So difficult it’s unreadable?

Japanese Language Reading
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I checked this video, and unless I missed something:

  • the guy didn’t say that Murakami’s books are infamous among Japanese learners, he said that after switching from Polish translation to Japanese original, he himself didn’t like the original
  • the lady didn’t said that Japanese version was hard, she was it had a “stiff style” and “specific vocabulary”
  • both were concentrating on the style, not difficulty
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You might be right, perhaps I indeed misremembered. But I could swear that I remembered him saying something about their perceived difficulty… The mind can sometimes play funny tricks :wink:

Yeah, but for me it sounded like the style made it hard to read. But maybe it was more “hard” as “unenjoyable” than “difficult linguistically”.
Sorry for creating confusion…

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Well I did hear before that apparently Murakami style is … un-Japanese? So maybe that’s what they meant. :woman_shrugging:

Murakami doesn’t read many of his Japanese contemporaries. Does he feel detached from his home scene? “It’s a touchy topic,” he says, chuckling. “I’m a kind of outcast of the Japanese literary world. I have my own readers … But critics, writers, many of them don’t like me.” Why is that? "I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation’s almost the same. I’m kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.
“But I think, in a sense, we are playing different games,” he continues. “I began to think that way. It’s very similar, but the rules are different. The equipment’s different, and the fields are different. Like tennis and squash.”
source: Haruki Murakami: 'I'm an outcast of the Japanese literary world' | Haruki Murakami | The Guardian

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