Abstract
This article examines how Haruki Murakami—the most widely read contemporary Japanese
author in the world today—is translated in the Anglophone world. We suggest that the highly
networked world of Haruki Murakami, which transcends literary spaces still largely divided
along lines of language and nation state, may be seen as a kind of grand experiment in
“contemporary literature”, and that while Japan and the United States are no doubt key centers
in the laboratory that operates this experiment, this network comprises diverse “rewriters”
across the globe that include translators, editors, agents, designers, critics as well as readers,
bringing additional complexity to the question of who we are reading when we are reading
Haruki Murakami.
