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