Memorandum

INTERVIEW/ Jay Rubin: Translator offers a peek into his life--and Haruki Murakami's as well

The Asahi Shinbun

March 03, 2014

By LOUIS TEMPLADO/ AJW Staff Writer

Editor's note: This interview is part of The Asahi Shimbun AJW's series on internationally acclaimed writer Haruki Murakami.

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Readers can’t get far into a Haruki Murakami book without hearing the music.

From his early works such as “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” (where there is a mention of Bing Crosby singing “Danny Boy”) to “After Dark” (believed to have been titled after a jazz classic) and the latest “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” (Franz Liszt’s “Années de pèlerinage,” or years of pilgrimage, runs throughout it), the famed author always finds aural arrangements to harmonize his words.

Where does Murakami draw the references from?

Probably from his vast record collection, says Jay Rubin, 73, the American translator behind “Norwegian Wood,” “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and “1Q84,” among other Murakami works. A former neighbor to the famously reclusive Japanese writer as well, Rubin had the privilege of seeing some of that immense musical vault up close, together with getting a rare view into the private life of the renowned writer.

“He’s a human being. He’s a very nice guy, and he’s kind of low key in person,” says Rubin, speaking on a visit to Tokyo in December. “He’ll talk most if you talk about music with him because he loves music so much. It’s in his head all the time.”

The two first came into contact in 1989, when Rubin penned a letter to the still relatively obscure author proposing to translate a few short stories into English. Murakami responded favorably, beginning a collaboration of nearly a quarter of a century. Rubin, now the Takashima research professor of Japanese humanities at Harvard University, had a big part in bringing Murakami to the institution as an artist-in-residence in 2005.

He’d always known that Murakami was a music buff, he says, but had no idea of just how much so until the writer moved next door to him in Cambridge, Mass.

“I was astounded by the size of his music collection: he must have something like 10,000 records,” says Rubin, counting just the vinyl and not the CDs. “I’ve offered him some old LPs from my collection (after talking about music) and he would say, ‘Oh, I have this one or I can get it myself.’ He didn’t want to take it from me.

“His knowledge of music in any field is just astounding. His knowledge of classical music is really immense,” Rubin says. “When I first read ‘Talking about music with Mr. Seiji Ozawa’--that book where he and the conductor were talking about classical music matters--I would occasionally lose track of who was talking and think that I was reading Ozawa, because there was this very knowledgeable comment about how the Cleveland Orchestra in the 1950s changed with (conductor) George Szell or something like that, but this was Murakami talking.

“He doesn’t just listen to pieces of music and likes them or dislikes them, he listens and he fits them into a big context that comes from his own systematic approach to what he’s doing.”

In some cases their musical tastes have overlapped, says Rubin, which is a boon when he is translating such works as “After Dark,” where a central character is a student-trombonist fixated on the song "Five Spot After Dark" from Curtis Fuller’s 1959 album, “Blues-ette.”

"I've never had problems with his references to jazz musicians or what not," he says. "I usually know what he’s talking about because I used to be very excited about jazz myself, but that was a long time ago.”

Those days were back during his graduate school years, says Rubin, when jazz gave him some relief from the “gray realism” of his academic specialty: Meiji Era (1868-1912) literature (one of his earliest projects was a translation of “Sanshiro” by Natsume Soseki) and the naturalist writers from the early 20th century.

“Those gray novels I was reading from the turn of the last century were not funny books,” he says.

Rubin says Soseki attracted his interest because there was nothing really exotic nor Japanese about his stories--“it’s low-key writing about fairly well-rounded characters who are as depressed as anybody in the West.”

“That was part of what was a great shock about Murakami. Here I am reading works by so-called naturalist writers who are very much focused on rather boring everyday life and along comes this guy who has unicorn skulls and colors floating off into space. I just couldn’t believe that a Japanese writer could be that good.

“Maybe what we have most in common is our sense of humor,” he says. “There are lots of funny scenes and characters in Murakami that were deliberately funny. It was great to have something to laugh about in the genre I was working on.”

Murakami is also a kind of a bookworm “in the best sense,” says Rubin, who, if he had to be described, fits the bill of a “nice guy and pretty low key in person.”

“He’s always got a book with him, and if there’s a lull in the conversation he may pull a book out and start reading it. He just knows an amazing amount of things but he complains about his bad memory. On a daily basis he probably does have a bad memory, and I think that has something to do with his interest in questions of memory and bringing back the past and things of that sort in his books. But he does remember an amazing amount of what he’s read and what he’s heard.”

The Murakami translator also discovered that he and his subject also share the same work habits. Working on “1Q84,” for example, was “just a matter of sitting down at the computer at a certain time of the day, a certain point in the day, and staying there for a while. It’s more a matter of discipline. Murakami is always talking about discipline, and I think I’ve got that, too. And concentration. Those are the two big words for him, and definitely it’s true for me as well. Once I get locked on to something, I can get very obsessed.”

Despite the rumors, there was no conspiracy behind the book’s delayed release in English: Rubin says his work attention span is about four hours, punctuated by frequent play breaks with his grandson. Philip Gabriel translated the latter half of the book.

“To be honest, what I do is not really very exciting,” Rubin says. “In a way it’s like Yukio Mishima, who used to disappoint people by pointing out that being a writer was like being a banker. You go to work at a certain time, do a certain amount of work, and the next day you do the same thing all over again.

"I’m not trying to say it's not fun--it is tremendous fun--but the fun is all up here in the head. I sometimes think that if our neighbors were spying on us--looking for some kind of activity--they would be very disappointed. There’s no movement in the house from the morning. It’s just someone sitting at a computer.”