Dreaming Murakami

When Mette Holm begins to translate Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing), a two-meter-tall frog shows up at an underground station in Tokyo. The Frog follows her, determined to engage the translator in its fight against the gigantic Worm, which is slowly waking from a deep sleep, ready to destroy the world with hatred. More than twenty years ago, Mette read a novel by Haruki Murakami, who had yet to reach literary stardom. Back then, she had no idea how the Japanese author’s imagined worlds would steadily shape and transform her own. Since then Mette Holm has spent thousands of hours translating Murakami’s puzzling and widely discussed stories to his Danish readers. Stories that continuously spellbind and challenge millions of devoted readers all over the planet. As Mette struggles to find the perfect sentences capable of communicating what Murakami’s solitary, daydreaming characters are trying to tell us, the boundary between reality and imagination begins to blur.