Alfred Birnbaum

Alfred Birnbaum is an American translator and writer who has lived in Japan for decades and has translated the works of Haruki Murakami into English. He translated Underground, Murakami's oral history of the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack, a devastating suite of survivor testimonies.

Birnbaum was also the translator of Murakami's early masterworks including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, helping define how the era's most influential Japanese novelist sounds in English. As a former Japan-based journalist, he is among the few translators of the very first generation of Murakami's global fame.