In Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, author and translator David Karashima examines the emergence of Haruki Murakami as a global literary phenomenon, bringing together an incredible amount of information surrounding this towering figure of contemporary Japanese literature—including a conversation with the man himself—and putting his eye for detail to excellent use as he seeks to uncover everything that went into the establishment of the “Murakami industry” in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this meticulous work—first published in Japanese in 2018 and now in English by Soft Skull Press—Karashima sheds light on the mysteries of Murakami’s translation into English (including an answer as to why, for example, dozens of pages were cut from the published translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) and demonstrates the extent to which the process of bringing an author from one language to another involves countless decisions and a small army of agents, publishers, editors, and—of course—translators.
In this interview, conducted by Editor-at-Large for Japan, David Boyd, Karashima discusses Murakami’s translators, a potential re-translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and how Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami found its way into the English language.
David Boyd (DB): In your book, we meet all the major players in Murakami’s orbit, but it’s clear that the stars of your story are the translator Alfred Birnbaum and the editor Elmer Luke. Why did you choose to focus on them?
David Karashima (DK): In my mind, at least, the individuals that take center stage in the book are Birnbaum, Luke, and Jay Rubin, although I do feel that all of the dozens of people who speak in the book have important episodes to relate. There are perhaps two main reasons that Alfred Birnbaum and Elmer Luke stand out in the book. First, I decided—at least for this first book—to focus on the years when Murakami’s work first began appearing in English (1985 to 1998), because this was a period that relatively little was known about; Birnbaum and Luke played important roles as trailblazers during this time. I remember a staff member of the Murakami Office telling me that these (especially the eighties and early nineties) were the “black box years” for them too. The story of the quarter-century since Murakami began to really break through—with the publication of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle—would have a different cast of central characters, although Jay Rubin would still be one of them. I also think that Birnbaum and Luke perhaps come to life in the book because it has been many years since they were involved in what Murakami himself calls the “Murakami industry” and are therefore in a position to reflect more openly on their experience. Many people—including Murakami himself—were kind enough to talk to me for the book, but most people’s responses (quite understandably) tended to be more measured.
DB: When people talk about Murakami’s translators, they usually focus on Birnbaum and Rubin. People describe them as opposites—Birnbaum the Bohemian and Rubin the Academic. In your book, you quote Murakami: “My style has changed from around 1990. My prose has become more meticulous, so it’s a problem if Alfred translates it freely. I want my work to be translated properly . . .” What importance do you assign to “the changing of the guard”? What does that moment mean to Murakami in translation?
DK: Birnbaum, Rubin, Philip Gabriel, and Ted Goossen are all terrific translators and I have a lot of admiration for the work that they do—not only translating Murakami, but introducing other Japanese (and in the case of Birnbaum also Burmese) writers to English readers, both as translators and editors. Murakami says that he has trouble distinguishing between the translations by his different English-language translators, but his American editors have suggested that each translator has his (and people have pointed out to me that, unlike with other languages, all of Murakami’s English-language translators have been men) own style. I imagine people compare Birnbaum and Rubin for two reasons. One, because they were the first two translators into English of Murakami’s book-length works (although Gabriel and Goossen both translated a few short stories early on). And, two, because they’ve translated a number of the same or similar works that many readers feel very attached to, such as Norwegian Wood and parts of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The “Birnbaum the Freestyling Bohemian versus Rubin the Meticulous Academic” dichotomy seems to have first captured people’s imaginations when Murakami tried to give credit to his translators in interviews he gave in the US and the idea has been explored by others since. It’s catchy, and there must be some truth to it, but I wonder if it doesn’t impede understanding of the complexity of each translator’s approach and the different contexts in which they were undertaking their translations.
DB: It absolutely does . . .
DK: Regarding the “changing of the guard,” Stephen Snyder, who is himself one of the most accomplished translators of Japanese literature into English, has suggested in his insightful essay “The Murakami Effect” (while acknowledging that it may seem “too cynical” a view) that the switching of translators “from a talented but ‘interventionist’ freelancer to a Harvard professor” (together with the switching of publishers to Knopf, signing with a major US agency, and maintaining of a close relationship with The New Yorker) was part of Murakami’s “conscious management of his global career.” My understanding of this is evolving, and things will become clearer as more of Murakami’s papers (especially correspondence) are made available, but the sense I have at the moment is that decisions regarding the selection of translators were largely practical. None of the people involved at the time had much experience helping a contemporary Japanese novelist make inroads into the US/UK publishing markets. Murakami knew very little about the publishing market outside of Japan, the academic translators were new to commercial publishing, and the US agent had never worked with a writer in translation. Nobody expected Murakami to become the international phenomenon he has become. It seems like the people in the position of deciding on translators simply wanted someone who would deliver a solid, publishable manuscript on time. As both Stephen Snyder and Murakami himself have suggested, however, there is no doubt that the “publishing hub” Murakami established in New York was crucial to his international success.
DB: It’s probably worth mentioning that your book is also a translation. You first wrote Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami in Japanese. How did you find self-translating? Were you tempted to change anything in the book for an English-language audience? Did writing the book in English change your perspective in some way?
DK: The Japanese edition of the book with the same title—except in Japanese of course—was published in 2018 by Misuzu Shobo. Most of that book was written in Japanese, but many of the interviews were conducted in English, and some sections I actually wrote originally in English. The English edition is based on the Japanese edition, but is essentially an adaptation. I left out things (about the Anglophone publishing industry, for example) that I had put into the Japanese edition thinking they would be interesting to Japanese readers. I also managed to do a few additional interviews and gain access to more correspondence as I was rewriting the book in English, so there are new sections in the American edition. I also learned a lot from working with Yuka Igarashi—my super-talented and tireless editor at Soft Skull—who did some significant structural editing. There’s a quote from Murakami in the book: “[Elmer] is also an American editor, so his mentality was completely different from that of Japanese editors. American editors love editing. They love to cut a lot and move passages around.” When Yuka and I were editing the book using track changes, she highlighted this quote and wrote “I guess I can’t argue with that! (:” I thought that was great.
DB: As Masatsugu Ono recently wrote for The Paris Review, when Murakami debuted, many critics in Japan saw his style as “translationese.” This connects to something we often hear—Murakami has to be the easiest novelist to translate into English because his writing is already steeped in the language. I’m personally inclined to agree with Ono, who wrote in the article that he never had that impression when he read Murakami. As Ono says, “[Murakami’s] writing did not feel like translationese to me at all. Rather, I had a strong feeling that his Japanese was our Japanese, one that I also lived and breathed. I was struck by the fact that one could write a novel in that kind of language.” What are your thoughts on this?
DK: Given the relatively rigid hierarchical structure of the Japanese literary field (centered around literary magazines, prize committees, etc.) at the time, the individuals who were in a position to publicly express their opinion on Murakami’s work were, almost without exception, significantly older men. It comes as no surprise to me that these men felt that Murakami’s Japanese was different from the Japanese used in mainstream literary work up to that point. I was born in 1979 (the year Murakami made his debut with Hear the Wind Sing), grew up in a bilingual household, and first read Murakami in the late nineties when I was a university student. My sense of Japanese is clearly different from the men who were criticizing—and I do think the response was largely critical—Murakami’s work in the late seventies and early eighties, but the language that Murakami used in his novels and essays didn’t strike me as “translationese” when I first came across it. When I go back now and reread his early work, I do find certain places where he seems to be consciously incorporating foreign loanwords and turns of phrase that are influenced by English. I suspect he was doing this to distinguish himself from the writers who comprised the “mainstream” at the time. I don’t think he does this as much anymore. Masatsugu Ono is exactly nine years older than me—we share the same birthday!—but I think that for many people around our age Murakami’s language doesn’t feel all that “foreign.” I know that when I assign Murakami’s work at university, his style strikes some of my students as slightly outdated. As for ease of translation, I agree that Murakami probably isn’t the most difficult Japanese writer to translate. He has certainly got to be easier to translate than say Yoshikichi Furui, Hisaki Matsuura, or—for that matter—Masatsugu Ono!
DB: As you mentioned in the book, Rubin has expressed interest in re-translating Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. When you spoke to Elmer Luke, who edited Birnbaum’s 1991 translation, he said such a re-translation “would be more successful as an exercise than as a translation.” Do you think it would do any good to re-translate some of Murakami’s better-known texts?
DK: Jay Rubin is in the process of doing a new English translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at the request of the author. I think it’s great that an unabridged version will be made available to English readers and very much look forward to reading one of my favorite Murakami books in Rubin’s iteration. Birnbaum and Luke made significant cuts throughout their version to scenes that they felt weren’t essential to the narrative and where, as the scholar Hosea Hirata pointed out to me, the Pink Girl character gets “sexually aggressive.” I think that the new translation will be especially welcomed by both Murakami fans and scholars who want to better understand Murakami’s work but don’t have access to the Japanese original. At the same time, I do hope that the author and publisher decide to keep the original Birnbaum translation in print so that readers can experience Murakami’s work in different versions. I also imagine it won’t be long before an unabridged version of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle will be made available in English. Again, I hope the author and publisher will choose to keep both versions in print. I would also love to see a collection of Murakami short stories translated by a dozen different translators. I realize that current publishing norms, which even today seem somewhat geared toward maintaining the illusion that we are reading only the words of the original author even in translation, may make this difficult, but Murakami (who is a translator, has a significant readership in English, and has always expressed interest in working with “younger” translators) may be one author in a position to make something like that happen. And I don’t see any of Murakami’s current translators—all of whom have been active in nurturing a new generation of translators by teaching translation classes/workshops and editing magazines and anthologies—objecting to this idea. I think they would welcome it.
David Karashima has translated a range of contemporary Japanese authors into English, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hisaki Matsuura, and Shinji Ishii. He coedited the anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown and is coeditor of Pushkin Press’s Contemporary Japanese Novellas series and Stranger Press’s Keshiki series. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo.
David Boyd is an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami for Europa Editions.
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