This translation is fully worth the re-read of the older work and, to my mind, replaces it. Restoring around 100 pages from the original English version, the Rubin translation also unwinds the story in a slower and more reflective arch than the earlier Birnbaum.

And this review is not intended to cast doubt on Birnbaum's work, necessarily. But here, the novel is given a new and different mood, and a richer life through it.

One of the most interesting aspects to me is an examination of the choices each translator has made along the way to touch upon that "ineffability" Murakami is so famous for. How do we capture the ideas which themselves are a bit beyond language? Birnbaum's translation of kokoro, for instance, as "mind" is now in Rubin as "heart." When our narrator in the shadowless town feels he is losing something vital, this difference is critical, knowing still that neither of these quite captures what Murakami is after. In later novels, he will begin using nani-ka for some of this, which essentially means "anything/something," perhaps less helpful still.

And our shallow and efficient Cybertech-noir narrator is given greater depth as he struggles through discovering the purposes of the mystery, his relationship with the pink-dressed girl and the grandfather, etc. The "explanation" for the narratives near the novel's end is also lent greater elucidation.

From my view, this new Rubin translation raises the status of HBW&EotW, already a favorite, to stand alongside some of his other greater works, 1Q84, Wind-Up Bird, After Dark, Kafka on the Shore, . . .  in his works of magical surrealism, that touch upon the patterns which lie beneath/within us.