![]() "Can I talk? I'll keep real quiet, and you don't have to answer. Strange, the girl's voice sounded completely different, depending on whether my eyes were open or closed. The interplay between Murakami's classic thirtyish male protagonist, Toru Okada, and the author's equally classic weirdo teenage girl, May Kasahara, just felt better in Rubin's words: ![]() ![]() I compared Rubin's translation with an earlier one by Alfred Birnbaum, who'd translated the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women (it originally ran in The New Yorkerseveral years prior but reappeared in the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes), and instantly sided with Rubin. In addition to the silky prose, I was enraptured by the directness of dialogue and description despite Murakami's continual bending of reality. Jay Rubin, one of his three longtime translators, handled the English edition, a necessary thing for me then as a just-budding student of Japanese. ![]() I knew little of Murakami when I began reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle-some six hundred pages of potent modern-day Surrealism-back in university. A few fun-facts about Haruki Murakami, Japan's most celebrated contemporary author and the man behind the year-end publishing sensation 1Q84: he name-drops classical études as frequently as 20th century jazz and rock greats he once ran a coffeehouse-jazz bar in Tokyo and he's a triathlete. ![]()
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