Alfred Birnbaum

Alfred Birnbaum was born in the United States[1] 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.

In the 1990s, while studying in Yangon, he helped document architecture that was being replaced or destroyed.

[3] Birnbaum's translations include Haruki Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 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.