Alfred Birnbaum is one of the major translators into English of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Alfred Birnbaum was born in the U.S. in 1955 and raised in Japan from age five. He studied at Waseda University, Tokyo, under a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship, and has been a freelance literary and cultural translator since 1980. His translations include Haruki Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Dance Dance Dance, Underground, and other works; Miyabe Miyuki's All She Was Worth; and Natsuki Ikezawa's A Burden of Flowers. He also compiled the short story anthology Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction.
