HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.
Alfred Birnbaum is an American translator who has translated works by Haruki Murakami, Miyabe Miyuki, and Natsuki Ikezawa. He has also edited the short story anthology Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction. Birnbaum is a professor of creative writing and translation at Waseda University’ s School of International Liberal Studies.
