Alfred Birnbaum’s home, west Tokyo
Birnbaum first came to Japan in 1960, when he was five years old. His father, Henry Birnbaum, had been tasked with establishing the Tokyo office of the National Science Foundation, and moved the family—his wife, Nancy, and his sons, Bob and Alfred—from their home in Wheaton, Maryland.
As far as Birnbaum can recall, there were no other foreigners living in Kagomachi, in north Tokyo, where his family settled. He attended the Nishimachi International School in central Tokyo, and spoke English both at home and in school, but he was quick to pick up Japanese from the housekeeper and the neighborhood kids. He recalls watching television in Japanese, though he does not recall specific programs. He also remembers spending a lot of time alone drawing.
Birnbaum’s family moved countries every few years. After Tokyo, they spent three years in the States, including a year in Honolulu, where Henry Birnbaum was vice chancellor of the newly founded East-West Center on the grounds of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.4 But in these early years of grade school he had very little contact with the Japanese language. Many of his classmates at the Iolani School, a private preparatory academy, were of Asian descent, but English was their common language. It didn’t occur to him to use Japanese even with his Japanese American classmates. Birnbaum says that, having lived in Japan, it “felt natural” to be surrounded by Asians. If anything, he “felt a little out of place” when he was “only surrounded by white people.”5
When he was in middle school, Birnbaum’s family moved to Mexico City. He remembers being affected by “the feel of the place, the ambience and people, the color and life in the streets, the food and folk art . . . I was focused on drawing and obsessed with Dalí and surrealism. We traveled all over Mexico and everything seemed like a grand strange wonderful chaotic dream painted large, a complete contrast to the dull banality of the suburban U.S. In retrospect, my knowledge of Latin America was very shallow and superficial, a riot of exuberance to match my wannabe rebellious teenage posturing. Kind of embarrassing, to think back now.”6
The Birnbaum family. Left to right: Alfred, Henry, Nancy, Bob
The family returned to Tokyo when Birnbaum was in high school, and he enrolled in the American School in Japan. He spent most of his free time in the art studio, and at home he would read Latin American authors—García Márquez in Gregory Rabassa’s translations first, then Borges and Cortázar—to transport himself back to Mexico.
Did his early interest in these writers influence which works he would decide to translate later? While Birnbaum does not make that connection, it is true that the two Japanese writers he has introduced to the Anglophone world—Haruki Murakami and Natsuki Ikezawa—have both been compared to “magic realist” writers from Latin America.7
After graduating from high school in Japan, Birnbaum, dissuaded from art as a career, attended the University of Texas at Austin to pursue his “second interest,” Latin American literature.8 The Latin American Institute had been established at UT in 1940 and had just moved to a new building in 1970. The school owned the second-largest archive of materials related to Latin America in the country, after the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.9 The fact that Austin was only a four- to five-hour drive from the border with Mexico was another attraction. When Murakami was invited to the same university in 1994 as part of a five-day author tour, he wrote about falling in love with the city, with its greenery, its many cats, and the river running through it; he even wrote that it “might not be a bad place to spend the rest of my life.”10 But when Birnbaum had arrived in the city as a student twenty years earlier, he had the opposite reaction. Whether it was Japan or Mexico, he had always managed to find a place for himself. But in Texas he experienced “terrible culture shock.” Austin was a liberal oasis, a city unlike any other in Texas, and his roommate had assured him that he was going to “love Texas,” but Birnbaum never got used to the place. He thinks, in retrospect, that the issue may have been not where he was but what he was doing. He was still having trouble letting go of the idea of becoming an artist.
In the end, Birnbaum escaped Texas to the University of Southern California. His father had recently taken a job at the university, where he would eventually be named associate provost, which meant that Birnbaum would not have to pay tuition. He took the opportunity to change his major to East Asian studies.
“When I was in Japan I didn’t want to be there and tried to avoid everything Japanese,” he says. “Didn’t even read Japanese literature. But once I left Japan, the country started to interest me. I always find myself being drawn to things and places far away. So every time I moved, my interests would shift too. I suppose it just means I’m always trying to escape myself.”11
As far as Birnbaum can remember, there were no Japanese literature specialists at USC when he was there. He came across short stories by Kyōka Izumi and Motojirō Kajii while working at the school’s East Asian Studies Center, and he began translating them “to kill time.” These stories had the same fantastic and visually stimulating elements that had attracted him to Latin American writers. The outsider perspective was also appealing. “I considered myself an outsider wherever I went, so that must have been an attraction.”12
For his junior year in college, Birnbaum opted to study abroad—in Tokyo, at Waseda University, from which Haruki Murakami had graduated half a year earlier. It was the fall of 1975, Japan’s economy was stirring, and the Western world was beginning to take notice. Most of the foreign students Birnbaum encountered at Waseda were “MBA types who saw business opportunities in Japan.”13 Birnbaum spent time with like-minded friends—among them Keith Holeman, who would go on to direct films, and Beth Nishihara, who was taking part in the activities of the Asbestos Studio led by the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata.
Waseda currently has around 8,000 international students, but foreign students were a rarity in the seventies. Almost every day, when walking through the campus, Birnbaum was approached by someone wanting to practice English conversation with him. Birnbaum quickly grew tired of this. With Holeman, a student from the U.S. like himself, he created a short film as part of a class assignment in which the cause of a character’s mysterious death turns out to be karōshi—death by overwork—from having accepted endless requests to provide free English conversation lessons.
The film, received with mild amusement by the other students, was an early manifestation of Birnbaum’s sense of humor, which has a kindly absurd edge, and which seems to creep into his translations. In any case, Birnbaum was learning to deal with the constant gaze under which foreigners in Japan often found themselves.
Birnbaum returned to USC in the fall of 1976 to finish college, but a year later he was back in Tokyo—at Waseda—on a Ministry of Education scholarship. He focused on Japanese art history, and once his research year was up, he applied for official admission to Waseda’s graduate school to continue his studies. He prepared assiduously for the exam—which was in Japanese—and was accepted to the program.
Birnbaum entered graduate school in April 1978. At the same time, Haruki Murakami had begun writing what would become his first published book, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing).14 While Murakami was sitting at his kitchen table struggling to put words to paper, Birnbaum found himself struggling