With the English release of Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” now may be a good time to revisit an old favorite set in the same fantastical world for some deep reading. Out from Everyman’s Library and heralded as an “unabridged translation” by longtime Murakami collaborator Jay Rubin, “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland” provides an immersive, rollicking read that aptly showcases Murakami’s distinctive magic.
Rubin’s new edition restores over 100 pages of text excised from Alfred Birnbaum’s 1991 translation and re-establishes the same word order of the novel’s Japanese title. But existing fans of the novel needn’t worry they missed anything significant the first time around.
“There was no kind of systematic attempt to reshape the novel or to suppress any particular attitude or any particular theme in Birnbaum’s translation,” Rubin explains to The Japan Times. “There were just lots of little cuts that added up to a lot of pages. One or two of the cuts were maybe three or four pages long, but most cuts were really just a few sentences at a time.”
