‘I can’t even really understand Linda very well, but I couldn’t understand a word of what Grace Paley was saying!’

When I ask Murakami about the Grace Paley reading, his eyes light up. On another occasion, she went with Murakami to hear Grace Paley speak at the City Center on Fifty-fifth Street and ‘was struck by the degree of Yiddish lilt in her spoken address and wondered how much of that tone/rhythm Haruki had felt and sought to transmit in his translation of her work.’ Asher does not remember the substance of their conversations, but she does recall once going ‘with M and Mme Murakami to a soba restaurant in SoHo, a new fashion in NYC’. She had lunch with him whenever he was in New York, and in various essays and interviews Murakami refers to Asher as ‘my editor at the New Yorker’. This story, ‘The Windup Bird and Tuesday’s Women’, was published two months later in the magazine’s November 26 issue.Īsher also developed a friendship with Murakami. Though she ‘will make no public claims re writers I brought to the magazine for the first time’, according to Elmer Luke, who was then editing the English translations of Murakami’s stories and novels at Kodansha International, Asher had already been in the process of soliciting a Murakami story for the magazine when ‘TV People’ was published in September 1990. Haruki Murakami’s primary editor at the New Yorker for the first seven or so years of his relationship with the magazine was Linda Asher, who worked in its fiction department for eighteen years, under three different editors: William Shawn until January 1987, Robert Gottlieb until August 1992, and Tina Brown until 1997.

The following extract, which looks at the editorial process behind the publication of the short story ‘The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women’ in the New Yorker in 1991, provides one example of the variety of voices that have gone into creating the English variation of the author Haruki Murakami. But there was, of course, a time when Murakami was still new to the magazine. The magazine has since gone on to publish over thirty stories/novel excerpts by the Japanese author and has played a significant role in building his readership and reputation in the English-speaking world. In the foreword to the Japanese edition of his story collection The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami describes this as an experience ‘as incredible as walking on the moon’ that made him ‘happier than any literary prize could’.

But Murakami has enjoyed an especially close relationship with the New Yorker, which first published his short story ‘TV People’ in its Septemissue.

English translations of Haruki Murakami’s fiction have been published by a wide array of magazines in the US and UK ( including in Granta).

The wind up bird and tuesday's women