WHO WE'RE READING WHEN WE'RE READING MURAKAMI

A lively account of the many people involved in bringing Haruki Murakami’s writings to English-speaking readers.

Literature originates with an author’s imagination, but the final product is the work of a team of professionals, from agents and editors to marketing staff and cover designers. The task of bringing the work of an author who writes in another language to English-speaking audiences is even more complex. In this admiring work, first printed in Japanese in 2018, Karashima travels “back in time to tell the stories of the colorful cast of characters who first contributed to publishing Murakami’s work in English.” The vibrancy of those colors varies from person to person. Among the subjects are Murakami’s first translator, Alfred Birnbaum, an American who came to Japan with his family at age 5, got a job translating for Kodansha International, “one of the leading publishers of Japanese literature in English translation,” and translated A Wild Sheep Chase in 1987, when Murakami was unknown outside Japan; Elmer Luke, a Chinese American editor who, in Murakami’s words, “started the engine” when he sold his work to the American market; editors at the New Yorker, including former editor-in-chief Robert Gottlieb, who, Karashima argues, “may have been pivotal to Murakami’s career” by publishing his early stories; and later translators such as Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Parts of the book are extraneous; there’s little point in quoting someone whose response to a question about the U.S. publication of A Wild Sheep Chase is to say he doesn’t recall any details. But readers interested in Murakami will enjoy learning about the challenges and trade-offs involved in translation, from the different styles of his translators to his philosophical acceptance of the changes the New Yorker made to his work because that publication “has a large number of readers and they also pay really well.”

A fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of publishing.