Pinball, 1973 was published as part of the Kodansha English Library series, which was aimed at English-language learners in Japan and at the time included books like A Knock on the Door, a collection of stories by the prolific flash-fiction writer Shin’ichi Hoshi, as well as Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, a bestselling memoir by the television celebrity Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. The cover of Pinball, 1973 used an illustration commissioned for the original Japanese version, and at the back of the book were grammatical notes prepared by a high school English teacher.
Pinball, 1973, Kodansha English Library, 1985
KI’s hardcover books were distributed in the English-speaking world by overseas distributors. The Kodansha English Library series, on the other hand, was only distributed domestically. The first English translation of Murakami’s work never made it out of Japan.
Pinball, 1973 had been edited by Jules Young, who had moved to Japan in the mid-sixties and worked for KI for more than twenty years, starting in 1969. Young, who now lives in Bangkok, says that his edits “didn’t try to cater to the Japanese readership” and that he “relied on the Japanese editor who prepared the notes to explain any confusions.” He tells me that if there had been plans to release the translation outside of Japan, he “would have made some changes, just to inform someone not familiar with Japan and its culture.”29
Birnbaum says that Young had suggested the title Pinball, 1973. (A “literal” translation of the Japanese title would have been something like The Pinball[s] of 1973.) When I ask Young, he initially tells me that he does not remember anything about the title, but then writes to me later: “Thinking about it further, I remember that the comma in the Pinball title seemed to accentuate the time frame of the story. Without the comma it was a bit bland.”30
Although Birnbaum was disappointed that Pinball, 1973 had been published only in Japan, he accepted the offer to translate Murakami’s other novella, partly “to keep open the possibility of translating Sheep in the future.” He does not remember discussing the translation of either book with Murakami directly. “We were both overseas a lot . . . They were only for distribution in Japan and I don’t think Murakami was all that interested in them.”31
When I ask Murakami about this, he agrees. He tells me when the first two books were being translated, he had “kind of lost interest” in them because he was “already invested in writing longer works.”32 In a 2004 interview in The Paris Review, he describes the novellas as “immature.”33
Hear the Wind Sing, Kodansha English Library, 1987
Even years after Murakami’s work started to reach a wider readership abroad, translations of the two early novellas remained hidden from readers outside Japan. In 2015, more than thirty years after their original publication, they were released as a single volume in new translations by Ted Goossen (who chose to keep Young and Birnbaum’s titles).
I’m afraid that it might be a sensitive issue, but I ask Murakami about the decision to finally publish new English translations of his first two novellas. He does not seem at all bothered by the question. In fact, none of the questions I was worried about asking seem to faze him. We are in his Aoyama office in Tokyo and he is taking sips of coffee from a mug with the cover of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep printed on it.
“It wasn’t as if I was against the idea,” he says to me in Japanese. “I just felt that the books wouldn’t be all that interesting to read anymore. But there were so many requests that I finally relented. In Japan people have been reading my books in the order they were published, but outside Japan [the publication order] is all over the place. It seemed inevitable that some were going to read these two books as if they were my latest works. I was concerned that those readers would think, ‘What’s this?’ Also, I had created these two books by borrowing from American authors like Vonnegut and Brautigan that I had admired as a student. There’s a part of me that finds that a little embarrassing now.”34
When Birnbaum first began translating Murakami, he was a young freelance translator with no institutional affiliation. He created translations of “New York Mining Disaster” and later Pinball, 1973 and various short stories despite the fact that there was no guarantee that they would be published. When I ask Birnbaum how he supported himself while he worked on the translations, he shrugs and says that he “led a simple life” and that his “costs were minimal.” Birnbaum seems almost to thrive on getting by on a limited budget. He tells me that as a graduate student, during the month or so before his scholarship money was paid into his bank account, he subsisted on free bread crusts from the local bakery and twenty-yen packs of fermented soybeans from the supermarket. “My job,” he tells me, “is to not spend money.”35
Even today, he maintains this lifestyle. When I’m at his house, we always talk in the kitchen, with Birnbaum standing over the stove and me sitting at the kitchen counter with my laptop. Many of the cooking utensils, pots, and pans on the kitchen counter were purchased at the local flea market for a handful of coins. Our chats end in the late afternoon, when it’s time for him to make his rounds of the local supermarkets in search of the day’s bargains. Birnbaum and his wife rarely eat out. Once, when a literary festival in the U.K. offered to fly him business class, Birnbaum surprised the organizers by politely asking them to change his ticket so that he could sit in economy. This inclination to keep things simple may be one reason Murakami referred to Birnbaum in his interview with The Paris Review as a “bohemian”:
Alfred is a kind of bohemian; I don’t know where he is right now. He’s married to a woman from Myanmar, and she’s an activist. Sometimes they get captured by the government. He’s that kind of person. He’s kind of free as a translator; he changes the prose sometimes. That’s his style.36
The Paris Review interview was translated into Japanese and compiled with other selected interviews in a 2010 book titled Yume o miru tame ni maiasa boku wa mezameru no desu (I Wake Up Every Morning Just to Dream). In this Japanese translation the same passage has been edited:
Alfred is the bohemian type. He translates quite freely. He sometimes rewrites the prose. That’s his style.
Birnbaum tells me he has no idea why certain parts of the interview were deleted, but that he had been “shocked” when he first saw the comments in The Paris Review. “Murakami must have gotten us mixed up with the couple in ‘The Second Bakery Attack,’” he says. “With fiction writers there’s always a blurring of fiction and reality.”37
In February 1987, Hear the Wind Sing—translated by Birnbaum and again edited by Jules Young—was published as part of the Kodansha English Library series. Soon after, KI finally offered Birnbaum a contract for the book that would become A Wild Sheep Chase.
Birnbaum isn’t sure why KI changed its mind about the book it had originally deemed too long. He says it may have had to do, at least partly, with the brisk sales of Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing. It may also have been a reflection of KI’s ambition to find more success in the U.S. market. Either way, Birnbaum accepted the job and started working toward a December 1987 deadline.38
While Birnbaum was working on his translation, a new novel by Murakami, Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood), became a massive bestseller in Japan. Released in September 1987 in two hardcover volumes—one with a green cover and the other red—the book took off during the Christmas shopping season.