Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami. David Karashima
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.
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