At KI Luke worked on craft and architecture books, a collection of short stories by Harumi Setouchi, and a reissue of the classic The Book of Tea. “I must have done a reasonable enough job, because Pockell then handed me Birnbaum’s translation of Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase).”30
Minato Asakawa, executive vice president of KI’s Tokyo office at the time, tells me that he had been of the opinion that Murakami should be translated and edited by people who “shared the ‘pop’ feelings in his writings.”31 On the other hand, Stephen Shaw, who had already been working for KI for more than twenty years then, remembers that he had been “put off” by some of Murakami’s early work in English—“his early work seemed so static, as if the needle got stuck on a long-playing record of quiet jazz”—and “rather grandly, handed over the job to Elmer.”32
Luke, for his part, says that he does not recall being passed the job from Shaw. “His decision must have preceded my arrival. I do know that Asakawa told me that he and Les (as co-editorial directors) had discussed and thought that there’d be a good fit between Haruki and me, our being the same age and of kindred sensibility (sort of).”
Luke also suggests that there was some tension between the old-timers in Tokyo and new editors who had come from New York. “I don’t know what they [the old-timers] were told, but in a way we were given special consideration . . . There might have been the sense that we knew more, could provide a lift. We didn’t, not about the kaisha [company] anyway, and of course, we were beaten down immediately!”33
When I ask Shaw how the other editors responded to the arrival of the New York editors, he responds, “Not hostilely at all. But it was immediately apparent that their New York publishing habits were ill-suited to Tokyo. And neither of them spoke much Japanese, which hampered their efforts.”34
While Luke had never read Murakami, he was not unfamiliar with the name. The literary critic Norihiro Katō, to whom Luke had been introduced in Montreal in the early eighties, had recommended him highly. Katō, who died in 2019, recalled Luke coming to visit him soon after his arrival in Tokyo to start his job, to ask him for some names of promising young contemporary Japanese writers. “Topping the list was Haruki Murakami, followed by Gen’ichirō Takahashi. I explained their work in quite some detail. If I remember correctly, some others on the list included Ryū Murakami, Kenji Nakagami, Yoshikichi Furui, and Yumiko Kurahashi, but I wasn’t sure that these writers would reach a wide readership in translation.”
Katō had written relatively long pieces of criticism on both Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase) and Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) and felt confident that these two works would be well received in the U.S. “On the other hand, I thought that Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood) was too sentimental and would not be received well outside Japan. I clearly turned out to be wrong about that, but until I witnessed the warm reception of Jay Rubin’s translation of the book, I was pessimistic about its possibilities—maybe Asia, I thought, but not Europe.”35
As with the first two Murakami titles, A Wild Sheep Chase had been slotted for publication as part of the Kodansha English Library series. But, according to Luke, the team at KI—including Pockell, Asakawa, and himself—had “roundly agreed” that “this was bigger than eigo bunko [Kodansha English Library series].” Luke also says that “Birnbaum’s translation blew me away—it was witty, word-playful, ironic, creative.” Luke was convinced that he, working with Birnbaum, could “make every sentence sing” and appeal to a wider audience than any before. “It was a great story, thrilling actually, the unfolding, the digressions, the woman’s ear, the Sheepman, the Mafioso, the Rat, the resolution. It really was like nothing I’d read in any literature.”
I ask Luke if his early experiences in Japan somehow helped him better relate to the protagonist in Murakami’s fiction. “I think this narrative theme of Haruki’s—sensitive, un-macho, lonely, newly single male on a journey of (re)discovery—is something that is the basis of his wild popularity,” Luke responds. “And the Sheepman here is the agent—foreign, spiritual, magical—that contributes, empowers, affirms his sense of self. So, yeah, for sure there was a resonance.”36
When Luke started editing A Wild Sheep Chase, Birnbaum was still traveling around Europe from his base in Barcelona. The two first met when Birnbaum returned to Japan for a short visit. “Alfred was staying at his friend’s place and he asked if I’d like to come there,” says Luke. “He was very polite and even offered me tea and manju.”37
When I mention this to Birnbaum, who had initially said that he had no memory of their first meeting, he says, “Ah, I remember now. It was at the office slash home of a designer friend of mine. But I certainly don’t remember serving him manju.”38
How did Luke approach editing the book? One of the most significant changes—as has been noted by Jay Rubin, Minami Aoyama, and other scholars—is that the published translation leaves out dates from chapter and section headings that would set the novel in the seventies. For example, Part 1, which was “1970/11/25” in the Japanese original, is rendered “A Prelude.” Part 2, “July 1978,” is translated “July, Eight Years Later.” And Part 3, “September 1978,” becomes “September, Two Months Later.” Similarly, in Part 5, the chapter whose literal translation would have been “The Rat’s First Letter (Postmarked December 21, 1977)” is “The Rat’s First Letter (Postmarked December 21st, One Year Ago),” and “The Rat’s Second Letter (Postmarked May, 1978)” is “The Rat’s Second Letter (Postmarked May, This Year).”
Dates have also been omitted from the body of the English text. “I met her in autumn nine years ago, when I was twenty and she was seventeen” was, in the original Japanese, “I met her in the autumn of 1969, when I was twenty and she was seventeen,” and the final sentence of Part 1—“July, eight years later, she was dead at twenty-six”—has been changed from “July 1979, she was dead at twenty-six.”
One paragraph in the first chapter of the English translation begins, “I still remember that eerie afternoon. The twenty-fifth of November.” A literal translation of the original would be “I still remember clearly that strange afternoon of November 25, 1970.” This refers to the day that the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima publicly committed ritual suicide after failing to inspire a coup d’état to restore power to the emperor. The passage on the following page of the book, where Mishima is mentioned in passing, is retained in the English translation:
It was two in the afternoon, and Yukio Mishima’s picture kept flashing on the lounge TV. The volume control was broken so we could hardly make out what was being said, but it didn’t matter to us one way or the other.39
Readers outside of Japan may not recognize the reference to Mishima’s suicide even with the mention of the year. Without the year, however, it seems virtually impossible to make the connection, especially because it was not all that unusual for Mishima, who also starred in films, to be on television.
The book is updated in more subtle ways as well. The title of chapter 24, which is “Iwashi no tanjo” in the Japanese original and translates literally to “The Birth of Sardine,” is, in Birnbaum’s translation, “One for the Kipper” in English. “Iwashi” is the name given to the protagonist’s cat by a limo driver, because the protagonist is “treating him like a herring after all.”40 In Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Jay Rubin has suggested that, given that the action was set in 1978, the novel “should not have contained—and does not in the original—this allusion to the famous movie line ‘Make it one for the Gipper,’ which flourished during the Reagan years after 1980.”41 Reagan had used the phrase as a political slogan throughout his tenure as president,