In the meantime, Luke found himself making very little progress on his dissertation on Vidal. Eventually he decided to give up on finishing his PhD. He had a new plan: to move to New York and get a job in publishing. “It may have been a reflection of the times, where suddenly, it seemed, Asians were emerging more visibly in technology, finance, sciences, advertisements, popular culture too. They had haircuts I never had! An Asian in the US who had college loans would not think of going into publishing since the start-up pay was plainly terrible; they’d go into medicine, law, science, finance . . . I had no loans, by the way, made it through school with jobs that waived tuition and then had assistantships and fellowships, so didn’t have that urgency—or was naive enough not to have it.”17
Before moving to New York, Luke decided that he would first drive to New Mexico to see one Robert Seward, whom he had met in San Francisco, and who had begun a job as assistant professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. In four days, Luke drove cross-country in his “beat-up, rusting” Volkswagen Beetle. The idea had been to leave the car with Seward and fly back to New York. But Luke “just ended up never leaving.” Instead he got a job with the Institute of Public Law, editing civil procedure, and then concentrated on renovating an old Victorian house they’d bought. He also continued to write short stories (“a manageable form”) in the evenings on an IBM Selectric that Seward had bought him. One story was published in Canto: Review of the Arts alongside nine other authors, including John Updike.18
Luke did eventually leave New Mexico, but only when Seward accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania. “That was amusing—denied tenure at New Mexico, goes on to Ivy League school.” In Philadelphia, Luke worked as a freelance editor for university presses and eventually got a job editing statistics papers at an institute at the Wharton School, a job where “there was no creativity but there was rigor.” Luke speculates that this may have had some influence on the way he later demanded “understanding and clarity” even when he was editing fiction. He also continued to send stories to magazines and “got positive responses but no bites,” and would eventually give up his own writing, deciding that he had the ability to “improve somebody else’s work but not my own.”19
When Seward was offered a job by New York University, the two moved to New York. Luke was thrilled to finally find himself there. After serving as a reader for agents, publishing houses, and book clubs (“another way to be exploited and I happily did it”), he finally managed to land an editorial assistant job with a publisher. “I was much older than the usual editorial assistant . . . I suppose I did think I was better than what I was doing, but I did it—and met people and learned how things worked.”
Luke was eager to publish books that would be recognized by the literary community in New York. “And in my ambition, I didn’t want to be identified professionally as being an editor who was, again, Asian who did Asian books, though the first original title I published was Japanese Business Etiquette.”20
Luke bounced around a number of publishers: Pinnacle, Warner, Atheneum, where he worked on “a biography of Laurence Olivier, a book on running, a biography of Gordon of Khartoum, etc.” While he was “pleased to have done them,” they were not the kind of books he had imagined himself publishing. “The great irony is that I struggled in New York—Asians in publishing were few and far between then (I think I counted six); there were very few nonwhites in the business, so of course nonwhites stood out, were not neutrally viewed. Different expectations, different prejudices, different. One felt one should not stand out, or had to stand out brilliantly if at all.”21
In 1987, Seward was once again offered a position in another city—a professorship at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and Yokohama. Until then, Luke had gone wherever Seward’s academic career had taken him, but he “wasn’t jazzed” about going to Japan. “For one, I had bad Japan memories (ex-wife left me in Kyoto), but for another, professionally I was focusing more on the West—dreaming about publishing good fiction and nonfiction, having a career that was not Asia-focused.”22
Luke was afraid that moving to Japan would derail his career. It wasn’t even clear if he would be able to find a job in publishing. But once he started looking around, he heard of an opening at the Tokyo office of Kodansha International.
Luke’s interview was arranged by Tetsu Shirai. Murakami refers to Shirai in one of his essays as “the President of Kodansha America, and the type of person who didn’t bother with the typical Japanese way of doing things and allowed the American staff the freedom to do the work they needed to do.”23 (Shirai was actually the executive vice president.) Shirai had started out in sales in Kodansha’s headquarters in Tokyo and had used the study abroad program offered by the company to take courses in marketing at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He took charge of Kodansha’s New York office in 1983, a post he would hold until the fall of 1991.
Kodansha International had been looking for someone who could run the editorial department in Tokyo and help their books break into the U.S. market. The company already had a handful of skilled editors, mostly from the U.K., but none had experience working in U.S. publishing. Shirai was tasked with identifying candidates in New York, and Luke was one of them.24 Shirai recalls that Luke “had yet to establish his career as an editor, but he was full of vitality, and I could really sense his desire to work in Japan and his confidence that he could make a contribution.”25
For the director position, KI ultimately decided to hire Leslie Pockell, an editor who had worked at St. Martin’s and Doubleday, but called Luke and asked him if he might be interested in working in Tokyo under Pockell. The proposed compensation package “wasn’t anything to complain about either,” Luke says. “Colleagues [at Kodansha International] and I never compared, but my frame of reference was New York, and KI was a plus, and got to be more of a plus as endaka [a strong yen] took hold. I think the exchange rate was 130 to 135 yen to the dollar when I began at KI. When I left, it was just above 100. Big difference on that basis alone.”26
Elmer Luke in Tokyo, 1988
Luke and Seward decided to share a house in Kamakura, south of Tokyo, with Michitarō Tada, a scholar of French literature, and his wife, Chieko. “The Kamakura house was a large property, deep in the valley and up on a hillside, with a big Japanese garden (I planted a small vegetable garden too) and a pretty nice unobstructed view looking toward the sea (which I don’t think we could see, though). (Our cat was outdoors a lot, in fact was outdoors when we were at work.) It was an old house that’d been long unoccupied, built for a wealthy family. It was uninsulated (frigid in winter), and could have used better construction, and was a bit too ‘close to nature’ with mukade [centipedes], shiro ari [termites], nomi [fleas] (in summer, in the tatami), and kabi [mold] such as I’d never seen (long hairy green stuff growing on shoes). But it was enormous, as I said, and good for having people over.”27
Elmer Luke’s cat, Liliʻuokalani
The commute from Kamakura to Tokyo was just under two hours one way. Luke was late to work “almost every day,” but also tended to stay late “like a proper salaryman. I even did the whole thing of wearing suits to work every day. To surrender yourself to your surroundings. That was still important back then.” When he left the company several years later, Luke was handed a memo by a woman in human resources indicating “the exact number of days I hadn’t been late . . . which weren’t many.”28
His second time around in Japan was better, but the sense of alienation