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The first three novels I read by Murakami . . . were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was desperate to know more about Birnbaum.

—WENDY LESSER, Why I Read¹

The Making of a “Bohemian” Translator

Alfred Birnbaum lives in a narrow two-story house near Ino­kashira Park in west Tokyo with his wife, Thi, and their two cats, Koko and Chacha. The structure had been an abandoned boardinghouse when he purchased it around ten years ago; he has since transformed it into a unique, charming, self-designed home. The living room, which is on the second floor, rises to an open-beam ceiling. A wood-burning fireplace has been situated in a corner overlooking train tracks that connect two popular hubs of the city, Kichijōji and Shibuya. When a train stops at the crossing, Birnbaum walks over to the window and waves at the people in the train. Nobody glances in his direction.

There are fewer books lining the bookshelf than you might expect in the house of a literary translator. Birnbaum explains that while he is almost never away from an open book, he has been on the move for most of his life, so once he’s done with a book he leaves it behind or gives it away. Anyway, this house does not have the kind of space that can afford walls of books. This is Tokyo, after all. The ones that have managed to stay on his shelf include The Book of Dave and Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, by Will Self (“An excellent writer, great sense of humor”); Zadie Smith’s NW (“Can’t remember if I read that”); Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (“A gift”); and a range of novels in Spanish, including those by Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges (“Those I read many times”).

He seems to have no books by Haruki Murakami. When I point this out, Birnbaum shrugs. “They still send them to me . . . don’t think they sent me the latest yet . . . but the others should be somewhere.”²

Packed into the shelves next to the books are artworks he has created on a specialty printer at Kobe Design University, where he briefly served as a visiting professor. There are long handscroll prints collaged from photographs. On the walls are masks Birnbaum has collected from his travels throughout Mexico and Asia.

Birnbaum met his wife in 1990 when he first visited Yangon, in Myanmar. They married in 1998 in a ceremony in Yangon attended by friends from around the world; Murakami was one of the guests. For the next several years, the couple moved with the seasons, spending their winters in Myanmar, where the hot air suited Birnbaum; summers in Seattle, when the rains ceased; and the spring and fall in Japan. But when the Burmese government, in a moment of bureaucratic confusion, blacklisted him and refused to renew his visa, he found himself suddenly unable to go “home.” He was eventually allowed reentry to the country, and he now visits regularly, though not as often as before.

When Birnbaum decided to buy a place in Tokyo, he could not find a single bank willing to give a foreigner and freelance translator a loan, so he began looking for a place he could purchase in cash. He put together enough money to buy this property, standing on a small plot of land by the train tracks, for which no other buyer had emerged. A handyman who takes pride in doing things himself, he knocked down the walls, put in new stairs, and reworked the ceilings. More than ten years on, he is still working on the house. The latest project is a hinoki bath he has squeezed into a two-mat space on the first floor. The fig tree he planted soon after moving in has reached the roof and last year produced several kilograms of fruit. Birnbaum still travels out of Japan every few months, but he finally feels, he says, like he has “settled down.”³

Alfred Birnbaum’s home, west Tokyo

Escapes

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

The Waseda Years

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 too. His new official status as a grad student meant he was subject to unspoken rules and obligations—none of which had been required of him when he was a one-year fellow (essentially a guest) of the Ministry of Education. When his professor asked him to change his research topic “to Nara period sculpture or whatever it was that [the professor] was researching at the time,” Birnbaum took umbrage and left Waseda.¹⁵ Years later, he would go on to a master’s program at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and, for a short period, to teach creative writing back at Waseda, but he says that he never again considered taking up residence within academia.

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

Becoming a Translator

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

Birnbaum Discovers Murakami

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

The “Immature” Novellas

Birnbaum assumed that the manuscript he handed KI would be released as a hardcover, like Ryū Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue. But the copy of the book that arrived in his mailbox in the fall of 1985 was a slim, pocket-sized paperback.

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

Europe Calling

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. By January 1988 it had sold a combined total of 800,000 copies, and by the end of that year this number had exploded to 3.55 million.³⁹ By 2009, sales of the book in Japan alone had surpassed 10 million copies.⁴⁰

Birnbaum read Noruwei no mori only after KI asked him to translate it. He found it to be “missing the humor and surreal aspects I like” and “a bit sentimental,” but agreed to take on the translation.⁴¹ In a published conversation with Motoyuki Shibata, a translator of American literature and professor emeritus of Tokyo University, Murakami jokingly suggests that Birnbaum had translated Norwegian Wood purely “to make a living.”⁴² When I ask Birnbaum about this he says, “Sure, earning a living was a big part of it.”⁴³

Once Birnbaum had managed to put away some savings, and to complete his stint as a curator of two video art events in Tokyo, he packed up his belongings, left them with a friend, and boarded a plane to Spain. He had a gig in hand to cover Europe for a new magazine, launched by the Japanese publishing house Shinchōsha. He sublet an apartment in Barcelona and used it as a base from which to travel around Europe. In Birnbaum’s view, however, the editorial team seemed to have very little interest in any perspectives unrelated to trends in Japan. Birnbaum kept sending feature proposals to Tokyo, all of which were rejected. Even so, it was an exciting time to be in Europe and to “witness the world changing right in front of [him]” as the Iron Curtain fell.⁴⁴

The first issue of 03: TOKYO Calling was published in December 1989. It focused on New York and its cover was a photo of Spike Lee (who had just directed Do the Right Thing). Other features included a joint interview of Gary Fisketjon—who would eventually become Murakami’s editor—and Jay McInerney, whose Bright Lights, Big City had become a bestseller in a Japanese translation by the novelist Gen’ichirō Takahashi. McInerney would interview Murakami in New York several years later.⁴⁵

Birnbaum was disappointed that the magazine was placing such a strong emphasis on New York. He wasn’t a fan of the city, although his father’s family was from there and he had occasionally visited over the years. So what if it was the self-appointed center of the universe? He felt that the art world there “was too much of a game for showmen, a real estate market requiring salesmanship” and that the city was generally not “a place for introverts or pseudo-intellectuals like myself.”⁴⁶ “The Japanese are always looking toward America,” he tells me. “They need to get over this addiction.”⁴⁷

While seeking out projects and writing for 03: TOKYO Calling, Birnbaum continued working on his Murakami translations, completing a draft of A Wild Sheep Chase. He submitted the manuscript to KI. Several months passed, and then an editor he’d never heard of before got in touch. His name was Elmer Luke.