In preparation for my marathon, one of the things I did was read Murakami. I read the book, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” in the original Japanese.

In it, he talks about mantras he keeps in his head while running long distances. Here is the English translation:

One runner told of a mantra his older brother, also a runner, had taught him which he’s pondered
ever since he began running. Here it is: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running
and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality,
but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the
most important aspect of marathon running.

The interesting thing about it is, the following is how it appears in the original Japanese text:

その中に一人、兄（その人もランナー）に教わった文句を、走り始めて以来ずっと、レース中に頭の中で反芻しているというランナーがいた。Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. それが彼のマントラだった。正確なニュアンスは日本語に訳しにくいのだが、あえてごく簡単に訳せば、「痛みは避けがたいが、苦しみはオプショナル（こちら次第）」ということになる。例えば走っていて「ああ、きつい、もう駄目だ」と思ったとして、「きつい」というのは避けようのない事実だが、「もう駄目」かどうかはあくまでも本人の裁量に委ねられていることである。この言葉は、マラソンという競技のいちばん大事な部分を簡潔に要約していると思う。

He quotes the mantra in English! And he has a tidbit that was taken out of the English translation, where he describes that (what follows is my translation), “the exact nuance of the phrase is hard to translate, but if I translate rather reductively it means, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional (up to us)”.

(So yes, that’s my translation of Murakami’s translation.)

What’s makes this more interesting is that, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”, is itself a translated idiom that’s a summary of of a Buddhist parable. Japan, with its strong Buddhist culture, definitely has a translation ready for that phrase. So Murakami really didn’t need to go through the trouble, unless he didn’t know the parable or decided explicitly to do what he did. Any way, the parable goes like this, “You are walking in a forest when an arrow hits you. You feel pain. But the archer is going to shoot another arrow. Can you dodge the second one?” The second arrow represents emotional reaction. This, Buddha says, is something that can be controlled through contemplation.

So, what do we have here? The original Buddhist idea, translated somewhere and somewhen into English, passed on to a runner, told to Murakami in English, which he translated into Japanese his book, which was then translated into English again.

Because this is understandably a complicated thing to express without extensive footnotes, the English translation simply omits that part of the original writing and merely presents the “original” mantra Murakami heard in English…which is sort of a shame. Murakami is not only known as a writer, but as a prolific Japanese translator of English texts. His translations of Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, and J.D. Salinger are among the more respected in Japan. The whole tidbit of Murakami translating something is inherently Murakami, and in my opinion, something that ought to have been kept in the English translation in some shape or form.