Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening sentences of the Rubin translation:
"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
"I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax."
Not bad, eh? Perfectly good English sentences presented by a reasonably interesting narrator. But now listen to Exhibit B:
"I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.
"I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It's almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo."
And there he is, my Birnbaum -- or rather, my voice-in-the-ear version of Murakami, my Birnbaum-inflected Japanese narrator, my unemployed cosmopolitan wastrel who loves jazzy rhythms and thinks of his life in the present tense. Even the tiny details (the Italian rendering of the Rossini title, the use of the term "crescendo" rather than "musical climax") seem to me crucial to the smart but strangely innocent voice. In this translation, the logic of cause-and-effect English sentence structure has been jettisoned in favor of some other mode, and it is that mode -- the intrusion of the surprising and the foreign and the unknowable into the mundane regime -- which marks the world of a Haruki Murakami novel.
