Читать книгу Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami - David Karashima - Страница 13

I want to thank the passionate editors at Kodansha International—in particular Elmer Luke. This Hawaii-born, Chinese-­American editor, who may be small in stature but is full of vitality, initially sold my work to the American market with great enthusiasm. Elmer started the engine.

—HARUKI MURAKAMI, foreword to Zō no shōmetsu: tanpen senshū 1980–1991 (The Elephant Vanishes)¹

Elmer Luke “Starts the Engine”

Since the late 1990s—for over a decade—Elmer Luke had split his time between Tokyo and New York City, “never really living in either place.” But exactly one week before the March 11, 2011, triple disaster in Japan—the earthquake that led to the tsunami that led to the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant—he and his partner, Robert Seward, a just-retired professor of media and politics at Meiji Gakuin University, cleared out their apartment in Nishi Nippori, and returned to their apartment in New York. They’d purchased a house upstate, hoping to maintain a city-and-country existence, but soon enough found the arrangement “not the easiest, especially the four-hour drive.” When out of the blue, unsolicited, someone expressed interest in buying their city apartment, they did not refuse. “It was unexpectedly freeing.” Luke and Seward now live the year round in Coopers­town, New York.²

The property they bought had belonged to a descendant of the writer James Fenimore Cooper, whose father had founded the town. In the basement of one of the small houses on the lot, Luke and Seward found a full set of Cooper’s novels among three bottles of aged wine, which “probably aren’t any good.” In their garden they grow Japanese cucumbers, edamame, shiso, kabocha, and fava beans. While Seward works on his dyes and pottery in the atelier behind the garden, Luke sits in their second-floor study, working only on books “of genuine interest” to him.³ On the shelves in Luke’s study are the books he has edited over the years, many of them English translations of Japanese literature: Masahiko Shimada’s Dream Messenger, translated by Philip Gabriel; Hiromi Kawakami’s Manazuru, translated by Michael Emmerich; and Alfred Birnbaum’s translations of Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance. There are also two novels that I translated: Hisaki Matsuura’s Triangle and Shinji Ishii’s Kutze, Stepp’n on Wheat.

Elmer Luke’s home, Cooperstown, New York

Luke was born in Honolulu in 1948, the fifth child and first son of Hawaii-born Chinese American parents. His mother’s family had immigrated from Canton Province in the late nineteenth century and his father’s family arrived, “probably,” in the early twentieth.⁴

Luke left Hawaii for the first time when he went to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, spending the summer at his eldest sister’s house on Long Island. But it was only when he moved to the Midwest for college that he came to realize that “Hawaii was an island.”

“In Hawaii you can’t escape your boundaries, the ocean surrounds you, literally, so you can’t escape your family, immediate and extended, your history, yourself—even who you were in elementary, middle, and high school. I love the ocean, and the land—the mountains and valley—is beautiful, but the place is somehow choking. I don’t think I would ever consider living there again.”⁵

When Luke enrolled at the University of Illinois in 1966, he found himself in a massive dorm. He was—as far as he recalls—the only nonwhite student out of two thousand men. Coming from multicultural Hawaii, Luke had “a stark realization of racial difference not experienced before.”⁶

“I remember this feeling of not wanting to stand out, wanting to blend in,” he tells me in an email. We talk in person many times in Tokyo, New York, and London, but continue to correspond by email and speak every so often on the phone once I start writing this book. “And if I did stand out, which was inevitable, I suppose, I did not want to be viewed as Asian (‘Oriental’ in those days)—an Asian who had this identity as Asian and only had Asian friends. I mean, I imagined I was bigger than that. An actually very messy identity thing since I was categorizing other Asians on campus not as individual human beings, but as Asians. Which was, in a way, how I imagined I was being categorized by white students.”⁷

Luke started as premed but found that organic chemistry “didn’t agree” with him, and he eventually declared his major in English literature and rhetoric.⁸ He enrolled in a creative writing class led by the writer Paul Friedman and began writing fiction. “Took me weeks and weeks before I handed in my first story, and I was stunned, when I read it to the class, which is what we had to do, that people actually thought it was good. I mean, stunned.

“Friedman was, for me, an excellent teacher. I remember he would circle things in the stories I submitted and I would ask him what was the problem. He’d say, no problem, I just wondered why you did it, why it was that way. I never forgot that. I mean, that a writer needed to be conscious of every word he writes. That’s what I try to do when I’m editing, make sure that the writer is aware of the why behind every written word.”⁹

Luke began to imagine an academic career. “In those days, for a PhD, you needed two foreign languages—now one will do.” Along with Russian (which he had started in high school), he signed up for Mandarin. He’d had eight years of Cantonese Chinese school in Hawaii, but he’d never learned proper grammar, so “it wasn’t a free ride, but it was not a struggle . . . If you think about the times—the late sixties, the Cold War, et cetera—I would have been perfect for the CIA! Though of course I never went near them.”¹⁰

Luke got involved in political movements on campus and went to protests against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. In his senior year, the first year of the draft, his birthday was picked 71st out of 366, meaning it was almost certain that he’d be drafted. He filed for conscientious objector status. In spite of this, he soon received notice to report for a physical. On the early morning chartered bus to Chicago, where the physical would take place, Luke found that every student had a plan for getting out of the draft. Luke himself had fasted and lost enough weight to be ineligible. He fasted on the two other occasions he was summoned for a physical, and each time he was found to be underweight, and so was able to avoid going to Vietnam. (His conscientious objector application had been placed on hold.) These experiences as a student in the sixties and seventies would later become a shared topic of discussion between Murakami and himself.

After college, Luke pursued a graduate degree in Chinese literature at the University of Michigan. It wasn’t just his interest in the subject that kept him in the Midwest. He had spent time at a summer institute at Indiana University, where “a woman I met” (who would become his wife) and his assigned roommate were both from the University of Michigan, and Luke had hoped that they could “keep the commune thing going.”

At the University of Michigan, Luke briefly made the acquaintance of Edward Seidensticker, known for his translations of The Tale of Genji as well as the works of Yasunari Kawabata and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Luke thought that Seidensticker’s translations were “works of very fine writing in themselves . . . There’s a reason, when Kawabata won the Nobel, he offered to share it with Seidensticker. I didn’t know him well at Ann Arbor. I was a graduate assistant to another professor [of Chinese] in the department [of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures], and we’d acknowledge each other as we passed by in the hall. My brush with his fame came when I was answering the department’s phones during lunch hour and a call came in for him from the National Book Foundation . . . Turned out it was for his winning the National Book Award for his translation of Kawabata’s Sound of the Mountain.”

If Luke had been thinking strictly in terms of securing a position in academia, the practical thing to do would have been to continue with East Asian studies, an emerging field where he had a comparative advantage (already being able to read Chinese characters). But Luke didn’t want to be cast as an “Asian studying Asia.” Deciding that he didn’t have the passion to commit himself to a field he had “pursued in part for the scholarship money,” Luke dropped out of the program, got married, and returned to Hawaii with his wife. He was hired as a writer for a state Department of Education project and, when that ended, as a janitor while his wife completed her degree at the University of Hawaii. Eventually he reapplied to graduate school, this time in American studies at the University of Hawaii, which had established one of the first American studies departments in the country.¹¹

Kyoto to New York (By Way of Cambridge, New Mexico, and Philadelphia)

In 1974, a year after completing his master’s degree, Luke moved to Japan with his wife, who had been awarded a fellowship to study in Kyoto.

I ask Luke how his parents felt about him moving to Japan. Luke’s father had been too old to be drafted in World War II, but his father’s younger brother was killed in France, and the family had vivid memories of Pearl Harbor. “My father recounted hearing the bombs dropping early on December 7—though he, like many people, thought it was military maneuvers. He climbed the slope near our house to take a look at all the action going on. Only later, though soon enough, I’d think, did they learn it was an attack. But growing up, I did not hear any anti-Japanese sentiment. I did hear stories about nightly blackouts, where the family had to cover up windows with black paper so no light could be seen from planes above, and I did hear about air-raid alarms when the family would hurry into the gully next to the house to hide and take shelter. They were stories about fear, cowering, but less about hating the enemy.”¹²

Still, Luke did have some concern about how his parents would react to his moving to Japan. “Japan has a very mixed history with the Chinese, the same way with Koreans. I was not brought up to love Japan. But my parents’ reaction was all positive and encouraging, surprising me . . . Years later, my parents went on an Asian tour. They loved Japan, found China backward, Hong Kong unruly.”¹³

It was the first time Luke had lived abroad. “While then-wife was doing research (we were now living separately) I was working part-time as an English editor (what else?) for CDI (Communication Design Institute), a think tank whose director was Hidetoshi Katō, who’s still alive, a sociologist who studied in the US, where he met my mentor, Reuel Denney . . . When Reuel learned I was going to Kyoto, he suggested to Kato that perhaps he could use my services . . . The gig was grounding during a very ungrounded time in life. Little did I know that Japan would prove to be so much of the ground in my life.

“(I am rambling, but your questions induce that): I hadn’t planned that Susan (that’s the wife) and I would live separately. I was unprepared for living on my own in Kyoto. But when you’re breaking up, things get either/or polarized—I answered an ad to live in a room in the apartment of a physician whose wife and two young kids had preceded him in going to the States for a fellowship . . . being a young neurologist, he was almost never there. From Friday morning, when he went to work, until Monday evening, he was gone completely. It was terrible. I’d never felt so alone. On weekends I’d take the train and go downtown to Kawaramachi just to be in bump-physical contact with the masses on the sidewalk—but when you’re breaking up, it’s something you have to go through—even as this aloneness may have been extreme. As an Asian I was absorbed into the flow of the street, but I did not know the language, knew no one, could speak to no one. I had a lot of conversations with myself. Got to know myself better.”¹⁴

Luke returned to Hawaii and completed his doctoral coursework and, on the introduction of Reuel Denney, went to Harvard to work on his dissertation on Gore Vidal with the playwright William Alfred. “Vidal caught my eye—early on he wrote of gay stuff, with innuendo and frankness and nastiness too, his historical fiction you couldn’t put down, and his nonfiction ranged wide and fluidly and wisely. But as his years stretched on, he grew tiresome (to me), revealing among other things a self-­righteousness and, after all, a sexual reactionariness that was a disappointment—he became sad and boring.”¹⁵

Luke also continued to write fiction. He would exchange stories with another student who was doing his PhD at Harvard at the time. Tim Parks—who abandoned his doctoral work at Harvard after a year and a half but went on to become an author, translator, and scholar—recalls that they would “read each other’s fiction aloud and give each other a few pages. It was all paper then. I can’t recall anything coming of those pieces. It was a kind of apprenticeship, for me at least. Elmer was attractively different from most of the grad school students. A little older than the others perhaps, determinedly cheerful, ironic, sharp, and witty. We had exciting conversations. And we came from totally different backgrounds. So it was fun.”

I ask Parks if he had any inkling at the time that Elmer would go on to become an editor rather than a writer or academic. “We’re talking about a time when I was twenty-two, twenty-three. I just didn’t think in terms of, is this guy going to be a writer or editor or what. Elmer was fun to be around. He’d been married, he was in a relationship with a man. It was all very adult and new to me . . . Elmer was very knowledgeable about contemporary American literature, poetry as well, which I knew little about, but was eager to understand. Reading it didn’t do much for me and I felt someone like Elmer could help me ‘get it.’ In general, he was into really writing and reading stuff that was being written now, whereas most of the students were still in a ‘let’s study the past’ mode. Academics. Elmer saw literature as really part of our lives, now. Something to be done. And that was encouraging for a guy like me, trying to write. And he was willing to read. I guess these were the qualities of an editor, but I never thought of that.”¹⁶

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

Back to Japan

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 Discovers Murakami

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 was still there. “I’d never lived as part of a majority before, and suddenly I was passing as Japanese, as one of the majority, and while that spared me stares or rudeness, it had another kind of alienated-minority effect . . . I’m thinking that—maybe, big maybe—this sense of alienation was part of the bond established with Haruki and Yōko [Murakami’s wife], who felt a similar sense (though different, of course).”²⁹

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

Updating Sheep

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, including in his speech at the Republican National Conference in 1988 as he was about to leave office, in which he encouraged his vice president George H. W. Bush to “win one for the Gipper.”⁴²

Jay Rubin notes that these changes were made to improve the appeal of the book for “an international readership,” but when I ask Luke what might be meant by that, he replies that it would have been more precise to say that they had “American—­particularly New York American—readers in mind.”⁴³ Both Birnbaum and Luke tell me that they felt that America was looking for a “contemporary” author and work. It was something that Murakami also noticed when he visited New York soon after the translation came out. Asked in an interview for Asahi Shimbun, one of the major dailies in Japan, what the publishing professionals he had met in New York seemed to be interested in, Murakami responded:

They wanted to know how young people in Japan today think and live. In America there is zero knowledge about these things. People read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, but the Japanese lifestyle has completely changed in the past twenty-five to thirty years. The novels translated into English, however, are from before that time, and they don’t give you a sense of life [in Japan] today. Though that may not be the only thing of value, I do think that there is room for more contemporary works to be translated.⁴⁴

When Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase) was initially published in Japan in 1982, the action set in the seventies was less than a decade old. When the book was being prepared for publication in English in 1989, it had been seven years since the book was first published in Japanese, and close to twenty years since the period in which the book was set. The efforts to make the book more contemporary may have been a way to compensate for this time lag as well as to expand the potential readership beyond traditional fans of Japanese literature.

In the latest Kindle version of the book, the date has been reinstated in the first chapter, so that it is no longer called “A Prelude” but “Part One: November 25, 1970.”⁴⁵ When I ask Lexy Bloom, Murakami’s current editor at Knopf, about this change, she tells me that despite some searching she is unable to pinpoint when or why it was made.⁴⁶ When I tell Luke about the change and ask him if he would put the dates back if he were in a position to edit the book now, he tells me that “the situation, including his [Murakami’s] popularity, is completely different now. It’s hard to say without rereading the book, but I guess I might leave them in.”⁴⁷ When I ask Murakami for his opinion, he looks puzzled. It’s clear to me that he is unaware of the change or had forgotten about it.⁴⁸

Of Sheep and Men

Generating attention for a new book published by a small publisher is never easy. It can be especially tricky when the book is a translation of a novel by an unknown writer. Luke began to work with the Kodansha International USA office in New York to position Murakami as an exciting new voice from Japan. Kodansha International USA would eventually change its name to Kodansha America and take on an editorial function, but at the time it was primarily charged with the sale and promotion of books produced by KI in Tokyo. “We gathered people from all kinds of places toward that end,” says Tetsu Shirai.⁴⁹

The business manager, Stephanie Levi, had arrived from Chase Manhattan Bank. Her father’s work had taken her to Tokyo in the sixties, when she was aged seven to thirteen. Having also spent her year abroad studying at the International Christian University, Levi was fluent in Japanese. Her husband, author Jonathan Levi, had helped relaunch the U.K. literary magazine Granta in 1979 with Bill Buford, and was the magazine’s U.S. editor at the time. Later, once Murakami got over his dislike of public events, Jonathan Levi would occasionally join him onstage for a conversation or reading.

Marketing director Gillian Jolis had worked at Simon & Schuster and the Free Press before joining KI. She makes a brief appearance in one of Murakami’s essays, in which he visits various publishing professionals in the Hamptons. In the piece, Jolis tells Murakami that John Irving had put his house up for sale and suggests, “Why don’t you buy it, Mr. Murakami?”⁵⁰

The publicist for KI-USA was Anne Cheng. Born in Taiwan, Cheng had moved to the U.S. when she was twelve. After studying English literature at Princeton and creative writing at Stanford, she had started working in publishing. Before coming to KI she had been at the educational publisher McGraw-Hill, and after leaving KI she went back to graduate school. She is now a professor of English literature at Princeton University. “It was while I was working at Kodansha, working with a lot of great literature (including the works of Haruki Murakami), that I realized I needed to go back to graduate school because there were books I was reading that I wanted to write about.”⁵¹

At the KI-USA offices in New York. Left to right: Gillian Jolis, Anne Cheng, Tetsu Shirai

The first decision made by the KI/KI-USA team—Jolis and Cheng in New York, Les Pockell and Luke in Tokyo—was to push back Sheep’s publication by a year to fall 1989. The team then discussed the need for a title that “would appeal to a Western audience.” Some ideas included An Adventure Surrounding Sheep (a more or less direct translation from the Japanese) and Of Sheep and Men (a nod to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men), but in the end, the team agreed on A Wild Sheep Chase, proposed by Birnbaum.⁵²

Birnbaum says that Of Sheep and Men was one of his suggestions but was “more of a joke than a real working title . . . A Wild Sheep Chase, on the other hand, was obviously a play on the common, now dated expression ‘a wild goose chase,’ which does convey something of the convoluted quirks of the plot. Surprisingly, to me at least, no one ever seems to comment on that.”⁵³

Mike Molasky, a professor at Waseda University, was living in Japan when Birnbaum was working on the translation. He recalls seeing Birnbaum, whom he had known well at the time, on the Marunouchi subway line one day, lugging a large computer (according to Birnbaum, a “totally non-portable Macintosh Portable”). When Molasky asked him what he was doing with the massive machine, Birnbaum explained that he was translating a book by Haruki Murakami. Then he added, “I decided to call it A Wild Sheep Chase. Don’t you think it’s a much better title than the original?”⁵⁴

Of Copy and Capital

Kodansha International budgeted $46,000 for the promotion of A Wild Sheep Chase. This money was spent on advance reading copies and postcards, ads in The New York Times, including one in the Sunday Book Review, and a co-op ad in the San Francisco Chronicle.⁵⁵

The advance reading copies featured the cover design by Shigeo Okamoto, who had also designed the cover of Murakami’s short story collection Kaiten mokuba no deddo hīto (Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round), published in Japan in 1985. When I ask Murakami about the cover, he says that he was not involved in the process and that he “left it all to Elmer.” “In Japan . . . I make very detailed requests including the style of the font. But in America I’m hands-off,” he says. “The one request I do make is to avoid ‘oriental’ designs.”⁵⁶

The advance reading copy of A Wild Sheep Chase

Birnbaum’s name was featured on the front cover of the book. Luke says that it was KI’s policy to recognize the translator’s work in this way and that it was probably something started by Stephen Shaw. When I ask Shaw about this, he responds that the decision was “(a) encouraged by the prominence that one or two translators in Europe such as Constance Garnett (for Dostoevsky) were given, and (b) by being puzzled when there was no reference to a translator at all, as if it was an Immaculate Conception.”⁵⁷

The description on the jacket flap of A Wild Sheep Chase emphasized the “originality” and “novelty” of the voice (“a voice the likes of which no Western reader of Japanese fiction will have encountered before”), the contemporariness of the work and author (“The time is now. The setting is Japan—minus the kimono and the impenetrable mystique of an exotic, distant culture”), and the fact that the book was Murakami’s debut in English (“Haruki Murakami’s dazzling debut in the West”).

In the spring of 1989, Gillian Jolis and Leslie Pockell (who was visiting New York) met with the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild in the hopes that they would pick up A Wild Sheep Chase.

“Book clubs were a big deal,” Luke says. “They had a built-in readership—mostly suburban, perhaps, less so in the cities where bookstores thrived (as they once did)—and members trusted the book club to select the kind of book they wanted or should want to read. So a book’s being picked up by a book club was indication of its appeal, salability, and the buyers (the staff who placed the orders) at bookstores and chains paid attention when that happened.”⁵⁸

The Literary Guild chose A Wild Sheep Chase as one of its selections. It was still unusual for book clubs to select works in translation at the time; Asahi Shimbun gave this as an example of the U.S. becoming more open to new Japanese literature.⁵⁹

A couple of weeks after publication, a large ad ran in The New York Times Book Review, calling A Wild Sheep Chase “The American Debut of Japan’s Premier Contemporary Writer” and using phrases such as “marvelously engaging,” “gripping plot,” “comic,” “fresh, brave” from responses to the early copies that had been sent out to reviewers.

Ad in The New York Times

The KI team was feeling the benefits of the strong Japanese economy (the Nikkei recorded an all-time high of 38,915.87 at the end of 1989)⁶⁰ and, more specifically, the backing of their parent company, Kodansha. “If this was five, ten years later,” Luke says, “I don’t know if there would have been the environment to invest so much money and manpower into the project.”⁶¹ Cheng said it was a benefit that extended to all of KI-USA’s projects; it meant that the publisher could be “dedicated to quality rather than simply the bottom line . . . So we could do gorgeous art books that are $300 apiece and tailored for libraries and other projects of love like that.”⁶²

Needless to say, a large promotional budget does not guarantee the success of a book. Being relatively new and small, KI had fewer connections and less prestige than its more established rivals; it may have been flush with economic capital, but its social and symbolic capital was limited. Luke, for instance, was forty years old when he joined KI. Given that he had “stumbled into” the profession, he didn’t have the same networks and influence that an editor of similar age would after working in the field for a couple of decades. The team had to find ways to borrow the networks and prestige of individuals and institutions already established in the U.S.⁶³

Luke met many of the journalists who would go on to write about Murakami’s work at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. He says that this eventually led to an Associated Press article calling Murakami a member of Japan’s literary “Brat Pack” and “perhaps the biggest sensation in Japanese publishing in recent years.”⁶⁴

The writer Robert Whiting also played a role in helping Luke and KI expand their media contacts. Whiting had been receiving attention for You Gotta Have Wa, his second book on Japanese professional baseball, which had been published in the summer of 1989 and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize later that same year. In June 1989, he had taken part in a three-week-long promotional tour in the U.S. and was interviewed “35 times in two and a half weeks.”⁶⁵

Luke and Whiting were both living in Kamakura at the time, and Luke had read and commented on the manuscript of You Gotta Have Wa before publication. (Luke’s name appears in the acknowledgments.) They were also planning to work together on a memoir of the Yomiuri Giants star Warren Cromartie (published by Kodansha America in 1991 under the title Slugging It Out in Japan: An American Major Leaguer in the Tokyo Outfield).

Whiting tells me that Luke was “a very good editor . . . I remember I submitted a manuscript that used Cromartie’s voice, as it was recorded during our interviews. The result was that the manuscript was flat. Elmer said so, quite emphatically. I had to go back and rewrite the whole thing creating a more reader-­friendly version of Cromartie’s speaking style, part fictional . . . I had a falling-out with Cromartie during the interview process. I would show up at his apartment sometimes and he would just be gone, no explanation, nothing. So towards the end I got fed up and quit. Elmer patched that up and even did one final interview himself with Cromartie and had a very frank discussion about racial discrimination, which proved to be a good addition to the book.”

When I ask Whiting about the publication of A Wild Sheep Chase, he tells me that he does not remember any details. “I just remember Elmer was very enthusiastic about Murakami.”⁶⁶

The Murakamis Go to New York

On May 10, 1989, Luke sent Murakami a fax reporting on the sale of paperback rights to A Wild Sheep Chase (to Plume for $55,000)⁶⁷ and asking him to take part in the promotional activities that were scheduled in New York that fall. Murakami declined. Several months later, Luke and Murakami met in person for the first time in Tokyo (together with another editor from KI), and on August 14, just three days before a copy of A Wild Sheep Chase arrived at the Murakamis’ home, Luke again asked Murakami to join him in New York. Murakami once again declined. On September 24, Luke asked again, saying that Birnbaum had become unable to attend, and that they had also managed to arrange an interview with The New York Times. Murakami finally relented.⁶⁸

Murakami and his wife, Yōko, landed in New York on October 21, and Luke and Shirai picked them up at the airport. Shirai remembers handing Murakami a copy of that day’s New York Times folded open to a story in the Arts section about him and A Wild Sheep Chase. The headline, “Young and Slangy Mix of the U.S. and Japan,” was followed by a tagline: “A best-selling novelist makes his American debut with a quest story.”⁶⁹ “Of course, it was something that had been in the works,” Shirai tells me, “but I was surprised by how well the timing worked out.”⁷⁰

Shirai and Luke had chosen a hotel on the Upper East Side, thinking Murakami, an avid runner, would like to be near Central Park. Ten years later, Murakami would write in an essay for the women’s magazine an an that, while he preferred the Village and SoHo with its many bookshops and secondhand record stores, he ended up staying uptown in New York because “the appeal of running in Central Park in the morning is too great.”⁷¹

Of the boutique hotels close to Central Park, the team at KI decided on the Stanhope Hotel. Luke says that he suggested the Stanhope, “which might seem odd (uptown, old-world-ish, maybe even stuffy, not hip or cool),” because it was the setting for The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.⁷² When Murakami had visited the U.S. in 1984 at the invitation of the Department of Defense, he had interviewed Irving while jogging through Central Park with him. Two years later he had also translated Irving’s debut novel, Setting Free the Bears, into Japanese.

Murakami spent eleven days promoting his book in New York. Many of the interviews were conducted in KI-USA’s new office, which had a large poster of the cover of A Wild Sheep Chase on one of its walls. Cheng says that her most vivid memory of working on the book was “me trying to get this huge, glossy, bigger than life, poster reproduction of the book cover—that startling peacock blue background and the sheep in the foreground—to hang in our beautiful glass offices, next to the fresh ikebana arrangement that Mr. Shirai ordered for the entryway every week. There were a bunch of logistic and mundane details, but when the poster (almost five feet tall) was finally hung up, it was breathtaking and felt like a symbolic tribute to a book that was also larger than life.”⁷³

KI-USA/Kodansha America’s offices, New York

At the time, Murakami was already known for avoiding media attention. But during his time in New York, he agreed to an interview with Asahi Shimbun/Aera in which he told the reporter that he wanted to publish English translations of three of his novels, Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood), and Dansu dansu dansu (Dance Dance Dance), “at the rate of one book every year” as well as “short stories in magazines.”⁷⁴

In addition to individual interviews, Cheng thinks that there may also have been a book party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. “I may not be getting the details right . . . I seem to remember—please double check with Mr. Shirai—we had a row of seven sushi chefs making exquisite fresh sushi to order. It was a wonderful event.”⁷⁵

Shirai has no recollection of the Helmsley Palace event, but tells me it may simply have been that he hadn’t attended and that Stephanie Levi would have a better idea.⁷⁶ Levi says that she does remember a big party at the Helmsley Palace, but isn’t sure either whether it was for A Wild Sheep Chase or not.⁷⁷ When I ask Luke about this, he laughs. “No way! Really? Would be amazing if it were true. True, they could have had it and I wasn’t there. I mean, the Helmsley Palace was a pretty big deal back then. If Gillian were alive, she’d be the one to know. The Seven Sushi Chefs. Sounds like a parody of a Japanese film.”⁷⁸

A private party was also held at the Levis’ apartment, attended by the Murakamis, Kodansha staff, and researchers from Columbia, as well as the editor Gary Fisketjon and the literary agent Andrew Wylie, who, according to Jonathan Levi, were “the only two Americans [he] knew who had heard of Murakami” and who were “both very keen to work with him.”⁷⁹ One guest recalls coming back into the living room after being given a tour of the Levis’ apartment to find Andrew Wylie still talking to Murakami. The Murakamis left a short while later, saying they had plans to go to a jazz club.⁸⁰

Luke also accompanied the Murakamis on visits to bookstores. A Wild Sheep Chase, he says, was prominently displayed in Three Lives, “a terrific independent store in Greenwich Village that was my favorite—and that, many years later, would host midnight opening parties on publication dates of Murakami books.” Luke says that Murakami may have signed books, but that no public events were planned.⁸¹ It would be another couple of years before Murakami would do his first ever public event with Jay McInerney at the PEN America Center.⁸²

“Haruki was excited, though guardedly, not effusively, in his Haruki way . . . We [KI] were careful about overdosing him with publicity, and he was a bit shy about availing himself, but he was willing to participate. Not as guarded as he is now.”⁸³

In the afterword of his 1990 collection of travel writing, Tōi taiko (Far-off Drums), Murakami shared his impressions of the New York trip, writing that although it had been some time since he had last visited the city, he “did not feel especially out of sorts,” and that while he would never want to live in New York, the fact that people were direct “in some ways made it less uncomfortable than Tokyo.”⁸⁴ Nearly thirty years later, Murakami tells me that he “remembers the response in New York being especially big.” When I show him the New York Times review with his photo on it, he laughs and says, “I was a lot younger back then.”⁸⁵

Without a Kimono in Sight

The New York Times review that appeared on the day of the Murakamis’ arrival in the city had been written by Herbert Mitgang, who had been at the paper since immediately after the Second World War.⁸⁶ He had just published Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors and had also reviewed Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa several months earlier.⁸⁷

Mitgang wrote that A Wild Sheep Chase was a “bold new advance in a category of international fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific novel.” He continued:

This isn’t the traditional fiction of Kōbō Abe (“The Woman in the Dunes”), Yukio Mishima (“The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea”) or Japan’s only Nobel laureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (“Snow Country”). Mr. Murakami’s style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving.⁸⁸

Mitgang also emphasized that “there isn’t a kimono to be found in ‘A Wild Sheep Chase.’” Actually, a kimono does appear in the novel, when the protagonist visits the Boss’s residence and an “elderly maid in kimono entered the room, set down a glass of grape juice, and left without a word.” But there is a chance that Mitgang was influenced by the description on the book jacket: “The setting is Japan—minus the kimono.”⁸⁹

Mitgang concludes by stating, “What makes ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’ so appealing is the author’s ability to strike common chords between the modern Japanese and American middle classes, especially the younger generation, and to do so in stylish, swinging language. Mr. Murakami’s novel is a welcome debut by a talented writer who should be discovered by readers on this end of the Pacific.” After Mitgang’s review appeared, Yomiuri Shimbun—the Japanese broadsheet with the largest circulation in the world—published an article headlined “US Newspaper New York Times Lauds Haruki Murakami.”⁹⁰

Mitgang’s was the first of many reviews that placed Murakami in contrast to the “Big Three” postwar writers in Japan. In The Washington Post, novelist/journalist Alan Ryan wrote, “Readers who treasure the refined sensibilities of Kawabata and Tanizaki, the grand but precisely etched visions of Mishima, or even the dark formalities of Kōbō Abe, are in for a surprise when they read Murakami,” and went on to say that he was not surprised to learn that Murakami had translated authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Theroux, Raymond Carver, and John Irving. Ryan also suggests that “Murakami echoes the state of mind of the ordinary Japanese, caught between a fading old world and a new one still being invented, willing to find magic but uncertain where to look.”⁹¹

Not everyone was thrilled by Murakami’s arrival on American shores. One of the least enthusiastic reviews was by another Japanese novelist. Foumiko Kometani had received the Akutagawa Prize (an award for emerging writers that Murakami was short-listed for twice but never won) in 1986 for Sugikoshi no ma­tsuri (translated into English by the author as The Passover). In her Los Angeles Times review, “Help! His Best Friend Is Turning Into a Sheep!” Kometani criticized the narrative voice of A Wild Sheep Chase for “sound[ing] more like a black Raymond Carver or a recycled Raymond Chandler or some new ghetto private eye than a contemporary Japanese novelist” and suggested that his readers in Japan are “people who have taken their places sheep-like on the conveyor belt of Japanese society as salaried men and housewives, but still like to harbor images of themselves as cool and hip and laid-back, sophisticated and aware, and, yes, above all, Western.”

Kometani was a translator herself (she translated not only her own novel into English but also her husband’s nonfiction books into Japanese), and her otherwise scathing review is kind to the translator: “Not that Alfred Birnbaum’s excellent translation has not gotten Murakami’s sentences down exactly right.”⁹²