Haruki Murakami

I read Dance Dance Dance first; it isn't a direct sequel so much as another story about the same character, but events from WSC are referenced in it. But for that matter, events from Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 are referenced in Wild Sheep Chase, and the fact that very few English-speaking readers have read them doesn't seem to bother anyone. I don't think the story in DDD really relies on knowledge of WSC at all; just expect a few mentions of backstory that'll be summarized instead of fully relived.

In the end it boiled down to choice rather than choices becasue the 3 for 2 offer finished before I could make my mind up. It was 'A Wild Sheep Chase'. I tried to read it while moving house, etc., so I couldn't really get into it and I didn't finish it. What I liked best about it was the drawing of a sheep. Looking upthread I see it is a man in a sheep costume. That encourages me to finish it one day. Also looking upthread I see you are all very well informed, perhaps to the point of lunacy.

Sorry this is such a damp squib of an answer.

At least two posters upthread have read it ... anyone else? What'd you think compared to later things?

I have just finished 'A Wild Sheep Chase'. I thought it was very good. The last bit made me sad and I don't know why. I suppose this is quite clever. It is a game of three halves. I wish I understood Japanese.

I look forward to reading more.

i like murakami, and don't think he is as lightweight as is oft suggested, but referencing kafka in the title is seriously stepping up to the plate, isn't it?

I was attempting the movie adaptation in my head enthusiastically while reading DANCE DANCE DANCE, which remains my favorite, but the darkness seemed to present problems.

I need to finish the copy of Norwegian Wood I've had out from the library the entire summer but I've been hesistant to subject myself to the sadness.

not with the sony cinealta!!

Wind-Up was the best when it came to the individual strands, but it really didn't seem to hang together and the ending felt forced. Dance Dance Dance was probably my favourite, just for the sheer feeling of joy it inspired - much needed after the end of Wild Sheep Chase.

Which should I read next? I was thinking about The Elephant Vanishes but Norwegian Wood is tempting me as well.

For myself, I'm putting more and more of my thoughts on recent reading on the Brown Wedge on FT -- but that said, I'm definitely concentrating on nonfiction reading first and foremost. I think this is partially down to the fact that in many cases I'd rather be writing fiction than reading it!

As for the Elephant Vanishes dramatisation, I saw it when it was on. it was great fun - lots of Mcburney trickery without losing the murakaminess of the stories.

My POV obviously, but I fail to see how this makes Murakami better than Lynch. I find mysteries more rewarding if I have to make an effort to solve them.

But it would be brilliant if it was actually Apache Indian.

Patrick 'Picard' Stewart was in the audience (I had a good view of the crowd), I wanted to shout out "Hey Picard! Dude! Make it so!", but I didn't. I kond of regret it now.

Anyway, bearing in mind Chronicle is my favourite, is Wonderland a good next move?

Also can anyone who's read the first two novels tell me more about the girl who dies at the beginning of Wild Sheep Chase?

Oh you meant in what sense were we robbed, is that it? It’s not like we ever actually witnessed that images ourselves in previous years.

Yes exactly. Just an odd phrasing.

It’s not like it was some kind of New Year’s Eve drinking game that got cancelled.

An interesting little interview with Birnbaum from Mat Alt's 'Pure Invention' newsletter this week -

I came of age in the Eighties, a period where the vast majority of content imported from Japan, which is to say video games, toys, anime, comics, and films, wasn’t particularly well translated. The translations of games in particular were often unbelievably, epically, legendarily bad, to the point some have achieved eternal meme status today.

Occasionally, however, I’d stumble across a gem in the rough. Something translated by someone whose prose truly matched the level of the content, elevating it out of the mere “translated” and into the realm of something that might be actually enjoyed by someone who didn’t have any particular interest in Japan at all. In manga, for instance, that name was Frederik Schodt; in games, Ted Woolsey. But when it came to modern Japanese literature, that someone was Alfred Birnbaum.

Alfred’s translations of Haruki Murakami’s novels were some of the first Japanese lit I took actual pleasure in reading. Murakami made Japan feel modern, branded, real, warts and all. And Birnbaum’s prose, as laconic as the protagonists themselves, made them sing in English. A Wild Sheep Chase left a particularly deep impression, leading me down the rabbit-hole of Murakami’s oeuvre in translation. And I wasn’t alone: it was through Alfred’s translations that Murakami first began to be read abroad.

One can make the argument that Alfred “discovered” Murakami, in the sense that he was the first to bring Murakami’s work to the attention of a major publisher for books in translation: the late, lamented Kodansha International. Over the course of the Eighties and Nineties, Alfred translated Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing; Pinball, 1973; Norwegian Wood; A Wild Sheep Chase; Dance Dance Dance; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Underground; and assorted short stories.

One of the most interesting of these is “The Windup Bird and Tuesday's Women,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1990. It is an excerpt from A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the book that would put Murakami on the map in American literary circles. The book itself was translated into English by Jay Rubin, making this one of the rare and fun occasions you can compare two master translators’ approach to the same writer. (The same later happened with Norwegian Wood, in its entirety: first translated by Birnbaum and then again by Rubin.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known Alfred for fifteen years now (which is why I can’t bring myself to call him by his last name here, as custom ordinarily dictates.) Over the years, we’ve spoken offhandedly about his work. But despite his fame in literary translation circles, there are surprisingly few interviews with him on the record. It was a pleasure to be allowed to conduct one of them. And if you’re interested in an even deeper dive on the translation process of Murakami’s books, I highly recommend David Karashima’s Who We’re Reading When We Read Murakami.

So how did you first become interested in Japan?

I had no choice! My father’s job brought me here in 1960, when I was five years old. I lived here until I was seven or eight, for kindergarten and first grade, and then again for high school.

What was Tokyo like back then?

Well, I came to Japan just fifteen years after the end of the war. There were no tall buildings at all in Tokyo. Trollies were still running everywhere. It wasn’t high tech at all. What I remember is in winter, the smell of coal burning in the city, everywhere. And most homes were not connected to sewers. My memory is that the whole city sort of smelled like rotten takuan, pickled radish.

Did you pick up the language naturally?

I had no formal training. From what little I remember, I used to play with local Japanese kids all the time, and we had a maid — the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar, everyone from abroad had a maid — and I used to watch TV in her room. I grew up before the boom for mecha and robots in Japan, so all of the kid’s entertainment was chambara, samurai things. I remember having wearing a yukata and a toy topknot wig. We would play-swordfight.

How did you encounter Haruki Murakami’s work?

My first wife was Japanese, and was reading a lot, and she basically said, why don’t you translate Murakami? The first book I read of his was Slow Boat to China. I’d done some translation of short stories when I was in university, Taisho-era stuff, Izumi Kyoka and Kajimoto Jiro. One Kajimoto story was published in the Kyoto Journal, for what it’s worth. I really didn’t like the prevailing trends in Japanese literature at the time, all dark and suffering. The whole tearful poverty aesthetic that came together in the Sixties along with the protest movement. I really hated that.

It was a trend in manga of the era, too, the underdog hero.

The only manga-ka I really liked at the time was Hisauchi Michio. He was crazy. I met him a couple of times. Who else draws a manga about a mole who’s a painter and a fan of Duchamp having a love affair with an angel who speaks in a Kansai accent? That doesn’t usually happen in manga. (Laughs)

What were you reading for pleasure?

Not much in Japanese. I’d pick things up and find more of the same “wet” family tragedies, wet being the Japanese idiom for emotive and weepy. And against that backdrop, Murakami came across as a breath of fresh air. He was a humorist and a satirist. So I took Slow Boat to China to Kodansha International. They said well, okay, but there’s no market for short stories. Then a couple of years later, A Wild Sheep Chase came out, and I went back and asked, can I do this? After some sort of editorial meeting, I was told “no, it’s too thick.” (Laughs) What is this, lit by the kilo? You can’t sell it because it weighs too much? (Laughs) They gave me Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing instead.

But A Wild Sheep Chase eventually was translated.

Eventually. I did some short stories first. There was a festival promoting cultural relations between the UK and Japan. They wanted to showcase Japanese arts, one of them being literature. Kodansha wanted something they could promote. My impression at this time was, it could have been anybody. Kodansha told me they’d release hardcovers in the English speaking world but in the end, Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing only came out in paperback in Japan, with English-Japanese glossaries at the back. I had this wonderful sense that Japanese high school students might be walking around speaking my English.

What was the process on translating A Wild Sheep Chase?

I worked on it for about six months. I would translate pages and send them to Elmer Luke, my editor. This was even before fax machines. One or two times we camped out for a weekend in the office and went over the translations line by line. We didn’t have much back and forth with Murakami. He gave us carte blanche to translate as we saw fit. What we did was save up half a book’s worth of queries and couriered them over to Murakami. And he’d send written answers back. Which were pretty much, “carry on.” I remember one section Elmer thought I’d taken too many liberties with, and sent to Murakami asking, Did you write this? And Murakami said, No, that’s Alfred. But he let us leave it in anyway! (Laughs) I worked for six months on the translation, on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Then editing took another six months.

Next came Norwegian Wood. That book was an absolute phenomenon when it came out in Japan. Did you notice the hype?

Not really. No. I guess I was self-absorbed. (Laughs) Honestly, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t like the book to begin with.

There’s a big shift in tone between the trilogy of Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing and Wild Sheep Chase, and Norwegian Wood.

Murakami wrote those, which are lighter, by design, and then decided to become a “serious realist” with Norwegian Wood. The earlier work is heavily influenced by, he says, Raymond Carver, but it’s really more Vonnegut, as far as I can see. Even the repeats, like his use of yare-yare, it resembles Vonnegut’s hi-ho and so it goes. In fact, when I translated Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I wanted to change the title. I wanted to reference Vonnegut, so I proposed The End of the World/The Way it Goes.

What did Murakami say to that?

It never got to that point because Elmer shot it down. He liked Hard Boiled Wonderland.

The translations of Pinball and Hear the Wind were initially released only in Japan. But A Wild Sheep Chase got a proper international release. What were the reactions to it abroad, when it came out in 1989?

I remember reviews that came out, saying things like, “Wow, they’re eating hamburgers! They’re wearing jeans!” As if the Martians had finally discovered American culture. The UK press is famous for painting the Japanese as people from outer space. In America at the time, the prevailing image of Japan was one of a successful manufacturing competitor, while America’s industry was in decline. So there was a measure of antipathy towards Japan. Most people were not aware that there was a hip side to Japan, or a youth culture at all. We were maybe no longer World War II enemies, but Americans felt they couldn’t trust them.

It’s ironic, today it’s the opposite. Most people interact with Japan through some form of youth culture, whether anime and manga or Murakami, who I still consider youth culture even though he isn’t exactly a spring chicken.

I think Japan is becoming more and more like a theme park, the whole of it. Have you ever read Julian Barnes’ England, England? England in that book has nothing to sell but its own past, and turns the Isle of Wight into a miniature English theme park. Japan is almost a parody of itself.

Don’t you think Murakami’s work, and your translations of it, has played a big role in flipping Japan’s image?

Many times I’ve wondered if I didn’t help create a monster. (Laughs)

I assume you met Murakami on occasion while working on his translations. What was your most memorable time together with him?

An assignment for Magazine House. They sent him to cover Mexico. He was teaching at Princeton at the time. The photographer Eizo and I drove from Princeton to Texas, and crossed at Brownsville. Murakami took a bus and arrived separately. I was basically interpreting. We drove all over, down to Oaxaca, Campeche and wound up in Yucatan, we went all around. We even rented a helicopter at one point so Eizo could get aerial photos of the Mayan ruins at Bonampak, the three of us crammed into that rickety thing. It was reportage, Murakami’s impressions of Mexico. We were there a couple weeks together, probably more acquaintances than friends, but it was mostly fun.

Let’s talk about your approach to translation.

I don’t consider Murakami a stylist. By which I mean, I don’t think he ever thought of himself as writing so-called high literature or high art, so he wasn’t fussing over each individual word. Which I felt gave me the liberty to express things more naturally for a foreign reader. Typically, because my background is in fine arts, and he is from the television-film generation, I approached his writing “cinematically.”He tends to drive the narrative scene by scene, rather than through, say, internal monologue, what this character is feeling, or via omniscient commentary. It’s a bit manga-like, or perhaps more like a television script. My approach was simply to picture the scene in my mind’s eye and describe how an English-speaker might see the scene. Occasionally I would go back for specific words, but often I would ignore the syntax and grammar of the Japanese original, and just go for the feel of it, how I imagined an English writer would describe that situation.

Murakami was not yet a “big name,” back then, so you didn’t come to his work out of fandom. Do you think that detachment proved an asset in translating him?

Over the course of my quote-unquote career, I’ve drifted further away from staying close to originals as I translate. Those first translations I did of Izumi Kyoka and so on were pretty damn literal. And pretty damn boring, I think. The way I see it, part of my job is to make any writer seem intelligible and intelligent. Japanese writing relies quite a lot more on flow than English does. It doesn’t depend on “logical progression” or voice as much as English writing. It’s not as strict. So you have to invent those voices, to separate the characters. Japanese has very standardized ways of expressing whether you’re a woman or a man, child or sixty-eight-year-old, so even without the subject you can tell who’s saying what. English doesn’t really have that, hence you need to extrapolate and invent. Japanese also has aizuchi, throwaway comments that keep conversations flowing, but don’t always make sense in English. “So, ne.” Nobody interjects, “Sure . . . Yeah right . . .” five times in an English conversation. It doesn’t work in English. I also try to work in more character development, to heighten the theatrics of the scene or the story.

And this is all in service of helping authors get their original intent across?

Well, let’s put it this way. A translation that reads like a translation is no good. Whether you’re acting as someone behind the scenes or in partnership with the author makes little difference. What matters is, if a reader gets caught up on an unnatural phrase, then you’re in trouble. Especially when you’re working for a commercial publisher, you don’t want people to be conscious they’re reading a translation. It’s not some heavyweight scholarly tome, it’s entertainment. People have to be entertained. Which doesn’t necessarily mean putting it into American idiom; it means coming up with a distinctive flavor. It’s a lot like cooking.

Has anyone ever told you you resemble a Murakami protagonist? Every time I read A Wild Sheep Chase I imagine you. (Laughs)

I’ve had it said to me, but I don’t see it. They say artists gravitate towards self-portraits, but I’m not sure that applies to translators. And anyway, I’m not much for confessional fiction. Whatever, it wasn’t intentional on my part. Maybe it’s true to the extent that his protagonists are generally freelancers! (Laughs)

The last book of Murakami’s you translated was Dance Dance Dance, which came out in 1994. Do you want to talk about why that is?

Well, a big part of that is I was gone. I got married and was living in Burma, and I wasn’t here in Japan. Communication to and from Burma was difficult back then. And Kodansha International, who put out my translations, was struggling. I gather that Murakami’s side wasn't happy at how they were distributing the books, which is to say not very well, and not being publicized very well. Which was all true. Publishing his books in English in Japan didn’t make any sense anymore. Anyway, by the time I made it back to Japan, decisions had been made.

What are you working on now?

The last thing I translated was Toshihiko Yahagi’s The Wrong Goodbye, put out by a UK publisher. Yahagi started out as a writer for manga, and he’s a bit of a jack of all trades. He’s a satirist and a political writer. He attacks the status quo Japan head-on and is quite the stylist; he appropriates all sorts of writing styles. As the title implies, it plays off of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

Most recently, though, I’ve been concentrating on writing my own fiction. There have been very few commissions coming in and Covid killed off a lot of smaller publishers, added to the fact that reading books has generally declined in competition with the net and other media. Also, I find I’m not very interested in current trends in Japanese writing — or at least I haven’t tried to keep up. I’d written various short stories over years, but this lull allowed me to finish one full-length novel and start work on another. I doubt they will ever get published or find an audience, but the writing itself is the main thing for me.

Thanks for that, I'm a huge Birnbaum-head and have brought up much of the opening to this interview on this very board (probably not this thread though, I think the "Translators" thread?) probably 17-20 years ago.

One thing I always wondered (and it's glossed at here as he was a professor in the west(US/UK) for over a decade) is that Murakami is highly proficiently bilingual and extremely capable of translating his own work which he never did, despite translating dozens of English language works to Japanese (Carver, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, et al)... but he always mentions that he loves reading translations of his work because he considers them original fiction!

Having talked with Japanese fans of Murakami, it's pretty interesting just how much license Birnbaum can take with his books... I remember a baffling conversation about the Sheep Man where we eventually realized the character was just totally different in the English translation.

Was hoping this might be bumped with an update on the English language version of The City and Its Uncertain Walls, but thanks for that!

For some bilingual authors it seems like translation is like mastering a record, they could do it themselves but prefer to get a fresh perspective, or maybe they're just sick of working on it by that point.

I love the collection of Japanese fiction that Birnbaum edited, Monkey Brain Sushi (1990)

There is a magic to his translations of Murakami, but he was also lucky in the Murakami’s output during that era was just superior, too. Birnbaum says that he would decline to translate Murakami’s new works

Reading “ Norwegian Wood” and of my god, the woman the protagonist gets involved with at university is so profoundly unlikeable that I’m repulsed. But I’m gonna finish this thing

I think what bothers me is that I can be a lot like the protagonist- overly agreeable, easily persuaded, eager to make the tiger person happy

The movie adaptation is free on Tubi, currently.

Not sure it's a great film but god some of the cinematography is so goddam romantic.

I like Greenwood's score (and the CAN tracks) but the film is a dud for me.

Seeing this in the Seattle Library catalog - 街とその不確かな壁 (Machi to sono futashika na kabe). Google translates to “The City and its Uncertain Walls”. Would figure translating/refining now for 2024 release?

Browsing at the bookstore and overheard this young woman berating Murakami for his sexism to this guy. Did giggle but I do think this stuff will sink without trace quite quickly.