{"id":147789,"date":"2020-09-23T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=147789"},"modified":"2020-09-23T10:03:05","modified_gmt":"2020-09-23T14:03:05","slug":"when-murakami-came-to-the-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/23\/when-murakami-came-to-the-states\/","title":{"rendered":"When Murakami Came to the States"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his rigorous new book, <\/em>Who We\u2019re Reading When We\u2019re Reading Murakami<\/a>, David Karashima examines how Haruki Murakami came to be one of the most beloved writers on the planet. The excerpt below chronicles the U.S. publication of Murakami\u2019s first book to appear stateside, <\/em>A Wild Sheep Chase.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The original Japanese and American covers of Haruki Murakami\u2019s novel Hitsuji o meguru bo\u0304ken<\/em> (A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em>).<\/p><\/div>\n

On May 10, 1989, Haruki Murakami\u2019s editor at Kodansha International, Elmer Luke, sent Murakami a fax reporting on the sale of U.S. paperback rights to A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> (to Plume for fifty-five thousand dollars) and asking him to take part in the promotional activities that were scheduled in New York that fall. Murakami declined. Several months later, Luke and Murakami met in person for the first time in Tokyo (together with another editor from KI), and on August 14, just three days before a copy of A Wild Sheep Chase <\/em>arrived at the Murakamis\u2019 home, Luke again asked Murakami to join him in New York. Murakami once again declined. On September 24, Luke asked again, saying that Murakami\u2019s translator Alfred Birnbaum had become unable to attend, and that they had also managed to arrange an interview with the New York Times<\/em>. Murakami finally relented.<\/p>\n

Murakami and his wife, Yoko, landed in New York on October 21, and Luke and Tetsu Shirai, the head of Kodansha\u2019s New York offices, picked them up at the airport. Shirai remembers handing Murakami a copy of that day\u2019s New York Times<\/em> folded open to a story in the arts section about him and A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em>. The headline, \u201cYoung and Slangy Mix of the U.S. and Japan,\u201d was followed by a tagline: \u201cA best-selling novelist makes his American debut with a quest story.\u201d \u201cOf course, it was something that had been in the works,\u201d Shirai tells me, \u201cbut I was surprised by how well the timing worked out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shirai and Luke had chosen a hotel on the Upper East Side, thinking Murakami, an avid runner, would like to be near Central Park. Ten years later, Murakami would write in an essay for the women\u2019s magazine an an<\/em> that, while he preferred the Village and SoHo with its many bookshops and secondhand record stores, he ends up staying uptown in New York because \u201cthe appeal of running in Central Park in the morning is too great.\u201d <\/p>\n

Of the boutique hotels close to Central Park, the team at KI decided on the Stanhope Hotel. Luke says that he suggested the Stanhope, \u201cwhich might seem odd (uptown, old-world-ish, maybe even stuffy, not hip or cool),\u201d because it was the setting for The Hotel New Hampshire<\/em>, by John Irving. When Murakami had visited the U.S. in 1984 at the invitation of the Department of Defense, he had interviewed Irving while jogging through Central Park with him. Two years later he had also translated Irving\u2019s debut novel, Setting Free the Bears<\/em>, into Japanese.<\/p>\n

Murakami spent eleven days promoting his book in New York. Many of the interviews were conducted in KI-U.S.A.\u2019s new office, which had a large poster of the cover of A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> on one of its walls. Anne Cheng, the publicist for KI-U.S.A., says that her most vivid memory of working on the book was \u201cme trying to get this huge, glossy, bigger than life, poster reproduction of the book cover\u2014that startling peacock blue background and the sheep in the foreground\u2014to hang in our beautiful glass offices, next to the fresh ikebana arrangement that Mr. Shirai ordered for the entryway every week. There were a bunch of logistic and mundane details, but when the poster (almost five feet tall) was finally hung up, it was breathtaking and felt like a symbolic tribute to a book that was also larger than life.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, Murakami was already known for avoiding media attention. But during his time in New York, he agreed to an interview with Asahi Shimbun\/Aera<\/em> in which he told the reporter that he wanted to publish English translations of three of his novels, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World<\/em>, Norwegian Wood<\/em>, and Dance Dance Dance<\/em>, \u201cat the rate of one book every year\u201d as well as \u201cshort stories in magazines.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to individual interviews, Cheng thinks that there may also have been a book party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. \u201cI may not be getting the details right \u2026 I seem to remember\u2014please double check with Mr. Shirai\u2014we had a row of seven sushi chefs making exquisite fresh sushi to order. It was a wonderful event.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shirai has no recollection of the Helmsley Palace event, but tells me it may simply have been that he hadn\u2019t attended and that KI-U.S.A.\u2019s business manager, Stephanie Levi, would have a better idea. Levi says that she does remember a big party at the Helmsley Palace, but isn\u2019t sure either whether it was for A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> or not. When I ask Luke about this, he laughs. \u201cNo way! Really? Would be amazing if it were true. True, they could have had it and I wasn\u2019t there. I mean, the Helmsley Palace was a pretty big deal back then. If Gillian [Jolis, marketing director for KI-U.S.A.] were alive, she\u2019d be the one to know. The Seven Sushi Chefs. Sounds like a parody of a Japanese film.\u201d<\/p>\n

A private party was also held at the Levis\u2019 apartment, attended by the Murakamis, Kodansha staff, and researchers from Columbia, as well as the editor Gary Fisketjon and the literary agent Andrew Wylie, who, according to Stephanie\u2019s husband, Jonathan Levi, were \u201cthe only two Americans [he] knew who had heard of Murakami\u201d and who were \u201cboth very keen to work with him.\u201d One guest recalls coming back into the living room after being given a tour of the Levis\u2019 apartment to find Andrew Wylie still talking to Murakami. The Murakamis left the party early, saying they had plans to go to a jazz club.<\/p>\n

Luke also accompanied the Murakamis on visits to bookstores. A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em>, he says, was prominently displayed in Three Lives, \u201ca terrific independent store in Greenwich Village that was my favorite\u2014and that, many years later, would host midnight opening parties on publication dates of Murakami books.\u201d Luke says that Murakami may have signed books, but that no public events were planned. It would be another couple of years before Murakami would do his first ever public event with Jay McInerney at the PEN<\/small> America Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaruki was excited, though guardedly, not effusively, in his Haruki way \u2026 We (KI) were careful about overdosing him with publicity, and he was a bit shy about availing himself, but he was willing to participate. Not as guarded as he is now.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the afterword of his 1990 collection of travel writing, To\u0304i taiko<\/em> (Far-off Drums<\/em>), Murakami shared his impressions of the New York trip, writing that although it had been some time since he had last visited the city, he \u201cdid not feel especially out of sorts,\u201d and that while he would never want to live in New York, the fact that people were direct \u201cin some ways made it less uncomfortable than Tokyo.\u201d Nearly thirty years later, Murakami tells me that he \u201cremembers the response in New York being especially big.\u201d When I show him the New York Times<\/em> review with his photo on it, he laughs and says, \u201cI was a lot younger back then.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em> review that appeared on the day of the Murakamis\u2019 arrival in the city had been written by Herbert Mitgang, who had been at the paper since immediately after World War II. Mitgang wrote that A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> was a \u201cbold new advance in a category of international fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific novel.\u201d He continued:<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the traditional fiction of Ko\u0304bo\u0304 Abe (\u201cThe Woman in the Dunes\u201d), Yukio Mishima (\u201cThe Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea\u201d) or Japan\u2019s only Nobel laureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (\u201cSnow Country\u201d). Mr. Murakami\u2019s style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mitgang also emphasized that \u201cthere isn\u2019t a kimono to be found in \u2018A Wild Sheep Chase.\u2019\u2009\u201d Actually, a kimono does appear in the novel, when the protagonist visits the Boss\u2019s residence and an \u201celderly maid in kimono entered the room, set down a glass of grape juice, and left without a word.\u201d But there is a chance that Mitgang was influenced by the description on the book jacket: \u201cThe setting is Japan\u2014minus the kimono.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitgang concludes by stating that \u201cwhat makes \u2018A Wild Sheep Chase\u2019 so appealing is the author\u2019s ability to strike common chords between the modern Japanese and American middle classes, especially the younger generation, and to do so in stylish, swinging language. Mr. Murakami\u2019s novel is a welcome debut by a talented writer who should be discovered by readers on this end of the Pacific.\u201d After Mitgang\u2019s review appeared, Yomiuri Shim-bun<\/em>\u2014the Japanese broadsheet with the largest circulation in the world\u2014published an article headlined \u201cUS Newspaper New York Times Lauds Haruki Murakami.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitgang\u2019s was the first of many reviews that placed Murakami in contrast to the \u201cBig Three\u201d postwar writers in Japan: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Jun\u2019ichiro Tanizaki. In the Washington Post<\/em>, the novelist and journalist Alan Ryan wrote, \u201cReaders who treasure the refined sensibilities of Kawabata and Tanizaki, the grand but precisely etched visions of Mishima, or even the dark formalities of Ko\u0304bo\u0304 Abe, are in for a surprise when they read Murakami,\u201d and went on to say that he was not surprised to learn that Murakami had translated authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Theroux, Raymond Carver, and John Irving. Ryan also suggests that \u201cMurakami echoes the state of mind of the ordinary Japanese, caught between a fading old world and a new one still being invented, willing to find magic but uncertain where to look.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone was thrilled by Murakami\u2019s arrival on American shores. One of the least enthusiastic reviews was by another Japanese novelist. Foumiko Kometani had received the Akutagawa Prize (an award for emerging writers that Murakami was short-listed for twice but never won) in 1986 for Sugikoshi no matsuri<\/em> (translated into English by the author as The Passover<\/em>). In her Los Angeles Times<\/em> review, \u201cHelp! His Best Friend Is Turning Into a Sheep!,\u201d Kometani criticized the narrative voice of A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> for \u201csound[ing] more like a black Raymond Carver or a recycled Raymond Chandler or some new ghetto private eye than a contemporary Japanese novelist\u201d and suggested that his readers in Japan are \u201cpeople who have taken their places sheep-like on the conveyor belt of Japanese society as salaried men and housewives, but still like to harbor images of themselves as cool and hip and laid-back, sophisticated and aware, and, yes, above all, Western.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kometani was a translator herself (she translated not only her own novel into English but also her husband\u2019s nonfiction books into Japanese), and her otherwise scathing review is kind to the translator: \u201cNot that Alfred Birnbaum\u2019s excellent translation has not gotten Murakami\u2019s sentences down exactly right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the other reviewers were also complimentary about the translation. In the New York Times<\/em>, Mitgang noted that \u201cthe novel is racily translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum.\u201d Ann Arensberg went further in the New York Times Book Review<\/em>: \u201cWithout question, [Murakami] has help from Alfred Birnbaum, who seems more like his spiritual twin than merely his translator.\u201d When I ask Birnbaum what his initial reaction had been on reading these positive reviews, he says, \u201cDisbelief, but I more keenly remember one bad review that cited \u2018Birnbaum\u2019s tin ear.\u2019\u2009\u201d (I was unable to locate this particular review, but a review in the Washington Post<\/em> stated that \u201cAlfred Birnbaum\u2019s translation constantly jars with its odd sentence structures, punning chapter titles, colloquial Americanisms, Britishisms, and at least one Boston-ism.\u201d)<\/p>\n

One review seemed almost to predict what lay in store for Murakami. In The New Yorker<\/em>, the novelist and poet Brad Leithauser wrote that the book \u201clingers in the mind with the special glow that attends an improbable success\u201d and that \u201c[i]t is difficult not to regard A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em> as an event larger even than its considerable virtues merit \u2026 Many years have elapsed, after all, since any Japanese novelist was enthusiastically taken up by the American reading public\u2014and this may soon be Murakami\u2019s destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leithauser, who has published eight novels and six poetry collections with Knopf and is currently a professor at Johns Hopkins, had lived in Kyoto in the early eighties. He tells me that he \u201cwasn\u2019t terribly surprised\u201d by Murakami\u2019s success. \u201cIt seemed clear to me from the first that he was bringing something new to Japanese literature. There\u2019s a peculiar lightness in what he\u2019s doing that should not be confused with any lack of seriousness \u2026 I think to Western eyes Japanese literature is apt to seem light in another sense\u2014in its sparsity. This is certainly true of Kawabata. And this sparsity is for me one of the great appeals of Japanese literature. But I\u2019m talking here of a different kind of lightness, an antic and lyrical and sunny quality. I tend to love writers who have this quality. Calvino (one such writer) is much more articulate than I\u2019m being in his essay on lightness versus heaviness. I\u2019m thinking he (Calvino) would have admired him (Murakami).\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Karashima has translated a range of contemporary Japanese authors into English, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hisaki Matsuura, and Shinji Ishii. He coedited the anthology <\/em>March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown and is the coeditor of Pushkin Press\u2019s Contemporary Japanese Novellas series and Stranger Press\u2019s Keshiki series. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2020 by David Karashima, from <\/em>Who We\u2019re Reading When We\u2019re Reading Murakami<\/a>. Excerpted by permission of Soft Skull Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. publication of \u2018A Wild Sheep Chase\u2019 in 1989 paved the way for Haruki Murakami\u2019s overwhelming success as an author in translation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Murakami Came to the States by David Karashima<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The U.S. publication of \u2018A Wild Sheep Chase\u2019 in 1989 paved the way for Haruki Murakami\u2019s overwhelming success as an author in translation.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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