Haruki Murakami and the challenge of translating Japanese’s many words for ‘I’

Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls, revolves around two parallel stories, one focusing on a 17-year-old boy, the other on a 45-year-old man. Readers of the translated English version will gradually become aware of the two worlds, as each first-person narrator establishes his respective setting within the novel. For readers of the original Japanese, the parallel is, however, immediate from the first pages of chapter five.

In the original Japanese text of The City and its Uncertain Walls, when the first-person narrator shifts from using boku to using watashi, it suggests a clear handover from one narrator (that of the boy’s story) to another (of the man’s story). The change is both visual (written differently) and audial (pronounced differently), and so becomes a simple anchor of recognition for each of the two worlds. Due to the lack of possibilities in English, both words are translated as “I”.

Unlike many other languages, Japanese has several expressions for the first-person pronoun “I”. In addition to boku and watashi used by the younger and older narrators in The City and its Uncertain Walls, “I” can for example be expressed as watakushi, ore, atashi, uchi or washi. Speakers and writers of Japanese have, therefore, a range of choices when referring to the self.

Each of the Japanese pronouns is loaded...

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