Last week, I finished reading “Sleep” by Murakami in Japanese. It definitely gave me a nice sense of accomplishment to read an actual work of literature in Japanese, as opposed to a comic book or the artificial Japanese found in textbooks. There were a lot of words I had to look up, but by and large, I could understand it pretty well. Of the words I didn’t know, I often could guess the meaning from context or from the kanji that made up the word, but I looked them up anyways so I could get the correct reading as well.
The style was very direct, crisp, and matter-of-fact, which made for a brisk read. The story is about a woman that hadn’t slept in 17 days. I’m not sure if this is actually physically possible (the character in the story wonders the same thing.) Although not a lot happens in the story, it builds up nicely. When she first describes her dissatisfaction with domestic life, she seems unhappy, but as the story progresses, you can sense her desperation growing, and the tone becomes more menacing.
The ending, however, did leave me a little confused. (spoilers!) At the very end she is trapped, crying in the car and says that the two guys are going to flip the car over. What I got out of it, was that even as she was “expanding her life” by staying up all night, she was becoming increasingly isolated, her discontent was swallowing her, the walls were closing in. So it made sense that she ends up trapped alone in her tiny car, which was being assaulted from the outside, rocked back and forth by forces beyond her control. So I think I understood the feeling he was invoking, but when I think about it logically, I wonder what was going to happen. Were they going to kill or rape her? Were they just going to flip the car over as a prank? I guess no matter what happens, her secret night life is over since something terrible was about to happen.
Anyways, that my rambling on the story. If you read this and wonder “what story was he reading?”, then maybe I understood the Japanese less than I thought!
sneaky
