The first three novels I read by Murakami -- A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance, Dance, Dance -- were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was desperate to know more about Birnbaum. Who was this guy who could come up with two completely different kinds of English, an old-fashioned fairy-tale diction and a sharp-edged modern idiom, to render the two intertwined plot strands of Hard-Boiled Wonderland? How did he manage to do that weird, youthful, but never annoyingly with-it voice in which Murakami's narrator-protagonists spoke to themselves? How, in short, could he make a Japanese writer sound so remarkably American without losing any of his alien allure? All I could find out, from the jacket notes, was that Birnbaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957, grew up in Japan, and lived at various times in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Barcelona.
Then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle came out. This may still be Murakami's best-known novel in America; it was his first crossover book, the one that signaled his emergence from the ghetto of Kodansha to the classy precincts of Knopf. I started the first chapter as soon as the book was available, but right away I sensed that something was wrong. Turning to the front of the book, I noticed the name of a new translator: Jay Rubin. What had happened to my beloved Birnbaum? I called Kodansha, Knopf, the Society of Translators -- no answer. Nobody knew anything about the missing Birnbaum. He had apparently completed the transformation required of the Ideal Translator and become a figment, a ghost, an invisible man.
