Poor Mojo's Newswire

People. J.R.R. Tolkien was a actual honest to god linguist. He invented languages for fun long before he ever even started writing fantasy books about short people with furry feet, and even the other Inklings made fun of the elves in his books. In fact, the unabridged biography of C.S. Lewis records this interaction between the two great British fantasy novelists:

LEWIS: John, you wanker! Drop the elf crap and let’s go down the pub, Dyson is buying the rounds tonight.

TOLKIEN: One second. Just want to finish these notes on Dwarvish. You know, they use runes, and -

LEWIS: Oh, god, another language? How many does that make now? The elves have two, the humans have two -

TOLKIEN: Well, actually that’s just the good humans. If you count the evil humans it’s more like seven.

LEWIS: And you wrote them all up with dictionaries and everything, didn’t you.

TOLKIEN: …I was bored.

LEWIS: So, are the Dwarves going to have two languages? Oh, and what about the furry little fellows -

TOLKIEN: The Hobbits?

LEWIS: I keep telling you, people are going to think you mean “rabbits.”

TOLKIEN: Oh, piss off.

LEWIS: “Dear Mr. Tolkien, I bought your so-called “novel” because I was anticipating an entertaining story about rabbits, much like that Watership Down thing. Instead, I got midgets with furry feet. What the hell. Signed, J.M. Puddlepoof, Esq.”

TOLKIEN: But you said you liked the Hobbits.

LEWIS: No, I said that I liked that they spoke English rather than Hobbitese or Hobbitaya or something like that. It was not a wholesale endorsement of your disturbing midget fetish.

TOLKIEN: Oh, I do not have to take this tripe from Mister “Hey, What If God Was A Lion?”

LEWIS: Come on, that’s solid stuff!

TOLKIEN: And “Mr. Tumnus.” Why did you think naming a character after foot fungus was a good idea?

LEWIS: He’s not!

TOLKIEN: Sounds like it.

LEWIS: At least I’m not conceited enough to put bloody epic poetry in my books.

TOLKIEN: At least I’m not fool enough to make the heroes of my story a bunch of annoying brats.

LEWIS: At least I came up with a better symbol for evil than a damn ring. What did your wife think of that?

TOLKIEN: I can’t believe I bloody converted you.

LEWIS: Well, I didn’t become a pope-hugger like yourself, so I think technically I’m still a heathen or something, aren’t I?

TOLKIEN: Technically, yes.

LEWIS: All right then. Are you done crafting fantastic new verbs ending in the letter “a” so we can go get sloshed?

TOLKIEN: The Dwarves have a much more guttural language, actually. You’re thinking of the Elvish tongues, like Quenya and -

LEWIS: No, I’m thinking of a pint of bitter with my damn name on it is what I’m thinking.

TOLKIEN: Arse!

Murakami has been embraced abroad as no other Japanese writer has. His books have been translated into about 40 languages. (In Japan, where Murakami is also regarded as an accomplished translator of American literature, the flow is neatly reversed: his recent rendering of The Great Gatsby sat atop the best-seller list for seven weeks.) Last October in Prague, he was awarded the prestigious Kafka Prize, dedicated to authors whose work "addresses the readers regardless of their origin, nationality and culture." It's difficult to imagine a better recipient than Murakami, who today splits his time between Tokyo and universities in the U.S. "The first [Murakami] story I translated for The New Yorker, they asked me to put in a Japanese reference at the top," says Philip Gabriel, a professor of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona. "He was so nonspecific to Japan that readers didn't realize where he was from."

A strong sense of otherness has always been in Murakami's nature. It began with his early preference for foreign novels (to the chagrin, one presumes, of his parents, who were both teachers of Japanese literature). It continues to this day in the deliberate distance he keeps from Japan's literary community, and in his abstemious mode of living. "Writers and artists are supposed to live a very unhealthy, bohemian kind of life," says Murakami. "But I just wanted to do it differently." So he rises at 4 a.m. to write for hours before swimming or running, training for marathons and lately triathlons as well. Murakami says he needs the exercise to keep up his stamina for the draining work of writing — the prolificacy of his output is legendary — but there's also an element of physical pleasure in his declaration that he weighs as much now, aged 58, as he did in his late 20s.