JAITS

ArticleWho We Are Reading When We Are Reading Haruki Murakami:
The Role of Various ‘Rewriters’ in Translating Haruki Murakami for the
Anglophone Market
David KARASHIMA
(School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University)
This article examines how Haruki Murakami—the most widely read contemporary Japanese
author in the world today—is translated in the Anglophone world. We suggest that the highly
networked world of Haruki Murakami, which transcends literary spaces still largely divided
along lines of language and nation state, may be seen as a kind of grand experiment in“contemporary literature”, and that while Japan and the United States are no doubt key centersin the laboratory that operates this experiment, this network comprises diverse “rewriters”
across the globe that include translators, editors, agents, designers, critics as well as readers,bringing additional complexity to the question of who we are reading when we are reading
Haruki Murakami.

Described in the Anglophone press as “the most anticipated literary event of the year” (Barra,2011) and “a global event in itself [that] passionately defends the power of the novel” (Haddow,
2011), Murakami’s novel 1Q84 arrived in English in the fall of 2011 “with all the razzmatazz
associated with a Harry Potter novel” (Cummins, 2011). Ardent fans in London queued for the
midnight launch at Foyles bookstore (Flood, 2011) and New Yorkers flocked to bookstores(Kyodo, 2011) to get hold of a copy of Murakami’s “mega-novel” (Miller, 2011)—initiallypublished in Japan as three separate volumes—packaged into a single eye-catching volume by
the popular designer Chip Kidd, pushing the book to open at number two for hardcover fiction on
The New York Times bestseller list (New York Times, 2011). Despite being an almost 1000-pagework of literature in translation, the book could have very well opened at the top of the list if the
publication date of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs—the face of the company that
produced the popular Mac computers on which Murakami composed his similarly popularnovels—had not been moved up to the same week following the charismatic business icon’s
KARASHIMA David, “Who We Are Reading When We Are Reading Haruki Murakami: The Role of
Various ‘Rewriters’ in Translating Haruki Murakami for the Anglophone Market,” Interpreting andTranslation Studies, No.14, 2014. pages 75-96. © by the Japan Association for Interpreting andTranslation Studies.

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untimely death (Lowensohn, 2011).
The major newspapers, magazines, and other print and on-line media—almost without
exception—gave the book and its author prominent coverage (The Complete Review, 2011).
Practically all of the quality UK newspapers including The Economist, Financial Times,
Guardian, Independent, Observer, and Times of London and culture/book magazines such as theSpectator, London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement reviewed the book as did the
major US newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San
Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer
and magazines such as the Atlantic, Salon, and the New York Review of Books. As a matter offact, one would be hard pressed to find a major newspaper or book magazine in the US and UK
that did not review it. The New York Times alone covered the book three times, with a review intheir Sunday Book Review supplement (Schulz, 2011), a second review in the paper’s regularreview column (Maslin, 2011), and a long profile in the New York Times Magazine (Anderson,2011). The major newspapers in Japan in turn reported on the coverage in the US and UK media,
sporting headlines with catchy phrases such as “kakushi zessan” [rave reviews all around]”(Asahi Shimbun, 2011) and “daininki” [highly popular]” (Yanagisawa & Ozaki, 2011), andpicking out particularly positive quotes from reviews, and even going as far as directly quoting
the blurbs on the book, further fuelling the myth of Murakami’s invincibility on the international
stage.
In reality, however, the reviews were mixed. They ranged from glowing to far-fromenthusiastic to downright scathing. Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of The Independent, who has
judged numerous literary awards including the Booker Prize and Independent Foreign Fiction
Prize, praised the book (or more precisely the author) stating “Which other author can remind
you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter
but on the same page?” (Tonkin, 2011). Kathryn Schulz, author and book critic for New YorkMagazine, was far less sympathetic, suggesting in her review for the New York Times that while
in George Orwell’s 1984 “the story serves to convey ideas about power, injustice and cruelty” in
Murakami’s 1Q84 “power, injustice and cruelty are fantasy elements in service of a story”(Schulz, 2011). Many of the other reviews, including those that were generally favorable to thebook—while politely recognizing Murakami’s talent and pointing to stand-out moments—
expressed similar frustrations with the repetition, loose ends, and flat prose.
But the content of the coverage, at least in this particular instance, may not have mattered allthat much. Many of the reviews were surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) alike. Most
provided similar overviews about Murakami’s background and the attention surrounding thebook’s publication in Japan and the rest of the world, a brief summary of the novel’s plot together
with a few examples, a quip or two about the translation, and a few words about what thereviewer personally thought about the book. What is of greater significance here is the fact that7676

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the vast majority of mainstream (particularly print and on-line) media outlets gave 1Q84
extensive coverage, utilizing striking visuals including portraits by celebrity photographers andartwork specially commissioned for the occasion.
While the approximately 200,000 copies that 1Q84 sold in the United States in just the first
couple of months (Publishers Weekly, 2012) is an impressive figure, particularly for a thousandpage work of literature-in-translation, the number of people who read the reviews, profiles, andinterviews in the media obviously far outnumber those who actually read the book. To put thingsin perspective, for example, in the US, as of September 2011, the daily circulation (for print anddigital combined) was over 2.6 million (2,633,638) for the Wall Street Journal, over 1.5 million(1,530,592) for the New York Times, and over half a million for several other publications that
also reviewed the book such as the New York Daily News (771,118), Los Angeles Times (611,153)
and Washington Post (534,620) (Lulofs, 2011). Across the Atlantic in the UK, the monthly print
and on-line readership (as of April 2012) was estimated at around 9 million (8,949,000) for the
Guardian and Telegraph and just over five million for the Independent (5,317,900) and the Timesof London (5,737,000) (Rogers, 2012). What is also significant is that the digital (and particularly
on-line) editions of these stories—unlike the actual book itself—could then be emailed, blogged,
buzzed, tweeted, retweeted, posted, shared, liked, and so on, often using the social media icons
embedded next to the on-line reviews, reaching millions of people in various shapes and forms.
Many of those who read these reviews, interviews, profiles, etc., and their various spinoffs—all“rewritings” of 1Q84—may never read the book (or anything by Haruki Murakami for thatmatter) and yet still get a glimpse into Murakami’s world.
The English translation of 1Q84—like its Japanese original and many of the translations into
other languages—was destined to become a bestseller well before the book(s) hit stores. When
Book 1 and Book 2 of 1Q84 were published in Japan in May 2009, the Japanese publisher
Shinchosha decided to order a second print-run even before the publication date, then continued
to reprint copies to meet the steep demand, printing a million copies in the first two weeks
despite (or according to some partially owing to) the fact that the only thing about the book that
had been revealed beforehand was its title. When Book 3 was published a year later, Shinchosha
once again upped the initial print run from 500,000 to 700,000 copies even before the book went
on sale. A year later, Murakami’s US publisher Knopf made a similar decision, upping the printrun by 15,000 copies to 90,000 copies more than a month before the publication date to meethigh demand from booksellers (Alter, 2011). Meanwhile, Sam Anderson, the critic at large for
The New York Times Magazine, made his first-ever trip to Japan to interview Murakami several
months before the book’s publication (Anderson, 2011). Emma Brockes, an award-winningjournalist with The Guardian, first opened her review copy of 1Q84 on her flight to Hawaii
where she was scheduled to interview Murakami and managed to get through about half of thebook before landing (Brockes, 2011). Given the timing and scope of the English media coverage,

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it seems safe to assume that many of the other publications had commissioned reviews andarticles before the book had been read based on Murakami’s rising popularity and reports of thebooks “phenomenal” success back in Japan (Page, 2011). As Jay Rubin—Emeritus Professor of
Harvard University and English translator of numerous Murakami works including Book 1 andBook 2 of 1Q84—commented in an interview with CNN, it seems that “Murakami can get awaywith anything now. If he scribbled on his toilet paper, they would publish it” (Rutledge, 2011).
In his review of 1Q84 in the Guardian, the journalist Douglas Haddow described Murakami as“the only living writer who can sell a million copies in a month and still be in the running for theNobel Prize” (Haddow, 2011). Murakami is often referred to as a “critical and commercial
success”. But what does this actually mean? “Commercial success” is perhaps the easier of thetwo to put a finger on. In the simplest terms, the phrase suggests that Murakami’s books havesold well—that they made money for both the author and the publisher. 1Q84 sold exceptionallywell for a work of literature in translation, and following the rise in Murakami’s popularity in thelater 2000s, his backlist sales have also increased significantly with the release of each new title.
“Critical success” for contemporary fiction, on the other hand, may be a little trickier to define.
What is clear is that both “commercial success” and “critical success” are determined by readers.
The conventional thinking is that “commercial success” is something that is determined by the“general readers” (or André Lefevere’s “non-professional reader”) whose response is recognizedin the most simple of terms: whether or not they buy the book. “Critical success”, on the other
hand, is determined by individuals with the authority to perform a “critical” reading: Lefevere’s“professional readers” and Bourdieu’s well-educated (high cultural capital) but not so wealthy(low economic capital) occupants of the “cultural pole” of the “literary field”. But can the criticaland commercial be separated so neatly in contemporary international publishing and in particular
the case of an internationally “renowned” author such as Haruki Murakami? Who are theauthorized critics who determine the critical success of a work of literature? In Japan, where theliterary field is structured fairly rigidly around literary prizes judged by senior authors, these“literary prizes” function as one clear indicator of “critical success”. You only have to take a lookat the long list of literary awards amassed by the authors on the jury of the Akutagawa Prize—
arguably the most ‘influential’ (though by no means the most prestigious) prize for writers of“serious literature” in Japan—to get a general idea as to how the Japanese literary field is
structured. The typical “elite track” consists of making one’s debut by winning a (submissionbased) new writer prize administered by one of the five main literary magazines (published by
the large publishers in Japan), then winning the Akutagawa Prize, followed by one of the moresenior prizes sponsored by the main publishers and/or newspapers (Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri
Literary Prize, Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, etc.). Murakami has emphasized ininterviews with the foreign press that he was ignored by the Japanese literary establishment. But7878

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you would not know it just by looking at his list of awards. With the exception of having missed
out on the Akutagawa Prize (despite being short-listed twice) and the hiatus following thecommotion surrounding the huge popularity of Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood), Murakami
seems to have been cruising quite comfortably along the “elite track” of serious literature. He
made his debut by winning Kodansha’s Gunzo New Writers Prize, then won the Noma New
Writers Literary Prize just three years later, followed by the prestigious Tanizaki Prize, becoming
the youngest ever recipient of the prize. Murakami was also awarded the Yomiuri Literary Prize
for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Mainichi Publishing Culture Award for 1Q84, as well more
recently numerous awards including the Asahi Prize that essentially recognize lifetime
achievement (as opposed to individual works).
Literary prizes, however, are less useful when it comes to measuring Murakami’s “critical
success” in the US and UK. The only major literary award Murakami has received in the
Anglophone sphere is the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award funded by the Cork
City Council of Ireland, which he was awarded in 2006 for the story collection Blind Willow,
Sleeping Woman compiled by his US publisher Knopf. One reason Murakami has not been
awarded any (traditional) “literary prizes” in the US or UK is that, as a Japanese author publishedin (English) translation, he simply is not eligible for most of them. Eligibility for most of theprominent literary awards in the United States is limited to works by living citizens of thecountry (although there are a few exceptions such as the National Book Critics Circle Awards). In
the UK, most major literary awards has been limited to authors who are citizens of theCommonwealth and the Republic of Ireland (although the influential Booker Prize announced
that beginning 2014 they would expand eligibility to all English-language Writers” (Brown,2013)). Literature-in-translation is essentially considered a “genre” of its own to be judged
separately through initiatives such as the Arts Council funded Independent Foreign Fiction Prize(which 1Q84 was long-listed for but did not win).
If literary prizes cannot be used to gage Murakami’s “critical success” in the US and UK,
what about critical writing by academics? There are hundreds of scholars in US universities
researching Japanese literature and Haruki Murakami is a staple on syllabi of modern andcontemporary Japanese literature courses at the institutions where they teach. The amount ofscholarly research done on Murakami at American universities, however, is surprisingly (or again
perhaps not so surprisingly) limited (Stretcher, 1998), and it is also not clear how widely what is
written is read outside of the relatively small field of Japanese literary studies. The situation
across the Atlantic is even less helpful as there are only a handful of scholars at UK institutions
doing research on contemporary Japanese literature. And while there are countless academic
books and articles written about Murakami in Japanese, very few of them have been translated
into English. One would imagine that the fact that Murakami is being taught and studied inuniversities would have a positive effect on establishing his literary legitimacy. Just how much of79
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an impact scholarly research has had on Murakami’s “critical success” within the contemporary
context, however, remains unclear.
It seems that whether a foreign author such as Haruki Murakami is considered a “critical
success” in the Anglophone sphere or not depends largely on the coverage their work receives in“quality” US and UK media outlets. But while many of the US/UK papers and magazines devote
more space to book reviews than do their Japanese counterparts, reviewers are still restricted byvarious factors including space and readership, meaning they do not always provide the mostideal venues for in-depth analyses. Furthermore, reviews on the websites of the major papers areoften also linked to on-line booksellers (often operated by the same media organization) so thatreaders can purchase the book easily after reading the review. While one would not want to go as
far as to suggest that these reviews function as promotional copy, it seems fair to ask whether
there is truly an environment where reviewers—many of whom are commissioned on anassignment basis—are able to write “critical” reviews. So what then constitutes “critical
success”? A variety of factors, no doubt, but one key indicator appears to be the level of coveragea book and author receive in prestigious—symbolic capital-rich—media outlets such as The New
York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement and the New Yorker. The content of themedia coverage—whether it was a positive or negative review, an interview/profile, or an article
about the translation process—is perhaps not as important as its “scope”. And setting the stage sothat the publication of 1Q84 would become the “literary event” of the year, all but guaranteedthat the book would become both a “commercial” and “critical” success.
With the exception of rare cases such as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which he chose toserialize in the monthly literary magazine Shincho, Murakami is known for not sharing his workwith his editors while it is still in progress. In principle, Murakami shows his work to his
Japanese editors only after the entire manuscript is “complete”. Assuming that the Japanesemanuscript of 1Q84 was not edited significantly by the editors at Shinchosha, the book that thereaders of the Japanese version of 1Q84 are reading may not be all that different from the final
draft that the Japanese author saved onto his trusty Mac. The same obviously cannot be said for
those reading Murakami in translation. As André Lefevere has emphasized, most readers
experience literary works through translations and other forms of rewriting. Haruki Murakami,
whose work is translated into almost fifty languages, is an excellent example of an author who isread primarily through “rewritings”. Most foreign readers already read Murakami in translation,and given his rising popularity overseas, it is more than likely that the number of people reading
Murakami in translation will eventually far outnumber those reading him in the original
Japanese. So then it seems only natural to ask: who are we (actually) reading when we arereading “Haruki Murakami”?
Needless to say, there are many people involved in producing the translated versions of
Murakami’s work. In the case of the English translation of 1Q84, first you have the two8080

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Who We Are Reading When We Are Reading Haruki Murakamitranslators. The initial plan had been for Jay Rubin, who had translated many of Murakami’s
works including The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, to translate all three volumes of
1Q84. However, in order to speed up the translation process so that they could bring the book—which Murakami’s agent Amanda Urban together with the publisher Knopf decided to publish as
one volume in the US—to eagerly awaiting fans (who had been hearing about the book’s successin Japan) as soon as possible, the translation of Book 3 was assigned to Philip Gabriel,
Murakami’s other main translator. Lexy Bloom, who succeeded the veteran editor Gary Fisketjon
as Murakami’s editor at Knopf, spent three months editing the book, putting together a “glossaryof terms” (Bloom, 2013) and working with the two translators to give the two parts unity and also
identify repetitious passages that seemed unnecessary given that the three volumes were being
published as one book (unlike the original where the third book came out a year after the firsttwo books) (Alter, 2011). The UK version of the book published by Harvill Secker was
Anglicized and also separated into two volumes, with Book 1 and Book 2 being published as one
volume and Book 3 being published as one volume a week later. All of this, of course, was before
the line editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, printers, and others came in to do their part. The
individuals and institutions involved in the production of the English editions of Murakami’sbooks are not the only ones “rewriting” Murakami for the English readership. The New Yorker—
which had published over twenty of Murakami’s short stories in just over twenty years—
published an approximately 8000-word excerpt from 1Q84 entitled “Town of Cats” in its pages amonth before the publication of the book. And “general readers” have played their part as well.
There are almost five hundred “customer reviews” of 1Q84 on Amazon.com, a number of whichhave been identified by hundreds of users as being “helpful” reviews.
And this is just for one book in one language. Similar situations no doubt exist for theapproximately fifty other languages that Murakami’s work has been translated into. When an
author is so widely “rewritten” in this manner, the name “Haruki Murakami” becomes a kind of
brand name that gives identity to the complex network of texts, writers, rewriters, and readers.
And as these networks expand and the production centers become more diverse anddecentralized, it seems inevitable (and only natural) that the degree of “authority” and“authorship” attributed to the “author” weakens. But even today, many years after the “death of
the author” was first proclaimed, the notion that the “authority” lies with the author remains
strong (though it appears to be a privilege reserved for authors of “serious” literature only). The
romantic notion of the author sitting alone at his desk composing his masterpiece still has a wide
appeal, naturally to writers, but also to many readers who appear to find satisfaction in belonging
to a community created around this author[ity] figure. This in turn requires authors to emphasize
and project their own “authority”—to show the world that the author is far from dead—byparticipating in interviews, readings, and other public events. This is important even for an
American author writing primarily for an English-speaking audience. It is, however, all the more8181ࠗ㏻ヂ⩻ヂ◊✲࠘ྕ  

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important for an author such as Haruki Murakami, whose network of creators (of translations,jackets, communities, meanings, etc.) spans the globe.
The impact of visuals in projecting this image of the author is also significant. Many of thearticles and reviews of 1Q84 in the US/UK press were accompanied by photographs of
Murakami—who is famous for avoiding the press and public appearances in Japan—posing like amodel. The black and white photographs by the internationally renowned photographer
Nobuyoshi Araki that accompanied the long profile of the author in the New York Times
Magazine are particularly arresting (Anderson, 2011). The contrast between the lean, stubblefaced man casting a sharp gaze at the camera and the simple sketches of Murakami-san (by theillustrator Mizumaru Anzai who provided illustrations and cover art for many of Murakami’s
earlier works) which used to function as the author’s “face” early on in his career is striking.
Murakami’s transformation into an “international writer” over the thirty-plus years since he firstmade his debut with Kaze no uta wo kike (Hear the Wind Sing) concern not just the shift in his
work (from short first-person novellas to grand third-person novel) and readership (from adomestic readership of thousands to an international readership of millions), but also his “image”
as a writer.
In addition to visual images, “events” are another important means for cementing the“authority”, “authorship”, and “authenticity” of an author. Although Murakami has occasionallyinteracted with his Japanese readers via the Internet, as a general rule of thumb he does not makepublic appearances in his home country. The talk he gave in Kyoto in May 2013 to commemorate
the establishment of the Kawai Hayao Monogatari-sho/Gakugei-sho (Kawai Hayao Story Prizeand Literary Prize) was his first public event in Japan in eighteen years (Kubota, 2013). Outsideof Japan, however, Murakami has been known to participate in public talks at universities andbook signings at bookstores, and to interact with his readers in person at these “events”. Throughthese “real-life” encounters with the author or through hearing accounts of these “live”
encounters (often through virtual networks), Murakami’s readers are able to confirm that Haruki
Murakami is indeed an individual living and writing in the same time and space as them. In otherwords, they are able to confirm that Murakami is indeed a “contemporary” of theirs.
One place where these two factors—the “visual” and the “event”—converge to provide
readers with a venue for community building is the official Haruki Murakami Facebook page.
While there are countless websites in various languages dedicated to Murakami, his official
Facebook page managed by his American publisher Knopf is perhaps the most “dynamic”, withover 830,000 registered fans or “likes” (as of July 2014). This may be less than a third of thestaggering 3.5 million “likes” J.K. Rowling’s Facebook Page has garnered, but it is impressive
even when compared to the pages of other internationally renowned “literary” authors similarly
managed by their US/UK publishers, including Kazuo Ishiguro (approx. 46,000 Likes), PhilipRoth (approx. 62,000 Likes), and Peter Carey (approx. 5500 Likes). And when “Haruki

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Murakami”—in reality staff at his US publisher—posts the latest news or quote from one of his
works together with a photograph, cover art or some other kind of visual image, hundreds of fans
immediately express their approval by “liking” the post, leave comments, and communicate
amongst themselves. For example, when the quote “I want you always to remember me. Will you
remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”from his novel Norwegian
Wood was posted on the site together with the image of the cover art for a new Vintage paperback
edition, more than 10,000 people “liked” the post, close to 2000 “shared” it, and over 250 posted
comments. When the English translation of 1Q84 was published, the opening chapter was madeavailable on the Haruki Murakami Facebook page, and almost 1700 people entered thesweepstakes held on the Facebook page where they could win a “limited edition uncorrected
proof” of the novel. The lucky fan who won the sweepstakes was able to deepen his connection
to the author by holding the collector’s item, signed by the author—proof again the he is a living
author—himself, in his or her hands.
What is perhaps most striking is that many of these diverse rewritings—the interviews andprofiles in the mainstream media that have retold time and time again the same episode about the
precise moment at a baseball game when Murakami “knew he would become a novelist”, theregular posts of quotes from Murakami’s body of work on the author’s Facebook page, the fivestar Customer Reviews on Amazon by ardent fans—that represent the decentralization anddiversification of the author “Haruki Murakami”, appear to further establish the authority andauthorship of the author by emphasizing his individual genius and talent. What is interesting
about the case of Haruki Murakami is how two seemingly contradictory states coexist withperfect ease: The “authority” of the author is strengthened while production centers arediversified, and the “celebrity” of the author is bolstered while the man at the center of it all
retreats from public life. The image of Haruki Murakami running shirtless adorns the hardcoverversions of both the English and Japanese editions of his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk
About Running. This image of the “lonely long distance runner/writer” is spreading far and widewith the help of striking visuals, events, technology, and most importantly, countless “rewriters”
across the world.
Murakami has an impressive team composed of the top professionals in the US and UK
publishing fields working on the English editions of his books. Needless to say, their collective
expertise, networks and reputation—social, cultural, symbolic capital—have played a vital role in
Murakami’s success in the Anglophone publishing world (and the languages and cultures that
discovered Murakami through English). The fact that the almost 1000-page (in hardcover andover 1300-page in paperback) book was published in translation with only the most minor ofcuts—at least compared to previous translations—demonstrates the position that the “author”
Haruki Murakami has come to occupy within the Anglophone publishing field. Needless to say,this kind of environment was not always there. The translation of Murakami’s first two books,

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Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, were published by a Japanese publisher with grammar
notes in Japanese for English-language learners in Japan (Marx, 2010). A Wild Sheep Chase waspublished in the US by the Japanese (funded) publisher Kodansha International with significant
edits aimed at making the book more “contemporary” and more “American”, and Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World was abridged by “something like a hundred pages”(Birnbaum, 2012) to create a fast-paced narrative. The American and British publishers of The
Wind-up Bird Chronicle (initially published in three volumes in Japan) cut the novel by 25,000
words (Rubin, 2001) and put together the non-fiction book Underground by combining two
books (published by different publishers in Japan) and cutting a third of the interviews Murakami
conducted with victims of the 1995 subway sarin attacks in Tokyo. The New Yorker has been
consistently publishing Murakami’s short stories, novel excerpts, non-fiction, profiles andreviews, often editing the translations heavily to create stand-alone pieces in line with themagazine’s needs. What is worthy of note is how these normally less visible (at least outside of
the field) rewriters—the editors, translators, agents, etc.—have become more visible together
with the rise of Murakami’s popularity. Murakami’s readers are known for being particularly
passionate fans whose interest extend to all things Murakami, including the music, food, andplaces that appear in his books. This has spawned various Murakami spin-off products, ranging
from the more conventional collector’s editions of his books (some of which are being sold atused bookstores for over 10,000 dollars) (Davies, 2013) to recipe books of dishes featured in his
fiction (Okamoto, 2012). And it appears that their fascination with Murakami “paraphernalia”
does not end with what is found in his books, but also extends to the translators, editors, jacket
designers, and others who help make them. In the case of 1Q84, the two English translators, Jay
Rubin and Philip Gabriel, were interviewed by the mainstream media in the US, UK and Japan
about the translation process, and were invited to give a talk on the topic together at the Centre
for the Art of Translation in San Francisco (Chang, 2012). Even the two editors in the US and
UK appeared in the press to offer insight into the book and the translation process (Beaumont,
2011; Alter, 2011). The You-Tube video on the Random House website in which the designer
Chip Kidd talks about his design of the 1Q84 jacket was picked up by the mainstream press (LosAngeles Times 2011, Witt 2011), specialized media (featuring a large photograph of the designer)(Lanks, 2013) as well as influential individual blogs, and has been viewed over 20,000 times (asof July 2014) (Kidd, 2013).
The level of “visibility” of these individual rewriters depends on numerous factors including
professional stature, personal stance towards publicity, role in the literary production process, etc.
Flipping through the first few pages of English versions of Murakami’s novels it is interesting tonote that there seems to be a hierarchy of “visibility” among the individuals involved in thecollaborative production of the English translation based on perceived levels of “authorship”. For
example, in the (2003 Vintage UK paperback version of) the English edition of Hard-Boiled

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Wonderland and the End of the World—which the translator Alfred Birnbaum and editor Elmer
Luke translated and adapted by working side-by-side five days a week—Haruki Murakami’sname appears on the cover prominently in a font larger than the title of the book. The translator’sname does not feature on either the front or back covers. This means that at first glance the casualbookstore browser would not be able to tell that the book was a translation. Open the book andon the first page are biographies of the author Haruki Murakami and the translator Alfred
Birnbaum. Flip another page, and the title page features the names of the author and translator.
Haruki Murakami comes at the top, above the title, below which are the words in a smaller font:
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY Alfred Birnbaum. Flip yet another page to the
copyright page, where are range of technical matters are squeezed in using a very small font, welearn that the book has been “Translated and adapted by Alfred Birnbaum with the participationof the author”. On the same page, there is also the following note: The translator wishes toacknowledge the assistance of the editor Elmer Luke. There are several things of note regardingthese acknowledgements. The first is the acknowledgement that the book has not only beentranslated, but has also been “adapted” with the “participation of the author”. Even more unusualis the acknowledgement of the editor by name (by not the author but the translator). The editor’sname generally does not appear on this page (or any other page for that matter with the exception
perhaps of the author’s acknowledgments page). If we take the example of another Murakami
book, Gary Fisketjon’s name does not appear anywhere in The Elephant Vanishes, despite thefact that he was responsible for editing and compiling the collection. The fact that Luke’s nameappears on this page seems to acknowledge the level of collaboration between the translator andeditor on the translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Luke is notcredited, for example, in A Wild Sheep Chase, which he also edited, but starting with a complete
manuscript. The hierarchy of “visibility” here is very clear with the author at the top, thetranslator in the middle, and the editor at the bottom. And there are, of course, many otherrewriters including line editors, proofreaders, designers, etc., who generally do not get “visible”
credit. While scholarship in the field of Translation Studies has tended to emphasize the“invisibility” of the translator, in fact the translator is one of the more visible “rewriters”
involved in the production of literary translations.
There is something else worth noting regarding the copyright page of Murakami’s English
translations. While authors generally retain copyright of the translated editions of their work, thetranslation copyright usually remains with the translator. With Murakami’s English translations,however, even the translation copyright is in the author’s name. In other words, the translation isessentially a work-for-hire and the translator has no say in how the translation may or may not be
used. While the earlier English translations of Murakami’s works published by Kodansha
International gave the English translation copyright to the translator Alfred Birnbaum, theserights have also been reverted to the author. The Czech author Milan Kundera famously rewrote

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the translations of his own works. Venuti gives the example of the English (re)translation of his
novel The Joke that the author “cobbled together not just from his own English and French
renderings, but also from the ‘many fine solutions’ and the ‘great many faithful renderings andgood formulations’ in the previous translations” (Venuti, 1998: 6). Venuti mentions that it is notclear if the translators gave Kundera permission to reuse parts of their translations to patch
together a new version but that the title page does not give the translators recognition. In thisinstance, Kundera has essentially taken the words of the translators to create a new version by
patching together the two existing versions and even adding some sentences of his own. Stuart
Glover has suggested that “there is a growing tension between an ever more distributed or(collaborative writing process) and the requirement for a super-cohesive authorial identity (asingle author) around which a book is branded or marketed” and that the complexity of therelations between the various individuals involved in producing a text “disappears as weconstruct the Author in order to hide the complexity” (Glover, 2011: 65). Retaining translationrights would essentially allow Murakami to similarly “rewrite” the translations. And while
Murakami himself has made no attempts to date to rewrite his English translations the way
Kundera has, the Murakami brand in its English manifestation is being gradually “rewritten” or“upgraded” in more subtle ways. This should perhaps come as no surprise given Murakami’s
belief that “it is imperative that new versions [of translations] appear periodically in the same
way that computer programs are regularly updated” (Murakami, 2013: 171). For example, when
Knopf published the collection The Elephant Vanishes—comprising seventeen stories, tentranslated by Alfred Birnbaum and seven translated by Jay Rubin—in 1993, the editor Gary
Fisketjon used Birnbaum’s translation of “Kangaroo Communique” and “Barn Burning” rather
than the translations by Philip Gabriel published first in ZYZZVA and the New Yorker. A similar
strategy seems to have been applied when Fisketjon compiled and published Blind Willow,
Sleeping Woman in 2006. This time the two translators published in the collection were Jay
Rubin and Philip Gabriel. And this time it was Gabriel’s new translations that replaced existingtranslations that had been published in various magazines and anthologies. A story initiallypublished in the June 9 2003 issue of the New Yorker in Alfred Birnbaum’s translation as “TheFolklore of our Times” was also retranslated by Gabriel as “The Folklore of My Generation: A
Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” for the same 2006 collection. The new translations
published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman also include several stories initially translated bytranslators other than Murakami’s three “main” translators. Ted Goossen, a professor at York
University in Toronto and editor of the Oxford Book of Japanese Literature, has translated
several stories and essays by Murakami. Goossen first came across Murakami’s work when he
was doing research in Japan in the early 1980s for his PhD in Japanese literature (for the
University of Toronto). Murakami’s work, and particularly the opening of Hitsuji wo meguru
bouken (A Wild Sheep Chase) felt familiar to Goossen, who had been an exchange student at8686

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Waseda for a year starting June 1968, the same year that Murakami had entered the university(Goossen, 2013). He translated a number of stories by Murakami in the early 1990s as well as
contributing the essay “Murakami Haruki’s Tokyo” to the Japanese magazine Tokyo-jin(Goossen, 1993). At least a couple of stories that Goossen translated early on have been
retranslated by the two current translators, Rubin and Gabriel. Goossen’s translation of “A
Perfect Day for Kangaroos” (Kangaruu biyori) was initially published in 1990 in the anthology
Soho Square III alongside stories by a range of international writers including Gunter Grass,
Jorge Luis Borges, and Margaret Atwood. The volume was edited by the Argentinian/Canadianauthor and translator Alberto Manguel, who had asked Goossen to recommend a story by aJapanese author (Goossen, 2013). The story was retranslated by Philip Gabriel for the 2006
Knopf anthology Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman from a slightly updated version of the story(where reference to the popular Japanese manga character Doraemon has been removed). In
1992, Goossen’s translation of the Murakami story In the Year of Spaghetti was published inissue 133 of the Toronto-based journal Descant. Goossen had immediately thought of the story
when the editor of the journal asked him if he had any suggestions for their “Food Issue”(Goossen, 2013). The story was retranslated by Jay Rubin with the slightly revised title “TheYear of Spaghetti” and first published in the Nov. 21 2005 issue of the New Yorker and later also
compiled in the collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. The story “Ice Man”, initiallypublished in the February 10, 2003 issue of the New Yorker and later in the collection Vintage
Murakami in a translation by yet another translator Richard L. Peterson, was retranslated by
Gabriel for the Knopf anthology. Most of the original magazines and anthologies that theseearlier translations were published in are now out of print. The Peterson translation is available to
New Yorker subscribers who know exactly which issue to look at in their digital archives. A
search of the magazine’s archives for “Haruki Murakami,” however, brings up all of the stories,
novel excerpts and essays by Murakami (as well as numerous articles about him by others) but
not Peterson’s translation of “Ice Man”. In the meantime, Ted Goossen began translating
Murakami again after almost twenty years. He published a translation of the short story ‘Samsa
in Love’ in the October 28, 2014 issue of the New Yorker and is currently working on newtranslations of Murakami’s first two books, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, which were
published by Kodansha in the 1980s for a domestic audience, but will be published outside ofJapan for the first time (as a single volume) in the fall of 2015 (Curtis Brown, 2015). In this way,
it appears that with the rise of Murakami’s authorial presence in the Anglophone world, some“rewriters” are becoming more “visible”, while others are “reappearing”, and still others are
quietly being “disappeared”.
The publication of Murakami’s work in the international arena over the past quarter century canbe (very broadly) divided into three phases and flows: publication in (mostly East) Asia, followed8787

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by publication in English and other major European countries, and finally, publication in smaller
European countries and the rest of the world. A number of countries in East Asia, such as South
Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, began to translate Murakami in the mid to late 1980s. South
Korea started by publishing Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood) around 1986 (Kim 2009: 7),
which became popular after being republished under another title that translates roughly as “TheAge of Loss” in 1989 (Kim 2009: 10). In 1994, the first two books of The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle trilogy were published almost immediately after they were first serialized in theJapanese literary magazine Shincho and even before the Japanese book version was published.
Translations and sales of Murakami’s work increased dramatically following the gradual liftingof restrictions on importation of Japanese cultural products starting in 1998 (Kim 2009:11-12).
Taiwan was the first country to publish Murakami in translation. Three short stories were
published by a monthly magazine as a part of a feature on the author, which also included literary
criticism by Saburo Kawamoto (Chang 2009: 39-40). This was followed by the publication of thefirst book-length Chinese translation, Pinball, 1973, in 1986. Following the phenomenal successof Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood) in Japan (published in September 1987), a Taiwanesepublisher commissioned five translators to translate different sections of the book, and published
an unauthorized translation in three volumes just a year and a half later in February 1989 (Chang
2009: 43), kicking off a boom in Murakami literature not only in Taiwan but across Chinesespeaking countries (Fujii 2009: 3). Hong Kong also started with Noruwei no mori (NorwegianWood) in 1991, and also published “Hong Kong original” translations of Dansu dansu dansu(Dance Dance Dance) and Hitsuji wo meguru bouken (A Wild Sheep Chase), before shifting to
publishing translations produced by Taiwanese publishers (Kwan 2009: 70).
The direct impact that Murakami’s success in the US, UK and the rest of the world has hadon the way that his works have been translated, published and read in East Asia is difficult tomeasure. While one assumes that the high profile of Murakami in the international arena can only
help the author’s reputation in East Asia, the Anglophone publishing/literary community does notappear to be serving as a gateway for East Asia the way it is, for example, for countries in
Europe. In other words, the translation flows of Murakami’s works in Asia appear to have theirown logic.

Even just the Chinese translations appear to have their own flow (most likely

unrelated to the English translations), with works going from Taiwan to Hong Kong to Shanghai
to Beijing (Fujii 2009: 3). And while in the West Murakami’s more experimental and/or
historically engaged novels, such as A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Endof the World, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, which have received the mostattention, Margaret Hillenbrand has suggested that Chinese-speaking readers seem to “tend toprefer ‘Murakami lite’” and that “Murakami lies at the heart of a transnational fan culture, abroad-based collective that exhibits many of the traits shared by other aficionado communities
across the world—whether their tastes run to basketball, early Bruce Springsteen, or Buffy the8888ࠗ㏻ヂ⩻ヂ◊✲࠘ྕ  

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Vampire Slayer” (Hillenbrand 2009: 720-721).
Many European countries, on the other hand, first started publishing Murakami after he waspublished in English. Although detailed information about this is difficult to come by (since thisis the realm of current business), it seems that many European publishers were introduced to
Murakami’s work via English, a language which many publishing professionals in Europe canread, either through published translations, translation samples and proofs of upcoming books, or
simply summaries written in English. Data available from the Japan Foundation’s Japanese
Literature in Translation Search seems to suggest that the first two books published in the US by
Kodansha International have helped get the same books published in other European languages.
Hitsuji wo meguru bouken (A Wild Sheep Chase), first published in the US in 1989, then in the
UK and France a year later in 1990, in Germany and Holland in 1991, and Sweden, Spain and
Italy in 1992, and in Norway, Finland and Greece in 1993 (Japan Foundation 2013). The same
pattern holds for Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the second Murakami bookthat was published in the US (in 1991 by Kodansha International). The novel was published thesame year in the UK, a year later in 1992 in France, in Holland in 1994, in Germany in 1995, andin Greece in 1996 (Japan Foundation 2013). The countries that began to consistently publish
Murakami in translation following the author’s initial (more critical than commercial) success in
the US in the early to mid-90s were mostly larger European countries such as France, Germany,and Italy. France published A Wild Sheep Chase in 1990, a Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Endof the World in 1992, followed by Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance (all soon after they
were available in English translation). The next three books published in French translation, The
Wind-up Bird Chronicle, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and Sputnik Sweetheart, were also
all published a few years after they were first published in English. Italy first published A Wild
Sheep Chase in 1992, and went on to publish Murakami fairly consistently. It is interesting tonote that several countries such as Spain, Holland, and Norway began publishing Murakami
immediately after he was published in the US, but stopped publishing him for a number of years,
before starting to publish him again, most probably after the critical success of the English
translation of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Spain published A Wild Sheep Chase in 1991 but did
not publish another book by Murakami for another ten years when they published The Wind-up
Bird Chronicle in 2002, and then went on to publish Murakami’s work at the pace of almost abook a year. Holland published A Wild Sheep Chase in 1991 and Hard-Boiled Wonderland andthe End of the World in 1993, clearly taking the lead from the English publications, but then did
not publish another book for another eight years. In 2002, a new publisher republished the first
two translations and immediately followed up with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 2003, thenbegan publishing his books consistently at a pace of one every couple of years. Greece similarly
published A Wild Sheep Chase (in 1991) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World(in 1994), but did not publish another book until 2005 when they published The Wind-up Bird

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Chronicle. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was first published in the US in 1997, bolstering
Murakami’s reputation as a serious writer among English speaking literary circles. Within thenext few years this massive novel—published as three volumes in the original Japanese but
published as one volume (abridged by 25,000 words) in the English translation—was publishedin a range of European countries including the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, andDenmark (Japan Foundation 2013).
It was also around this time—when Murakami’s reputation was becoming established among
literary circles in the Anglophone and larger European countries—that a slew of other countries
such as Israel, Russia, Latvia, Croatia, and Brazil began to publish Murakami for the first time,and countries that had been publishing Murakami intermittently, such as Italy, Spain, Norway,
France, Denmark, and Holland, began to do so more consistently, often at a pace of one bookevery year or two. It is interesting to note that many of the countries that started publishing
Murakami at the turn of the century started with his “lighter” novels. Israel started with
Norwegian Wood in 2000 and South of the Border, West of the Sun in 2001, Iceland with South of
the Border, West of the Sun in 2001, Croatia, the Czech Republic in 2002 with Norwegian Wood,and Sweden in 2003 with Norwegian Wood, to give a few examples (Japan Foundation 2006).
While the publication order in these countries does not strictly follow those of Japan or the
US/UK, it does not necessarily mean that they were not taking their cue from the US/UK. As amatter of fact, the books that many of these countries had started with were the titles that had
most recently been published in English translation: South of the Border, West of the Sun in 1999,
Norwegian Wood in 2000, and Sputnik Sweetheart in 2001. Other countries that began publishing
Murakami in the first years of the 21st century include many smaller European countries
including Latvia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Lithuania. In 1999, a couple of years after the
publication and critical success of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in the US, Murakami’s work had
been translated into 16 languages (Kelts 1999). By 2005, when the English translation of Kafka
on the Shore was published, the official count was up to thirty-four languages. This number
increased to forty-two by the fall of 2011 when the English edition of 1Q84 was published(Murakami, 2011), and “more than fifty” by the summer of 2014 when the English edition ofColorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage was released (Murakami, 2014).
Even this brief look at publication dates and titles from around the world suggests certain
trends. The publications derived from the international conference “A Wild Haruki Chase: How
the World is Reading and Translating Murakami” organized by the Japan Foundation in 2006,
which brought together nineteen of Murakami’s translators (from fifteen countries), provides
some interesting anecdotes that seem to point to the importance of conducting further(collaborative) research into local cases. The Polish translator Anna Zielinska-Elliott, forexample, was introduced to Murakami’s work in 1987 by a friend who suggested it as an easy
read. Her translation of A Wild Sheep Chase—the first Murakami book to be translated into

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Polish—was published in 1995 (six years after the English translation was published in the US)
by a small publisher specializing in children’s literature as part of their series of books fromJapan. The publisher’s marketing resources were limited and readers were limited to those withpeople with a special interest in Japan and the translator’s friends. In 2003 a major publisher took
over the publication of Murakami’s work and began to publish him successfully. According toZielinska-Elliott, the publisher noticed Murakami’s rising popularity around the world anddecided that they wanted to make him into a bestseller in Poland as well (Japan Foundation 2006:
125). Mette Holm, who has translated The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart and other
Murakami titles into Danish, first approached a major Danish publisher with a proposal to
publish Norwegian Wood but was turned down. She was surprised when soon afterwards a
Danish translation of A Wild Sheep Chase was published (Japan Foundation 2006: 148). The
translation turned out to be a re-translation from Birnbaum’s English translation. She approached
the publisher offering to translate the next Murakami book from the original Japanese (JapanFoundation 2006: 148-9). The French translator Corinne Atlan first came across Murakami’sbook when a friend recommended Norwegian Wood as an “easy read” the year the book came out
in Japan. Several years later, Atlan was approached by a publisher to translate Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World, which was published in France in 1992, and she has sincetranslated many of Murakami’s works (Japan Foundation 2006: 97). Atlan suggests that
Murakami’s popularity in France tipped following the publication of Kafka on the Shore in 2006.
While this paper has focused primarily on the Anglophone market, conducting further casestudies for languages other than English would no doubt provide valuable insight into issues suchas translation flows through intermediary languages, retranslations, “upgrading” of publishers,etc., that would help generate a more comprehensive picture and understanding of how literature
is produced, circulated and consumed in the world today.
Murakami’s international network has now reached the point where his books are (almost
automatically) translated and published in dozens of languages and countries as soon as his latest
book is published in Japanese. It seems entirely possible that in the future, as with Walter
Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the “original” Japanese manuscript of the latest Murakami
book will be shared with publishers around the world even before it is published in Japan, andreleased simultaneously around the world. The highly networked world of Haruki Murakami,
which transcends literary spaces still largely divided along lines of language and nation state,providing a place for readers to communicate with each other, may be seen as a kind of grandexperiment in “contemporary literature”. Japan and the US are no doubt key centers in thelaboratory that operates this grand experiment, but this network comprises diverse creators acrossthe globe—creators that include, obviously, translators, editors, agents, designers, critics, andperhaps less obviously, also readers as creators of meaning, bringing additional depth andcomplexity to the question of who we are reading when we are reading Haruki Murakami.

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About the author
David Karashima is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the School of International LiberalStudies, Waseda University. He has translated into English a wide range of works bycontemporary Japanese authors such as Hitomi Kanehara, Yasutaka Tsutsui, and Shinji Ishii. He
serves as the International Editor of the literary magazine Granta Japan and co-edited (withElmer Luke) the anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese
Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown.
……………………………………………
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