》一書與其說是通往另一個世界的階梯，還不如說是完全逃向一個全新的世界。

　　Sitting in a taxi on the gridlocked elevated Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo, Aomame, theskinny heroine with asymmetric breasts , is catapulted intoaction when she hears Janacek s Sinfonietta on the radio. Her cabbie tells her she can beatthe traffic by hopping out of the car and down an emergency staircase at the next exit. Hewarns her that things will not be the same. But it is only when Aomame notices that thepolicemen have swapped their holstered revolvers for bulky semi-automatic weapons thatshe realises she has entered a parallel universe.

　　當身材纖瘦、兩個乳房不對稱的女主角青豆坐在一輛出租車里，在堵得水泄不通的東京高速公路上蹣跚前行時，車里廣播放著亞納切克的小交響曲，此時此刻，故事開始了。出租車司機告訴青豆說她可以通過走一條附近出口的緊急通道來繞開堵車，不過，他警告說如果她這么做了，事情將會不一樣了。但當青豆注意到警察們的左輪手槍變成了笨重半自動手槍時，才意識到自己進入了一個平行宇宙。

　　This gripping beginning ensures the reader falls for Aomame, forcing Mr Murakami to workextra hard on her counterpart, Tengo, who appears in alternate chapters in the book.Tengo is an unpublished novelist who keeps to himself, working as a private maths tutor in aprep school. His father was a debt-collector who rounded up licence fees for the NHKtelevision network, dragging his son along with him on Sundays as he called on householdsdoor-to-door. Tengo s beloved mother died when he was very young, and the boy s earliestmemory is of hearing his mother having her breasts sucked by a man who was not his father.Tengo s flat-pack character fills out as the book evolves, in particular in a long passagewhen he visits his aged father in his nursing home and tries to talk to him about the past.

　　這一引人入勝的開頭保證了讀者會為青豆而傾倒，這迫使村上春樹得花更大的力氣去塑造他的另一個人物天吾，在書里，天吾的故事與青豆的故事平行進行。天吾在一所補習學校里擔任數學老師，他是個孤僻的業余寫手，但他的小說從沒發表過。天吾的父親是NHK公司負責上門收費的收款員，周日的時候會拉著兒子跟他一起到各家各戶去收電視有線費。天吾摯愛的母親在他很小的時候就去世了，而他最早的回憶則是聽著一個不是他父親的男人在吮吸他母親的乳房。隨著小說情節的進展，天吾原本單薄的形象逐漸豐滿起來，其中有一大段他的形象特別突出，這一段描寫了他去養老院探望年老的父親，并試圖與父親談論過去。

　　Tengo s life changes when a friend, a grumpy editor named Komatsu, persuades him to cleanup a raw manuscript by a teenage girl, Eriko Fukada, called Fuka-Eri throughout. Komatsubelieves that the girl s autobiographical story, about being raised on a rural commune thatchanges into a sinister cult involved in mind games and child abuse, has all the makings of abestseller if its style can be improved enough so that it wins a literary prize. Aomame, asmight be expected from a woman who shimmies down from an overhead expressway withoutmuch concern for her stockings or her chestnut- coloured Charles Jourdan heels, turns out tobe a minx on the make, a charming, ball-breaking, feminist do-gooder who likes nothingbetter than rounding off a day s killing with an all-night bout of bisexual sex. Aomame isreally a hired gun, who specialises in quietly offing wife-beaters and child rapists, a mangaversion of Stieg Larsson s Lisbeth Salander.

　　當天吾的朋友性子暴躁的編輯小松勸服他去修改少女深田繪里子小說的初稿時，天吾的生活發生了變化。深繪里這部自傳體的小說描寫了自己生長的村莊公社被轉變成了一個邪惡的新興宗教團，充滿勾心斗角和虐待兒童。小松認為如果小說風格能得到很好修改的話，使其拿下一座文學獎，那就足以讓它成為暢銷書了。青豆，人們原來也許以為她是一個不顧自己還穿著絲襪和褐色佐丹高跟鞋搖搖晃晃地翻過高空中的公路的女子，事實上卻是一個野心勃勃的狐貍精，一個迷人而強勢的女權主義者，一個妄圖替天行道者，最喜歡每天出去干凈利落地殺人，然后晚上來場瘋狂的通宵性愛，男女不限。青豆實際上是個職業殺手，精于無聲無息地除掉那些虐待妻子或侵犯兒童的男人，簡直就是史迪克拉爾森筆下麗絲貝莎蘭德的日本漫畫版。

　　Aomame s and Tengo s parallel stories begin to rub against one another long before thecharacters do. They both see a black cat and two moons ; and both know about the little people who emergeperiodically from the mouth of a sleeping child and disappear under the child s bed. The twoheroes were once at school together and even, briefly, held hands at the age of ten. Anunresolved longing to recapture that moment permeates both their lives, and thewill-they-won t-they question overshadows the whole book.

　　早在兩位主角在這個反烏托邦世界里相遇之前，青豆和天吾這兩條平行的故事線就開始交織在一起了。他們都看見了一只黑貓和兩輪月亮;他們也都知道小小人：那些小小人會不時從睡著的小孩口中爬出來，消失在床底下。 兩位主角是校友，而且，他們在十歲的時候還有過一次牽手。想要重新拾回那個瞬間的渴望無法滿足，滲入了他們兩人的生活，而全書充斥著他們最終能在一起嗎這個問題。

　　Herein lies the conundrum of 1Q84. Mr Murakami s reputation as Japan s greatestliterary surrealist is based on a series of short stories and novels, such as Hard-boiledWonderland and the End of the World, which came out in 1985, and Norwegian Wood twoyears later. His early works were intensely personal fantasies involving unhappy, virtuallydisembodied men and suffused with references to Western music and literature. 1Q84 ismuch longer, but also far more conventional.

　　這里有個關于1Q84的謎題。村上春樹因一系列超現實主義的短文和小小說而被譽為日本最偉大的文學大師，這些文章包括1985年出版的《世界盡頭與冷酷仙境》以及1987年出版的《挪威的森林》等。他早期的作品集中于描寫郁悶的游魂般的男人的個人幻想，充斥各種西方音樂和文學的參考資料。相比之下，《1Q84》篇幅要長得多，但也保守得多。

　　Like two American writers, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, both known for theirfizzy inventiveness but whose recent work is more plot-driven, Mr Murakami seems tohave made a conscious move towards romantic narrative. Mr Franzen s latest book askswhether the married protagonists will stay together; Mr Eugenides s which of the two mainheroes will his heroine end up with . It is Mr Murakami s turn, now, to cut in on theboy-girl gavotte. This has certainly proved a popular move. When the first two volumes of1Q84 were published in Japanese in 2009, more than 1m copies were sold in just a fewweeks; the third volume followed to similar acclaim a few months later. Keeping uporiginality can be hard work. But Mr Murakami s new direction, like that of Mr Franzen andMr Eugenides, is bringing him thousands of fresh readers. And that is a good thing.

　　和兩位均因創造性而聞名的兩位美國作家喬納森弗蘭岑和杰弗里尤金尼德斯一樣，村上春樹似乎也有意描寫男女之間的愛情故事。弗蘭茲的新書懷疑已婚的主角們是否還會在一起;尤金尼德斯則拋出了女主角會跟兩位主要男主角中的哪位在一起的問題。現在，輪到村上春樹來決定男女主角之間的關系了，這顯然是最近的流行趨勢。2009年當《1Q84》的前兩卷在日本出版時，幾周之內就賣出了100多萬本;幾個月之后，第三卷也賣出了同樣數目。追求原創性絕非易事，但是就如弗蘭茲和尤金尼德斯一樣，村上春樹的新方向為他帶來了成千上萬的新讀者。 這是件好事。

　　New fiction fromJapan

　　來自日本的新小說

　　Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side;

　　嗨，去野外散個步吧;

　　A black cat, two moons and a host of nocturnallittle people populate Haruki Murakami s new novel.But has he become more conventional?

　　在村上春樹的新書里，他將一只黑貓、兩輪月亮以及一群夜晚小小人擬人化。但他是否變得更保守點了呢?

　　Haruki Murakami filches from George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the title of his newnovel, 1Q84, making a play on kyu, the Japanese word for nine, by transposing the letterQ for the number 9. Significantly, the action also takes place over the last nine months of1984. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Japan s magical postmodernisthas spent nearly 1,000 pages writing about a dystopian world where couples make love in anash glade, hardly daring to speak because of the all-listening microphones in the trees. MrMurakami s main influence here is not so much Orwell as Philip Pullman; his 1Q84 less astairway to another world than a heave-ho into a whole new universe.

　　村上春樹的新書《1Q84》書名的靈感來自于對喬治奧威爾《1984》一書的借鑒。此外，值得注意的是，書里故事發生的時間也是1984年最后的9個月。因此，如果錯誤地認為這位日本后現代魔幻大師花了近1000頁的筆墨，只為描寫一個情侶在野外做愛，并由于樹上裝有所有人都能聽到的竊聽器而不敢發出絲毫聲音的反烏托邦世界，這就錯了。但是村上春樹在這里的主要影響并不像奧威爾或是菲利普普爾曼一樣，他的《1Q84》一書與其說是通往另一個世界的階梯，還不如說是完全逃向一個全新的世界。

　　Sitting in a taxi on the gridlocked elevated Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo, Aomame, theskinny heroine with asymmetric breasts , is catapulted intoaction when she hears Janacek s Sinfonietta on the radio. Her cabbie tells her she can beatthe traffic by hopping out of the car and down an emergency staircase at the next exit. Hewarns her that things will not be the same. But it is only when Aomame notices that thepolicemen have swapped their holstered revolvers for bulky semi-automatic weapons thatshe realises she has entered a parallel universe.

　　當身材纖瘦、兩個乳房不對稱的女主角青豆坐在一輛出租車里，在堵得水泄不通的東京高速公路上蹣跚前行時，車里廣播放著亞納切克的小交響曲，此時此刻，故事開始了。出租車司機告訴青豆說她可以通過走一條附近出口的緊急通道來繞開堵車，不過，他警告說如果她這么做了，事情將會不一樣了。但當青豆注意到警察們的左輪手槍變成了笨重半自動手槍時，才意識到自己進入了一個平行宇宙。

　　This gripping beginning ensures the reader falls for Aomame, forcing Mr Murakami to workextra hard on her counterpart, Tengo, who appears in alternate chapters in the book.Tengo is an unpublished novelist who keeps to himself, working as a private maths tutor in aprep school. His father was a debt-collector who rounded up licence fees for the NHKtelevision network, dragging his son along with him on Sundays as he called on householdsdoor-to-door. Tengo s beloved mother died when he was very young, and the boy s earliestmemory is of hearing his mother having her breasts sucked by a man who was not his father.Tengo s flat-pack character fills out as the book evolves, in particular in a long passagewhen he visits his aged father in his nursing home and tries to talk to him about the past.

　　這一引人入勝的開頭保證了讀者會為青豆而傾倒，這迫使村上春樹得花更大的力氣去塑造他的另一個人物天吾，在書里，天吾的故事與青豆的故事平行進行。天吾在一所補習學校里擔任數學老師，他是個孤僻的業余寫手，但他的小說從沒發表過。天吾的父親是NHK公司負責上門收費的收款員，周日的時候會拉著兒子跟他一起到各家各戶去收電視有線費。天吾摯愛的母親在他很小的時候就去世了，而他最早的回憶則是聽著一個不是他父親的男人在吮吸他母親的乳房。隨著小說情節的進展，天吾原本單薄的形象逐漸豐滿起來，其中有一大段他的形象特別突出，這一段描寫了他去養老院探望年老的父親，并試圖與父親談論過去。

　　Tengo s life changes when a friend, a grumpy editor named Komatsu, persuades him to cleanup a raw manuscript by a teenage girl, Eriko Fukada, called Fuka-Eri throughout. Komatsubelieves that the girl s autobiographical story, about being raised on a rural commune thatchanges into a sinister cult involved in mind games and child abuse, has all the makings of abestseller if its style can be improved enough so that it wins a literary prize. Aomame, asmight be expected from a woman who shimmies down from an overhead expressway withoutmuch concern for her stockings or her chestnut- coloured Charles Jourdan heels, turns out tobe a minx on the make, a charming, ball-breaking, feminist do-gooder who likes nothingbetter than rounding off a day s killing with an all-night bout of bisexual sex. Aomame isreally a hired gun, who specialises in quietly offing wife-beaters and child rapists, a mangaversion of Stieg Larsson s Lisbeth Salander.

　　當天吾的朋友性子暴躁的編輯小松勸服他去修改少女深田繪里子小說的初稿時，天吾的生活發生了變化。深繪里這部自傳體的小說描寫了自己生長的村莊公社被轉變成了一個邪惡的新興宗教團，充滿勾心斗角和虐待兒童。小松認為如果小說風格能得到很好修改的話，使其拿下一座文學獎，那就足以讓它成為暢銷書了。青豆，人們原來也許以為她是一個不顧自己還穿著絲襪和褐色佐丹高跟鞋搖搖晃晃地翻過高空中的公路的女子，事實上卻是一個野心勃勃的狐貍精，一個迷人而強勢的女權主義者，一個妄圖替天行道者，最喜歡每天出去干凈利落地殺人，然后晚上來場瘋狂的通宵性愛，男女不限。青豆實際上是個職業殺手，精于無聲無息地除掉那些虐待妻子或侵犯兒童的男人，簡直就是史迪克拉爾森筆下麗絲貝莎蘭德的日本漫畫版。

　　Aomame s and Tengo s parallel stories begin to rub against one another long before thecharacters do. They both see a black cat and two moons ; and both know about the little people who emergeperiodically from the mouth of a sleeping child and disappear under the child s bed. The twoheroes were once at school together and even, briefly, held hands at the age of ten. Anunresolved longing to recapture that moment permeates both their lives, and thewill-they-won t-they question overshadows the whole book.

　　早在兩位主角在這個反烏托邦世界里相遇之前，青豆和天吾這兩條平行的故事線就開始交織在一起了。他們都看見了一只黑貓和兩輪月亮;他們也都知道小小人：那些小小人會不時從睡著的小孩口中爬出來，消失在床底下。 兩位主角是校友，而且，他們在十歲的時候還有過一次牽手。想要重新拾回那個瞬間的渴望無法滿足，滲入了他們兩人的生活，而全書充斥著他們最終能在一起嗎這個問題。

　　Herein lies the conundrum of 1Q84. Mr Murakami s reputation as Japan s greatestliterary surrealist is based on a series of short stories and novels, such as Hard-boiledWonderland and the End of the World, which came out in 1985, and Norwegian Wood twoyears later. His early works were intensely personal fantasies involving unhappy, virtuallydisembodied men and suffused with references to Western music and literature. 1Q84 ismuch longer, but also far more conventional.

　　這里有個關于1Q84的謎題。村上春樹因一系列超現實主義的短文和小小說而被譽為日本最偉大的文學大師，這些文章包括1985年出版的《世界盡頭與冷酷仙境》以及1987年出版的《挪威的森林》等。他早期的作品集中于描寫郁悶的游魂般的男人的個人幻想，充斥各種西方音樂和文學的參考資料。相比之下，《1Q84》篇幅要長得多，但也保守得多。

　　Like two American writers, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, both known for theirfizzy inventiveness but whose recent work is more plot-driven, Mr Murakami seems tohave made a conscious move towards romantic narrative. Mr Franzen s latest book askswhether the married protagonists will stay together; Mr Eugenides s which of the two mainheroes will his heroine end up with . It is Mr Murakami s turn, now, to cut in on theboy-girl gavotte. This has certainly proved a popular move. When the first two volumes of1Q84 were published in Japanese in 2009, more than 1m copies were sold in just a fewweeks; the third volume followed to similar acclaim a few months later. Keeping uporiginality can be hard work. But Mr Murakami s new direction, like that of Mr Franzen andMr Eugenides, is bringing him thousands of fresh readers. And that is a good thing.

　　和兩位均因創造性而聞名的兩位美國作家喬納森弗蘭岑和杰弗里尤金尼德斯一樣，村上春樹似乎也有意描寫男女之間的愛情故事。弗蘭茲的新書懷疑已婚的主角們是否還會在一起;尤金尼德斯則拋出了女主角會跟兩位主要男主角中的哪位在一起的問題。現在，輪到村上春樹來決定男女主角之間的關系了，這顯然是最近的流行趨勢。2009年當《1Q84》的前兩卷在日本出版時，幾周之內就賣出了100多萬本;幾個月之后，第三卷也賣出了同樣數目。追求原創性絕非易事，但是就如弗蘭茲和尤金尼德斯一樣，村上春樹的新方向為他帶來了成千上萬的新讀者。 這是件好事。