Rereading Norwegian Wood by Murakami (and on that note, why does WordPress never let me type in Japanese the first time I hit the IME key? I always have to open up another windows, switch between Japanese and English input, and then go back to WordPress and switch again. It makes no sense) 村上- it worked that time…
Anyway, rereading Murakami I remember first picking up the original Japanese, entitled ノルウェイの森, and thinking that the title makes no sense- It’s a reference to the Beatles song. The line the song takes its titles from is
“She showed me her room/isn’t it good?/Norwegian Wood”
It is obviously a reference to the timber decor of the girl’s room, but the word 森 means ‘wood’ in the (less common, I think) British sense, where it is a synonym for forest. Most English dictionaries list the primary definition of wood as ‘the hard fibrous substance under the bark of trees’ with ‘a small thicket of trees’ as the secondary meaning, while wwwjdic’s definition of 木 is “tree; wood; timber” and the word 木材 (which I’d conjecture is far less common, using the possibly flawed logic that I’ve never heard it before therefore it’s used less) means “lumber; timber; wood” closer to the Beatles meaning.
But it goes deeper- I may have mentioned before the characters that make up 木 (wood), 林 (woods) and 森 – which suggest a growing number of trees, culminating in the compound 森林, which means forest. 森 and 林 are both common surnames (like Wood and Forest in English) in fact one of them is the name of a woman in my office. I thought all this, all these possible meanings would have had to gone through 村上春樹’s mind (not forgetting he is quite a famous translator as well, fluent in English) as he chose the title of the novel. But then I was going through the songs I copied off 惠子’s iPod and there was a group of songs by a band called ビトルズ (ie. Beatles spelt out in Japanese), one of which was ノルウェイの森. I knew that it’s kind of wrong, and I thought there must be a better way to translate the title. Setting myself the task to work it out, I realised two things almost instantly:
1. ノルウェイの木 would be horribly incorrect, because the song is not about a tree from Norway, and neither is the book.
2. The song itself would be incredibly hard to translate- song lyrics always are but this one particularly. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m saying I can’t do it. Take the opening line, for instance
” I one had a girl, or should I say/She once had me”
How could I possibly translate that? I can’t even work out where the punctuation is meant to go in the English version.
So I’ll just go with what The wikipedia page on the book says, that the title is a reference to the most common Japanese translation of the song title, and that forest settings play a prominent part in the novel. But the original John Lennon song is not referring to a forest.
Oh well, oh well. I feel like listening to Rubber Soul.
