Birnbaum doubts that he would have become the translator he is if he had followed the conventional academic path. “It’s difficult,” he says, “for an academic to become a good writer.”16
After dropping out of Waseda, Birnbaum moved to the U.S., where he took a position at the Visual Arts Center, an outreach program of Antioch College, in Columbia, Maryland, teaching painting and calligraphy. It wasn’t long before he began feeling restless, finding the suburban environs of the college uninteresting and confining. After several years, Birnbaum moved back to Japan—Kyoto this time—and married Yumi, whom he’d met at USC when she was an undergraduate exchange student. He enrolled at Urasenke, one of the three main schools of tea in Kyoto. After some time, owing to his ability to speak and read Japanese, he was asked to translate short articles for the school’s publication, Chanoyu Quarterly, which introduced chadō—the way of tea—to foreigners. He gladly accepted because it would help pay his bills. “The editorial team at Chanoyu Quarterly was a group of misfits. And as a misfit myself, I fit in perfectly.”17
Kyoto had been a positive reentry to Japan, but soon his work at the quarterly began to feel constricting, the city over-mannered. Birnbaum moved back to Tokyo and eventually separated from his wife. He gradually began to take on longer translation projects while “dabbling in video art.” His work at Chanoyu Quarterly had opened opportunities for translating art and architecture books for Kodansha International, the English-language subsidiary of Kodansha Inc., one of the three largest publishing houses in Japan. The books he translated included Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, by Shin’ichi Segi, and Traditional Japanese Furniture: A Definitive Guide, by Kazuko Koizumi. But even then, Birnbaum had no intention of becoming a translator. “It just never occurred to me to pursue a career of any kind.”18
It was around this time that a friend recommended he read a short story collection by a young author named Haruki Murakami. Comprising seven stories that had appeared in various magazines between April 1980 and December 1982, Chūgoku yuki no surō bōto (A Slow Boat to China) had been published in the spring of 1983.
Birnbaum was immediately drawn to Murakami’s writing, especially its humor, something he found to be rare in Japanese literature.19 As soon as he finished reading the stories, he sat down at his typewriter and proceeded to translate several.
In the spring of 1984, Birnbaum visited the Kodansha International office in Tokyo to meet with the editor who was overseeing the nonfiction Birnbaum was translating. Kodansha International, established in 1963, focused on books that introduced Japanese culture to foreigners. In addition to books on fine art, martial arts, crafts, food, and business, it also published biographies and criticism by Western scholars of Japanese literature.
KI, as Kodansha International was known, was also one of the leading publishers of Japanese literature in English translation. In the 1970s it published Japanese classics of the early and mid-twentieth century, including Sōseki Natsume’s Botchan, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Lake, Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel, and Kenzaburō Ōe’s The Silent Cry. In the 1980s it went on to publish more contemporary works, like Ryū Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue and Yūko Tsushima’s Child of Fortune.
Ryū Murakami and Haruki Murakami—no relation—had both made their debuts by winning the Gunzō New Writers’ Prize, in 1976 and 1979 respectively. At the time, they were often referred to as “Double Murakami,” and in 1981, Kodansha had published a book-length conversation between them under the title Wōku donto ran (Walk Don’t Run).20 Birnbaum was hopeful that Kodansha International would show interest in “the other Murakami.”21
Near the end of his meeting with the editor, Birnbaum pulled out his translation of “Nyū Yōku tankō no higeki” (“New York Mining Disaster”), from Murakami’s story collection. He also expressed his interest in translating Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase), a novel that had first appeared in Gunzō, the literary journal in which Murakami had made his debut.
As Murakami has recounted in a 1991 interview, Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase) had gotten a “cold reception” at first.22 He was told by the editors at Gunzō that it was too long, and recalls that “it wasn’t easy getting them to accept the piece for publication.”23 But in the end, the novel appeared in full in the August 1982 issue of the journal and was published as its own hardcover book by Kodansha several months later. That December it was awarded the Noma New Writer’s Prize and, according to Murakami, sold around 150,000 copies.24
For Birnbaum, the attention the book had gotten was vindication of his interest. “I think what was remarkable about Sheep, both the attraction and the challenge, was that unlike almost all Japanese writing that is either extremely realistic (and mired down in minute details that obscure a broader or deeper vision) or extremely fantastic (like slapstick manga or robot-monster inanities) with no middle ground, it cut a fine balance between everyday tedium and fantasy; it kept the surrealism well within the realm of possibility, if not the plausible. And in that regard it was amazingly unique (especially at the time) and showed both perfect restraint and daring command in equal measures. Very different from anyone else in Japan, definitely more akin to US/UK novelists—which of course is why he was attacked by critics here. The total antithesis of heavy-handed dour pain-in-your-face voices like Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, Jūrō Kara, and Kenji Nakagami. I don’t know if that makes sense, but Sheep was really nicely understated.”25
The KI editor whom Birnbaum had been working with specialized in nonfiction, so she introduced him to one of her colleagues. The new editor took Birnbaum’s “New York Mining Disaster” and told him he would read it. When Birnbaum visited the office several weeks later, however, the same editor told him that from a business standpoint Sheep was too long. Birnbaum remembers being handed copies of Murakami’s first two novellas— Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing) and 1973-nen no pinbōru (Pinball, 1973)—instead. He did not totally buy the explanation that publishing Sheep was less financially viable than publishing the novellas, but he also didn’t feel that he was in any position to disagree with the editor; he was, after all, a freelancer trying to carve out a living on the fringes of the Japanese art and literary worlds.
Birnbaum started flipping through the books on the train ride home, and once he finished reading, he began translating 1973-nen no pinbōru (Pinball, 1973). He had chosen the title over Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing), Murakami’s debut, because he thought it was “the better book.” He tells me that he might have started with Kaze no uta o kike if he had been offered a two-book contract, but at the time it was far from clear that he would have the chance to translate a second book. “I think the surreal parts of Pinball appealed to me,” he adds. “The scene where the protagonist converses with the pinball machine was very much my kind of humor.”26
In a few months, Birnbaum produced what he felt was a “reasonably faithful” translation. His interactions with the editor on the manuscript were “minimal.”27 Back then it never occurred to him to deviate from the original. “I was still a nobody and there wasn’t anybody I could turn to for advice. I just had to trust my instincts.”28