Where are we now?
My Japanese family, Murakami, and what got lost in translation.
The other week, on a long-haul flight to New York, I rewatched Sofia Coppola’s 2003 movie Lost in Translation. “Nostalgia,” a friend had recently told me, “is just the fetishization of the past.” Which may well be true, but her admonition didn’t stop me from feeling nostalgic, even though the year of the movie’s release was in many ways an annus horribilis. Among other calamities, the United States invaded Iraq, civil wars raged in Sri Lanka and Sudan, conflict continued in Chechnya, and the Second Intifada saw intensifying violence in the Palestinian territories and Israel. To cap it all, an outbreak of Severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, sparked a global panic.
It isn’t as if the movie turns its back on this agitated history, which shapes the narrative, characterized as it is by a sense of loss and disorientation, in retrospect signs of a de-centered, post-9/11 world, with its fraught geopolitics, virtual networks, and emerging threats. Even the title hints at this global discombobulation. While a new connectivity defines the world, no-one is listening.
In fact, looking back, a preoccupation with “translation” and “mistranslation” seem to have been part of that old world zeitgeist. In 1998, I’d been in discussion with an editor at the Times Higher Education about running a series on translation. ‘Lost in Translation’ was the title of the essay I wrote to pitch the series, which came out of a program of talks I’d organized with colleagues at the University of Cambridge. Although the series never materialized, I later collaborated with the graphic design group FUEL and together, in 2000, we produced the book Fuel Three Thousand, with a chapter on ‘Translation.’ As the back blurb puts it, “Freedom is the power to translate, but what is the cost of mistranslation?” Soon afterwards, as it happens, FUEL worked with Coppola on the movie Lost in Translation, designing the title sequence.
Coppola’s movie revels in the slapstick comedy of mistranslation, exemplified by those scenes where the washed-up, fifty-two-year-old American actor Bob Harris, played by Bill Murray, struggles to understand his Japanese interlocutors. He’s puzzled when a sex-worker asks him to “lip”—instead of “rip”—her stockings. Or when a Japanese photographer, who is shooting him in a clichéd whiskey commercial, repeatedly mispronounces the letter “r.” It’s not the poetry that gets lost in translation, here, it’s something far more prosaic. It’s the Rat Pack and Roger Moore.
But emotionally, it’s the Americans in the story who are lost, their loneliness underscored by the mellow, dream-pop soundtrack. Bob Harris’s marriage is failing, and he now communicates with his wife via fax. Ditto Charlotte, the newly married Yale grad, played by the seventeen-year-old Scarlett Johansson, who can’t get through to her fashion-photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi).
Japan, as it features in the movie, foregrounds loss in several ways. It’s a place of miscommunication and non-communication. And beyond that, a country strangely alienated from its own past, were temples and elaborate rituals are drowned out by the soul-destroying techno-beats of a frenetic modernity obsessed with big-buck fashion, computer games, and karaoke. This is the kind of dissipation that Alex Kerr describes in his book Lost Japan, written and first published in Japanese in 1993 (Kerr later translated it into English), where authenticity is being smothered by quick-fix development.
In the twenty years since Lost in Translation came out, the ambiguity of the title has become move evident. Japan in the movie conforms to a “premium fantasy,” as the sex-worker tells the Bill Murray character; it exists in a state of suspension between the old and the super-new; its culture is undecipherable, a source of condescending hilarity, but also a locus of redemption, where lost Westerners can find themselves at the same time as they luxuriate in their alienation amidst an obliging otherness.
Not long after the movie appeared, I went to live in Japan—in Shibuya, Tokyo, where much of the movie is set. We have close family ties to Japan. My brother’s godfather was the composer and Noh scholar, Akira Tamba. My maternal aunt, Margaret, married the prodigy flautist Hirohiko Katō, whom she’d met while studying at the Conservatoire in Paris. After college they joined the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, but were both lost a few years later climbing Mons Blanc (while they recovered Hiro’s body, they never found my aunt’s). The tragedy bound us more closely to our extended Japanese family who would visit during the summer holidays. When my father was in Tokyo in the late 1960s, he got to talk to the novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima, shortly before Mishima committed suicide. Japan—its music, art, literature, and movies—was part of our familial world; an inspirational place inevitably tinged with loss and regret.
And it was in Japan that I read and was blown away by Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood, first published in Japanese in 1987, and later made into a movie directed by the Vietnamese French director Tran Anh Hung. This time, translation works the other way, and the book opens with the thirty-seven-year-old Toru Watanabe, the novel’s narrator, landing in Hamburg, where he hears the Beatles’ song ‘Norwegian Wood.’ Listening to it triggers a feeling of acute loss and he begins to reflect on his student days in the turbulent Tokyo of the 1960s. We learn that his best friend, Kizuki, and his lover, Naoko, both committed suicide. In his grief at the latter’s death, a lost Watanabe drifts around Japan. At the end of the novel, when he calls his girlfriend, Midori, to declare his feelings for her, she responds by asking “Where are you now?”
It’s a good question and one that David Bowie asks with an unnerving insistence in his song ‘Where are we now?’ in which he reminisces about his life in West Berlin in the late 1970s. In some form or other it crops up in all of Murakami’s fiction, where lost characters are on a mission to find themselves (or lose themselves to be found). In relation to Norwegian Wood, Murakami once observed, “I had some friends who actually killed themselves, and I was missing them when I started to write but at the same time it’s a kind of metaphor. I have lost many things: my values, my idealism.” Loss is real, but it is also metaphorical, which recalls the fact that the word “translation” in English comes from the Latin “to carry over,” the same meaning as the Greek word “metaphor.”
Ultimately, Murakami suggests, trying to find yourself is a futile exercise since life is loss. “Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” we’re told in his novel Kafka on the Shore. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.” So, faced with this intractable reality what should we do? “Walk slowly,” a character advises in Murakami’s After Dark, “and drink lots of water.”
Watching Lost in Translation on an airplane, in the aftermath of a pandemic, felt like the perfect setting. A world suspended in space and time but designed to facilitate global connections. Not unlike the hotel rooms in the movie, deluxe but monotone, that seem to float, untethered, above the city. Meanwhile, in the darkness beyond, aviation obstruction lights on Tokyo’s tall towers blink mournfully in remembrance of past losses, or perhaps as a forewarning of those to come.