Who translated Kafka on the Shore into English?

Philip Gabriel translated Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore into English.

Murakami originally wrote the novel in Japanese under the title Umibe no Kafuka. Gabriel’s English translation was published in 2005, bringing the intertwined stories of fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura and the elderly cat-speaking Nakata to a broad English-language readership.

The translation helped establish the novel internationally. It was recognized with the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, and the book later appeared on The New York Times’ list of the ten best books of 2005. Gabriel has translated several other works by Murakami, including novels and short-story collections.

Edward Seidensticker, Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin are all major translators associated with Japanese literature or with Murakami in English, which makes them plausible distractors. Jay Rubin, in particular, translated important Murakami novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but he did not translate Kafka on the Shore. Gabriel’s version preserves the novel’s shifting blend of myth, music, dreams, metaphysics and magical realism.