In the spring of 1989, Gillian Jolis and Leslie Pockell (who was visiting New York) met with the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild in the hopes that they would pick up A Wild Sheep Chase.
“Book clubs were a big deal,” Luke says. “They had a built-in readership—mostly suburban, perhaps, less so in the cities where bookstores thrived (as they once did)—and members trusted the book club to select the kind of book they wanted or should want to read. So a book’s being picked up by a book club was indication of its appeal, salability, and the buyers (the staff who placed the orders) at bookstores and chains paid attention when that happened.”58
The Literary Guild chose A Wild Sheep Chase as one of its selections. It was still unusual for book clubs to select works in translation at the time; Asahi Shimbun gave this as an example of the U.S. becoming more open to new Japanese literature.59
A couple of weeks after publication, a large ad ran in The New York Times Book Review, calling A Wild Sheep Chase “The American Debut of Japan’s Premier Contemporary Writer” and using phrases such as “marvelously engaging,” “gripping plot,” “comic,” “fresh, brave” from responses to the early copies that had been sent out to reviewers.
Ad in The New York Times
The KI team was feeling the benefits of the strong Japanese economy (the Nikkei recorded an all-time high of 38,915.87 at the end of 1989)60 and, more specifically, the backing of their parent company, Kodansha. “If this was five, ten years later,” Luke says, “I don’t know if there would have been the environment to invest so much money and manpower into the project.”61 Cheng said it was a benefit that extended to all of KI-USA’s projects; it meant that the publisher could be “dedicated to quality rather than simply the bottom line . . . So we could do gorgeous art books that are $300 apiece and tailored for libraries and other projects of love like that.”62
Needless to say, a large promotional budget does not guarantee the success of a book. Being relatively new and small, KI had fewer connections and less prestige than its more established rivals; it may have been flush with economic capital, but its social and symbolic capital was limited. Luke, for instance, was forty years old when he joined KI. Given that he had “stumbled into” the profession, he didn’t have the same networks and influence that an editor of similar age would after working in the field for a couple of decades. The team had to find ways to borrow the networks and prestige of individuals and institutions already established in the U.S.63
Luke met many of the journalists who would go on to write about Murakami’s work at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. He says that this eventually led to an Associated Press article calling Murakami a member of Japan’s literary “Brat Pack” and “perhaps the biggest sensation in Japanese publishing in recent years.”64
The writer Robert Whiting also played a role in helping Luke and KI expand their media contacts. Whiting had been receiving attention for You Gotta Have Wa, his second book on Japanese professional baseball, which had been published in the summer of 1989 and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize later that same year. In June 1989, he had taken part in a three-week-long promotional tour in the U.S. and was interviewed “35 times in two and a half weeks.”65
Luke and Whiting were both living in Kamakura at the time, and Luke had read and commented on the manuscript of You Gotta Have Wa before publication. (Luke’s name appears in the acknowledgments.) They were also planning to work together on a memoir of the Yomiuri Giants star Warren Cromartie (published by Kodansha America in 1991 under the title Slugging It Out in Japan: An American Major Leaguer in the Tokyo Outfield).
Whiting tells me that Luke was “a very good editor . . . I remember I submitted a manuscript that used Cromartie’s voice, as it was recorded during our interviews. The result was that the manuscript was flat. Elmer said so, quite emphatically. I had to go back and rewrite the whole thing creating a more reader-friendly version of Cromartie’s speaking style, part fictional . . . I had a falling-out with Cromartie during the interview process. I would show up at his apartment sometimes and he would just be gone, no explanation, nothing. So towards the end I got fed up and quit. Elmer patched that up and even did one final interview himself with Cromartie and had a very frank discussion about racial discrimination, which proved to be a good addition to the book.”
When I ask Whiting about the publication of A Wild Sheep Chase, he tells me that he does not remember any details. “I just remember Elmer was very enthusiastic about Murakami.”66
On May 10, 1989, Luke sent Murakami a fax reporting on the sale of paperback rights to A Wild Sheep Chase (to Plume for $55,000)67 and asking him to take part in the promotional activities that were scheduled in New York that fall. Murakami declined. Several months later, Luke and Murakami met in person for the first time in Tokyo (together with another editor from KI), and on August 14, just three days before a copy of A Wild Sheep Chase arrived at the Murakamis’ home, Luke again asked Murakami to join him in New York. Murakami once again declined. On September 24, Luke asked again, saying that Birnbaum had become unable to attend, and that they had also managed to arrange an interview with The New York Times. Murakami finally relented.68
Murakami and his wife, Yōko, landed in New York on October 21, and Luke and Shirai picked them up at the airport. Shirai remembers handing Murakami a copy of that day’s New York Times folded open to a story in the Arts section about him and A Wild Sheep Chase. The headline, “Young and Slangy Mix of the U.S. and Japan,” was followed by a tagline: “A best-selling novelist makes his American debut with a quest story.”69 “Of course, it was something that had been in the works,” Shirai tells me, “but I was surprised by how well the timing worked out.”70
Shirai and Luke had chosen a hotel on the Upper East Side, thinking Murakami, an avid runner, would like to be near Central Park. Ten years later, Murakami would write in an essay for the women’s magazine an an that, while he preferred the Village and SoHo with its many bookshops and secondhand record stores, he ended up staying uptown in New York because “the appeal of running in Central Park in the morning is too great.”71
Of the boutique hotels close to Central Park, the team at KI decided on the Stanhope Hotel. Luke says that he suggested the Stanhope, “which might seem odd (uptown, old-world-ish, maybe even stuffy, not hip or cool),” because it was the setting for The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.72 When Murakami had visited the U.S. in 1984 at the invitation of the Department of Defense, he had interviewed Irving while jogging through Central Park with him. Two years later he had also translated Irving’s debut novel, Setting Free the Bears, into Japanese.
Murakami spent eleven days promoting his book in New York. Many of the interviews were conducted in KI-USA’s new office, which had a large poster of the cover of A Wild Sheep Chase on one of its walls. Cheng says that her most vivid memory of working on the book was “me trying to get this huge, glossy, bigger than life, poster reproduction of the book cover—that startling peacock blue background and the sheep in the foreground—to hang in our beautiful glass offices, next to the fresh ikebana arrangement that Mr. Shirai ordered for the entryway every week. There were a bunch of logistic and mundane details, but when the poster (almost five feet tall) was finally hung up, it was breathtaking and felt like a symbolic tribute to a book that was also larger than life.”73
KI-USA/Kodansha America’s offices, New York
At