“Like my hairstyle!?”

Excerpt from Murakami Haruki’s novel “Norwegian Woods”
p.342

Midori : “Like my hairstyle?”

Watanabe : “It’s great!”

Midori : “How great?”

Watanabe: “Great enough to knock down all the trees in all the forests of the world.”

 

p.304

Watanabe : “You’re really cute, Midori “

Midori :”What do you mean really cute?”

Watanabe : “So cute that the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.”

 

Dialogue between the main character Watanabe and Midori, a girl that he kinda like.  I wonder how the original sentences would be like in Japanese. Actually this is my second time reading “Norwegian Woods”. The first copy of “Norwegian woods” I read was a Taiwanese Chinese translated version. So now that I’ve read the Chinese and English version, I think I wanna read the original Japanese copy too. It will take me some time though, coz’ for me, reading Japanese will still be slower compared to reading English and Chinese. When I have mastered Korean language, I would love to read it in Korean too. * getting a little bit too ambitious * It would be interesting to compare the differences in translations. Darn! I should have studied linguistics in University.

If you have not read Murakami Haruki books but would like to give it a try, you might wanna start from “Norwegian Woods” or “Kafka on the Shore”. I really enjoyed reading these 2 books.

p/s: “Norwegian Wood” will be made into a movie! The film will be directed by French-Vietnamese Tran Anh Hung and to be release in 2010..

English :  Norwegian Woods
Japanese :  ノルウェイの森 ( Noruwei no mori )
Korean :  노르웨이의 숲  ( Noreuwei e  sup )
Chinese : 挪威的森林 ( Nuo wei de sen lin )

Lunch with Murakami Haruki

my current read.

It seems that French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung is going to film “Norwegian Wood“ , casting Matsuyama Kenichi (well-known for playing “L”  in  ”Death Note” the movie ) as the male lead and  Kikuchi Rinko ( Babel ) as female lead.

I have not seen any of  Tran Anh Hung‘s movie before but it seems that his work have won awards from Cannes film festival and also been nominated in Oscar before in the best foreign film category …

I’m excited to see how the movie will turn out. 

Don’t know who is Murakami Haruki? Click here or  here.

English :  novel
Japanese :  小説　( しょうせつ・shou setsu )
Korean :  소설 ( so seol )
Chinese :　小說　( xiao shuo )