Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami. David Karashima
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
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
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”),