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Language Spoken by Murakami’s Female Personages and Japanese Pseudo-Translation Style

Hiroko Inose (Dalarna University, Sweden)

Murakami’s original Japanese text is often described as if it was “translated” from English. The reason for this can vary, and some mention his use of metaphors imported from English, while others suggest that his sentence structure is close to that of English language. The present study suggests yet another element which might be contributing to such claim – the Japanese female language spoken by Murakami’s female personages.

Japanese female speech patterns (onna-kotoba) can be found most frequently in texts translated into Japanese from other languages, where it appears much more often than in actual language spoken by today’s Japanese women. This includes not only fictions, but also translation of interviews or film/TV subtitles and dubbings. It is very possible that this excessive use of now classical female language in translated texts has contributed to the creation of a prototypical image of “translated Japanese” style.

The present study analyses several female personages in Murakami’s works from different periods (e.g. Sputunik Sweetheart, Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage among others) to compare their articulation style to the female speech patterns frequently found in translated Japanese texts.  It also considers in the Murakami’s original Japanese text, what nuance this female speech pattern is adding to the female personages– in other words, what has to be inevitably lost or changed in translation into other languages which do not differentiate male/female/neutral speech patterns as markedly as in Japanese.