Alex Brandon/AP

Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a swearing-in ceremony for US Ambassador to Japan William F. Hagerty IV in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex, Thursday, July 27, 2017.

One is brash and unpredictable, the other a polite, reliable conservative. One is a novice at governing, the other a seasoned legislator and governor. And despite – or perhaps because of – their stark differences, President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have carved out a relationship that appears to work.

Mr. Trump has come to rely on Mr. Pence’s advice and guidance, say people familiar with the workings of the West Wing, who add that Pence is often at his side. He is in many ways the “anti-Trump,” a reassuring presence to conservatives who are wary of the president, or even hostile. And until now, Pence has managed to escape the palace intrigues that have dominated Trump’s first 200 days in office.

That’s why the weekend story in The New York Times reporting that Pence may be quietly preparing to run for president himself in 2020, should Trump not be on the ballot, was so explosive. It suggested a hint of disloyalty by a vice president who has been vocally supportive of Trump from the day he was named to the ticket. Top presidential advisers have vigorously pushed back on the story. Pence himself issued a statement denouncing the article as “disgraceful and offensive” and calling it “fake news.”

But beneath the latest West Wing kerfuffle lies a deeper reality: that Pence has embarked on perhaps the most challenging vice presidency in history.

“He’s facing a very complicated situation,” says Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and author of the book “The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden.”

The office of vice president gained real stature only 40 years ago. It was President Jimmy Carter’s VP, Walter Mondale, who established up front the role of a true governing partner, not just a successor. Every vice president since has operated on that model. But Pence is the first to play that role in a White House that is unusually light on governing experience. Pence has named George H.W. Bush as his model – which, perhaps not coincidentally, turns Trump into Ronald Reagan and Pence into a vice president who goes on to become president.

The art of 'followership'

Pence’s experience – 12 years in Congress and four years as governor of Indiana – makes him an essential asset. But as a president-in-waiting, Pence also has to walk a fine line as he seeks not to overstep his bounds.

And in that, Pence has had to display a type of leadership that some call “followership” – to both induce people to follow him and also be a good follower himself, in the context of a Trump presidency that is pursuing policies and tactics that at times differ from his own approach.

So far, Pence has earned high marks from Republican regulars.

“He was born to be vice president,” says Cam Savage, a Republican consultant from Indiana. “He’s a team player, he gives a great speech, he’s easy to get along with, he’s hard-working, he’ll never embarrass you.”

“You need someone to go halfway around world to make a good impression at a foreign leader’s funeral? Slam dunk,” Mr. Savage adds. “You need a guy to hit the campaign trail and stump for a week at a time? He’s your man. You need a guy to talk to a group of big-shot donors? Piece of cake. You need a guy to go on ‘Meet the Press’? He’s great on TV.”

The challenge comes when the issue of succession becomes significant. “It drives a wedge between the president and vice president, and their two teams,” says Professor Goldstein.

Thorny question of succession

Unlike the Clinton presidency, in which the Lewinsky scandal broke in the second term, Trump’s presidency has been tumultuous from the start – sparking early chatter about succession and jokes about “President Pence.”

For Pence, the role he plays for Trump is no laughing matter. And for a president adamant about his own primacy, any hint that Pence is thinking about anything other than Trump’s needs is anathema. Yet it’s clear that Pence has an eye on his political future. He recently replaced his chief of staff with a veteran political operative, Nick Ayers. And in May, he became the first sitting vice president to launch a leadership political action committee.

The new PAC, called Great America Committee, can be seen two ways: Its stated goal is to raise money to support Trump’s reelection and congressional candidates who support Trump’s agenda. But it also creates for Pence a separate power center that could further his own political career. The timing of its creation, a week after Trump fired the head of the FBI, has raised eyebrows.

“He claims he is doing it to help 2018 candidates,” says a Republican strategist with ties to the White House. “Normally you would raise [money] for the party, not your PAC. Notice he did it roughly one week after the Comey firing. This is about Pence's political future even if they don't outwardly say it.”

Pence has long had his eye on the presidency, and is seen as a prospect for 2024. But the turmoil of Trump’s early months in office has spawned what the Times called a GOP “shadow campaign” for 2020 – not just Pence, but also Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Visits to early primary and caucus states by these politicos and others have fueled speculation.

For Pence, the layers of complication are many. If the Trump presidency crashes and burns, he will surely be tarnished. For the most part, Pence has managed to maintain enough separation from Trump that he hasn’t been consumed by West Wing controversies. During the early flap over Trump’s first national security adviser, Mike Flynn, Pence said he was “out of the loop” over Mr. Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador.

And so Pence has managed to have it both ways – to be Trump’s anchor but also absent at times.

The irony is, if Pence had run for president in 2016, Trump would certainly have eviscerated him, as he did the rest of the field. Instead, Trump plucked Pence from a gubernatorial reelection race that he was in danger of losing, and turned him into a presidential player.

“In a lot of ways, Trump and Pence are yin and yang – on matters of style and faith, and in how they operate,” says Barry Bennett, who was a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. “Pence loves details, Trump wants one-page memos.”

Mr. Bennett adds that “Pence’s leash is quite long,” and that he has earned Trump’s respect. “I think he trusts Mike Pence implicitly.”

That is evident, for example, on Washington’s posture toward Russia. Last week, while Trump was bashing Congress for imposing new sanctions on Russia, Pence praised the bill as sending an important message during a trip to three Eastern European countries.

Trump's man on the Hill

His primary task has been to work Capitol Hill, where he rose to the House Republican leadership while in Congress. Marc Short, Trump’s legislative affairs director, worked for Pence when he chaired the House Republican Conference.

Pence is a regular on the Hill, and not just to break ties in the Senate – the veep’s only real constitutional power. Like the last Republican vice president, Dick Cheney, Pence often attends his party’s Tuesday Senate lunches.

"He’s appreciated here for his understanding of how the system works and what's possible,” says Sen. Roy Blunt (R) of Missouri, who has known Pence for two decades.

But it may be the little things that capture the essence of Pence. In late July, as he was about to take off for his trip to Eastern Europe, a press pool report noted that he and his wife, Karen, held hands as they walked toward Air Force Two.

Once on board, the Pences make a surprise trip to the back of the plane, bearing cupcakes and brownies with red, white, and blue sprinkles, and birthday wishes for a reporter. Pence shook hands with every member of the press, welcoming them to his official plane and inquiring if everyone was comfortable.

“It should be a good trip, everybody,” Pence said.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed to this report.

Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin/Sputnik/Reuters

Russia's President Vladimir Putin (l.) congratulates head of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alexeyeva on her 90th birthday during a meeting in Moscow last month. Ms. Alexeyeva, a dissident who challenged the Soviet regime and Russian authorities for decades, advocating for democratic rights and seeking justice for political prisoners, is still one of Putin’s most scathing critics.

For the past four years, Oksana Dubinina has been working with stray animals, particularly the estimated 30,000 homeless dogs who roam the streets of Moscow.

She's put together a group of a few dozen volunteers, who manage to get by on crowdfunding, with which they provide shelter, training, and veterinary services for about 40 dogs annually. They have forged ties with local orphanages, schools, hospices, and nursing homes, and bring dogs to foster mutual comfort and companionship. Sometimes, a dog finds a permanent placement. Ms. Dubinina calls the project “Friend for a Friend.”

This may sound unremarkable. But in Russia, where taking any kind of grassroots initiative is a whole new thing, it is a significant accomplishment.

Statistics show, and activists affirm, that people in their local communities are increasingly identifying problems and appointing themselves to address them – something virtually unheard of in the past. That includes raising funds and forming constructive relationships with local institutions.

To be sure, authorities in many places remain suspicious and unwelcoming of even the most apolitical activities. And the Kremlin has cracked down hard on politically active nongovernmental groups that receive foreign funding. But it also appears to be taking note of the new civic activism and creating fresh sources of funding, even for some of those it previously branded “foreign agents.”

“I am glad to say that there is a new generation emerging,” says Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a legendary Soviet-era dissident and human rights champion. She cites 19th-century writer Alexander Herzen, who argued that in order to become a free country, Russia would need at least two “un-whipped” generations. “This is the first one like that since the collapse of the USSR. In that sense, we are halfway along in our journey,” she says.

A whole new sphere

The Kremlin's war on foreign-funded groups that engage in what it deems to be political activity continues apace. About 160 NGOs remain trapped on the toxic “foreign agent” list, which makes it almost impossible to raise money or interact with the public, and 30 of them have been driven out of existence. The affected groups are disproportionately in politically sensitive fields like election monitoring, human rights, democracy activism, and environmentalism.

That picture remains dire. But Yelena Topoleva-Soldunova, head of the Agency for Social Information and an expert with the Federal Civic Chamber, an assembly of officially approved civil society groups, argues that it shouldn't obscure the extraordinary growth of non-political civic activism, volunteering, and raising money for worthy causes that is changing the grassroots landscape in Russia.

“I travel all over, and see many groups, often not registered or with any legal existence, starting to do things. They organize to improve their immediate surroundings, such as cleaning up streets, parks, or apartment lobbies. To protect the natural or architectural heritage of their communities. Or to help children, or disabled people, or find homes for stray cats,” she says.

“You have to appreciate how new this is in our country. Opinion polls show the vast majority of people still believe the state should organize everything, and they see no reasons to act on their own,” she adds. “This is the Soviet legacy, which is still very much with us. It's hard to change. But at least now our authorities know what civic activism is, and we can hold a dialogue with them. It doesn't mean they will be cooperative, but at least we are talking the same language nowadays.”

Ms. Topoleva-Soldunova recently took part in a round-table meeting with President Vladimir Putin that mainly focused on groups that provide assistance to the mentally ill, drug addicts, elderly, and terminal patients in hospices. This type of non-professional activism is new and controversial in Russia.

“Putin seemed surprised to see so many people who are sincerely involved in such nonprofit activity, and who believe in the values they express,” she says. “We are seeing the birth of a whole new sphere of private providers, both commercial and noncommercial, who are ready to step into the gaps in official care of orphans, elderly, disabled people, alcoholics, etc. The goal now is to integrate these new NGOs with the state system.”

Russian civil society has grown by 10 percent over the past decade, according to a new report prepared for the Public Chamber. About 5 percent of the population is regularly active in organized NGOs or report experience of “political activity,” while some 30 percent say they have taken part in occasional non-political involvement in their own communities. Topoleva-Soldunova says there are currently around 220,000 registered NGOs in Russia, and uncounted thousands of unregistered ones.

While cracking down on foreign-funded NGOs, the Kremlin has instituted its own system of grants to encourage civil society groups that it approves of, and has instructed regional governments to do the same. This year the Presidential Foundation for Civil Society Development disbursed about $40 million to almost 1,000 civil society groups. To the surprise of many, three groups that had previously been declared “foreign agents,” including the independent Levada public opinion agency, were included among the recipients.

Hanging on

Most groups still stuck on the “foreign agent” list have survived and learned to adapt.

“Of course we still accept foreign funding, because there are no other sources of money for us here,” says Galina Arapova, head of the Center to Protect Media Freedoms in the central Russian city of Voronezh. “Russian big business is afraid to donate money to any human rights cause, and the average person doesn't see any reason why he or she should.”

“But I think the state is starting to realize that they can't strangle every single NGO. Some of the weaker ones have ceased to exist, but we've been around for 20 years and we will live through these bad times. I'm an optimist, and I hope this paranoia will end one day.”

Even those who've managed to prove they no longer receive foreign funding and get themselves removed from the Justice Ministry's list of “foreign agents” say they are not out of the woods.

“We have been removed from the Justice Ministry's list, but they continue to insist that we are engaged in political activity,” says Yelena Gerasimova, director of the Center of Social and Labor Rights in Moscow, which provides legal assistance for workers who have disputes with employers. The reason, she says, is because the group is publicly critical of Russia's labor laws.

Due to the pressure of fines they had to pay over refusing the “foreign agent” label, Ms. Gerasimova's center has had to give up its offices and is reduced to consulting with workers and trade unions in public places and peoples' homes. “We're off the list, but all the accusations against us remain,” she says. “We gave up foreign funding, but there is no way to make up for it.”

Dubinina, who works with stray dogs in Moscow, says she's never had any unpleasant contacts with authority, and is surprised by the question. But the scarcity of money, due to the undeveloped culture of giving in Russia, is a huge obstacle to expanding operations, she adds.

“It would be really nice if we could find a big corporation to sponsor us, or something like that,” she says. “There is so much more we could do.”

The first time Braden Lawyer saw the “campus preacher,” he was puzzled. He had just started at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. – less than three hours by car from his tiny hometown of Elnora, but a whole world away.

Such preachers show up on the campus regularly, and often draw crowds with statements that many students find jarring or offensive, about all kinds of people who will burn eternally for all sorts of sins.

Mr. Lawyer could never have predicted that just a few years later, he’d be walking in the preacher’s shoes – to make a point about free speech.

It was only for a minute. He donned a suit, got up on stage in front of some 6,000 first-year students during orientation, and shouted words he’d never say in real life at a cluster of girls strolling by in short shorts.

His fellow actors portrayed three ways students might react: One wanted to hit him, one wanted the dean to intervene, and one wanted to debate him.

As campuses around the country have simmered and erupted in polarized protests and debates in recent years, more are considering how they can help students navigate free expression – sometimes with a push from legislators.

This year Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and North Carolina have mandated campus free speech policies, and a handful of other states are considering such laws. Some schools have decided that First Amendment instruction should be included right from the start, during a time typically reserved for talk of meal plans and dorm rules. 

“We needed to take the opportunity in orientation to simply educate students how free speech works at a public university,” says Daniel Carpenter, Purdue’s director of student success. “Among some, there was an expectation that the university would do things [that were] unrealistic about controlling speech, or impossible, or illegal.”

The recent disruption of conservative speakers on campuses from the University of California at Berkeley to Middlebury in Vermont is driving the appetite for the civics lessons. Administrators find themselves in the middle of a values tug-of-war, one that requires guidance to create safe environments where constitutional – and civil – rights are respected.

“What may be a conservative cause today might not be five years from now. This affects the health and well-being of higher education in general,” says Azhar Majeed, vice president of policy reform at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in Philadelphia, which has worked with Purdue and other campuses to qualify them for the group’s “green light” rating for free speech. 

“There is a lot more to do, but it is encouraging to see schools reach out to students the moment they get to campus,” he says.

The approach at Purdue

At Purdue – whose approach has become a model for other schools considering adding the topic to orientation – the new session that Lawyer participated in last year featured three skits. After each skit, a panel of administrators and legal experts weighed in – explaining, for instance, why the First Amendment prevents a public university from restricting a person speaking on the campus mall, unless the speech meets narrow exceptions, such as falsely defaming or genuinely threatening someone. The skits depict common situations students face, such as an offensive flag on a dorm door, and a professor bringing up possible parallels between a United State political campaign and Nazi propaganda. (See a video here https://youtu.be/uy85haP5fB4)

Information sessions can become a blur for students, so Purdue orientation director Kasi Jones quietly observed students’ reactions to the preacher during the first week of school. “I kind of hovered around the tree…. Two girls walked by [him] and said, ‘We learned about this at [orientation], just keep going.’ Hearing that, I was like, Oh my gosh, they listened!”

Among US college students, 78 percent agree that colleges should create “an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints,” even if offensive or biased, the Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute reported in 2016. But some students say universities should restrict offensive speech.

Free-speech advocates and many conservatives have grown increasingly concerned about student protest groups that shout down or block controversial speakers rather than hearing them out or challenging them in respectful debate.

Lawmakers aren’t always willing to wait for campuses to step in, as the recent legislation suggests. In addition, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos used her bully pulpit in July to encourage lawmakers to push back against “intolerance” on campus.

This viewpoint may help explain why nearly 6 out of 10 Republicans now say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country – while 10 years ago the same number said they had a positive effect, the Pew Research Center reported in July. 

Could regulations backfire?

But even some Republicans think the impulse to legislate could backfire.

In Wisconsin, a bill that passed the Assembly in June was opposed by all Democrats and one Republican – Rep. Bob Gannon of West Bend. It would require the state university system to address free speech policies during orientation. It would also mandate a disciplinary hearing for students who disrupt the free expression of others – and suspension or expulsion after a second offense.

“People that want to use this law to stifle speech could easily do it,” Representative Gannon says.

After an “indoctrination,” he says, referring to the orientation requirement, “I suspect these 17-, 18-year-old undergrads are going to say it’s easier to be silent on abortion, gun rights, issues that are uncomfortable on campus,” rather than risk their expensive degree. 

The bill hasn’t yet been taken up by the state Senate.

Many in higher education also say the premise that universities are bastions of liberal intolerance is inaccurate. It’s “a narrative to demonize our institutions of higher education,” says David Sanders, a biology professor at Purdue.

Professor Sanders says that while the orientation session is a worthy endeavor, he doesn’t think Purdue leaders have followed through on commitments they made to strongly condemn racism while also promoting free speech (he advocates this approach: “censure, not censor”).

Protests are part of campus life

Balancing free speech with other values became a high priority for the University of Mississippi after heated reactions to the 2012 election. So leaders there created “Respect the M,” an orientation session based on the university creed – seven statements affirming such commitments as “respect for the dignity of each person” and “fairness and civility.” 

New students often don’t realize when they first arrive that political tensions and protests are part of campus life, says Jacob Ferguson, an orientation leader heading into his junior year. Respect the M cuts down on the surprise factor and helps them learn “how to voice their opinion.”

This summer, it included a video of more experienced students sharing how they’ve lived the creed.

“College is a time where you are supposed to hear opinions that are different from yours,” says Savannah Smith, an Ole Miss senior and orientation coordinator. “I have best friends … that are so different from me and have made me see beyond my perspective.… Imparting that to the younger students … creates a culture where they really take ownership of this creed.”

Lawyer, now a Purdue senior applying to medical schools, says he’s hopeful more students will feel comfortable learning from their differences as successive classes receive this education.

“It’s not limiting thought whatsoever,” Lawyer says. “Professors can teach how they choose to teach; people can say what they need to say. [We’re] letting thought be as open as possible, because that’s where you find progress.”

Nick Squires

Syrian children attend an English class in the refugee camp on Tilos, Greece.

They are the forgotten people – more than 60,000 refugees who have been languishing in camps in Greece after their dreams of finding a new life in Europe were thwarted.

The Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans are stuck in limbo, waiting to hear whether they will be granted asylum and allowed to settle in the European Union – or rejected and sent back to Turkey, from where they crossed in boats to Greece.

But amid the grim picture, a tiny island in the Aegean Sea is offering a glimmer of hope and possibly a lesson for how the rest of Greece – and indeed the whole of Europe – could tackle the continent’s refugee crisis. 

Ever since the migration crisis erupted in 2015, the island has embraced asylum seekers. It is now home to a dozen Syrian families, about 70 people in total, many of them young children. That may not seem a large number in the scale of things – until you bear in mind that the entire population of Tilos is fewer than 500 people.

The islanders are keen to integrate the newcomers as much as possible and hope they will forge new lives amid the olive trees and ancient stone terraces of Tilos. And they think their acceptance of refugees could – and should – provide an example to the rest of Europe.

“If a little island like ours can support 12 families, then others can do the same, in proportion to their population. Bigger communities can take larger numbers. We can solve the refugee problem,” says Maria Kamma, the outspoken mayor of Tilos. “We think that the arrangement we have here is a model that could be exported to the rest of Greece and the whole of Europe.”

A more welcoming home

Tilos is an outcrop of limestone mountain peaks, pebble beaches, whitewashed churches, and goats – lots and lots of goats. A two-hour boat ride from Rhodes, it is part of the Dodecanese chain of islands and lies just a few miles off the coast of Turkey. 

The Syrians live in a cluster of prefabricated cabins grouped around a shower block and a communal cooking area.

It is hardly luxurious, but it is much cleaner and less institutional than the refugee facilities on other Greek islands such as Lesbos, where thousands of asylum seekers are crammed together behind wire fences.

Here on Tilos, the people are free to come and go. Many of the adults have found jobs – in shops, restaurants, the local bakery, and as day laborers.

It helps that the camp, shaded by mature trees, is right in the heart of Livadia, the main port.

Nick Squires

Tilos, a tiny island in the Aegean Sea, is offering a glimmer of hope for refugees and possibly a lesson for the rest of Greece.

It is a few hundred yards from a long beach, where the Syrian children have been learning to swim.

“It is so much better than where we were before,” says Mohsen Barak, who fled his native city of Al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria because of the war. He and his family have been living on Tilos for seven months.

“We were on Rhodes, in a refugee camp inside an old slaughteryard. It was really bad. We spent nearly a year there.”

The camp on Tilos was established about a year ago by Solidarity Now, a Greek nongovernmental organization, with help from UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.

“The refugees are much happier than they were at first, especially now they have found jobs. It’s not good to sit around all day with nothing to do, you become angry and depressed,” says Spiros Aliferis, a team leader from the NGO. “The kids go to the playground in the village, they swim in the sea.”

The children attend Greek and English language classes from Monday to Friday and many can already converse comfortably in their adopted language. They will start going to the island’s primary and secondary schools when the school year starts next month.

'Greek with a Scandinavian attitude'

The presence of the refugees has inspired plans to build a cheese factory on Tilos, to make cheese from the milk produced by the many goats that wander its herb-scented mountains and valleys.

There are 15,000 of them, outnumbering the human population by 45 to 1.

Currently, just one or two shepherds use the milk to make cheese, and that’s for their own consumption. The plan is to produce enough to export, in a cheese factory that will provide jobs for both Syrians and locals.

“We think there's a big potential,” says Stathis Kontos, adviser to the mayor.

“The mentality on Tilos is different from other islands,” he says. “I like to say the people are Greek but with a Scandinavian attitude. They like to help others.”

While some of the refugees hope to be reunited with relatives already settled in Germany and other EU countries, the mayor hopes the rest will remain and rebuild their lives on the island.

“I’d like them to stay,” she says. “They’re human beings. It’s their right to live in humane conditions. Tilos is a place where we can support their dreams of a peaceful life.” 

Courtesy of Anna Zielińska-Elliott

Anna Zielińska-Elliott translates Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, 'Killing Commendatore.'

When Haruki Murakami's 13th novel, "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage," was released in Poland, Polish readers didn't necessarily need to go to bookstores to find a copy. Instead, in three Polish cities, Japanese-style vending machines were installed, offering hot-off-the-press copies of the novel (a coming-of-age story about a railway-station designer).

The vending machines were a short-lived phenomenon, just one piece of an extravagant PR campaign on behalf of the book, but their presence in heavily traveled public places says much about Murakami's place in mainstream Polish culture. Polish readers have enthusiastically embraced the Japanese writer and his often fantastical stories of love, loss, and guilt.

Behind Murakami’s fame in Poland is a woman leading a quiet life in Boston.

Anna Zielińska-Elliott is now translating her 12th Murakami novel – the latest, "Killing Commendatore." Having translated Murakami for 30 years, she feels as if she can hear him speaking in Polish as she reads the Japanese. A professor of Japanese literature at Boston University by day, Zielińska-Elliott is like one of those Murakami characters with a curious double occupation. With the author's new book, she is also trying a new translation method: Instead of reading through the text first, she is rendering it sentence by sentence as she reads.

“It’s a more exciting experience,” Dr. Zielińska-Elliott said. “I don’t know what’s coming on the next page.”

Courtesy of Anna Zielińska-Elliott

Anna Zielińska-Elliott’s translations and her picture guide to Murakami’s Tokyo.

Raised in Poland, Zielińska-Elliott moved to the US in 1993 when she married an American. But her tortuous journey to bring Murakami to Poland began a few years before that.

Zielińska-Elliott had never thought she would become a translator until, in 1987, she encountered Murakami’s work as a college student studying linguistics in Tokyo. It was the year the love story "Norwegian Wood" took over Japan’s bookstores. One day, her language tutor brought her Murakami’s short story "Her Little Dog Underground."

She was struck by an aspect of the writing that is perhaps central to Murakami's global appeal. “While it was very clearly set in Japan, there were no visible markers of Japan,” Zielińska-Elliott recalls. “No Japanese names, no Japanese food. There was something really universal about it, and I thought I’d try to translate it and see how it would feel.”

Her friends liked her translation, she said. Encouraged, she went on to translate Murakami’s "A Wild Sheep Chase," a surreal quasi-detective story. She could not find a publisher, however, as Murakami was then unknown in Poland. Eventually, one publisher expressed interest, but it couldn’t afford the copyright fee.

“This was a few years after the USSR collapsed,” Zielińska-Elliott said. “The economy was in shambles. So I wrote a letter to Murakami. I wrote about the situation of a Polish intellectual, who wants to buy books but can’t afford them. Later, [Murakami's wife, Yoko,] called me. She quoted a really small amount, and I said: ‘Oh, yeah! That’s fine. I can pay it myself.’”

"A Wild Sheep Chase" came out in Poland in 1995, when Zielińska-Elliott was already living in the US. The publisher did little advertising for the book, she said, and it did not have a large impact. Still, the novel won an award for translation debuts. Years later, another Polish publisher commissioned Zielińska-Elliott to translate Murakami, and released multiple novels by him simultaneously. This time, Murakami took off.

Meeting the publisher’s demand while teaching full-time has not always been easy. “I have no life,” Zielińska-Elliott said, laughing. “When I’m translating a book, every free moment I spend on it.”

To preserve the feel of the Japanese original, Zielińska-Elliott has to race against another “deadline” – the publication date of the English translation.

Her editor, who does not speak Japanese, would judge her work’s quality based on the published English translation, Zielińska-Elliott explained. This phenomenon, called “the hegemony of English,” is a frustration for many European translators of Murakami.

“English versions are often heavily edited. And generally, they tend to domesticate, so all the foreignness is taken out,” Zielińska-Elliott said. “My editor would compare my version to the English and say: ‘This is not in the original.’ And I’d say: ‘Yeah, it was cut from your ‘original,’ but it is in the ‘original original.’”

With the dystopian novel "1Q84," Zielińska-Elliott finally got ahead of the English version. She was able to render Murakami’s creative uses of Japanese in the speech of a character diagnosed with dyslexia – which was not preserved in the English – without raised eyebrows from her editor.

Despite these constraints, translation is a game Zielińska-Elliott enjoys. “You try to understand a character, develop a way they speak, and try to stay in that character,” she said. “It’s like in a puppet theater.”

The in-depth reading her work involves can also become too intense to bear. She once put off translating a chapter in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," which describes in chilling details the torture of a Japanese spy by Russian-led troops during WWII. Zielińska-Elliott, whose own grandfather was captured by Russians during the war, dreaded the scene and left it for the end.

“I asked my husband to sit there," she recalls, "and translated it in one sitting.”

“But then the images stayed with me for weeks. Because when you translate it, you have to let it pass through you. You really become aware of every single word.”

In the future, Zielińska-Elliott plans to publish an English version of her own picture guide to Tokyo as seen through Murakami’s fiction.

Through her work, Zielińska-Elliott has come to know Murakami personally, but out of respect to the reclusive writer, she keeps this part of the story to herself.

AP Photo

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Vladimir Korolev, right, and Commander of Western military district Andrei Kartapolov attend a military parade during the Navy Day celebration in St.Petersburg, Russia, July 30.

After a meeting last weekend with Russia’s foreign minister, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States harbors an “extraordinary” mistrust of Moscow, caused in large part by its hacking of the 2016 US election. In recent days, that mistrust has resulted in tougher sanctions on Russia and a beefed-up US military presence along its borders. Many US allies have followed suit after Russia meddled in their democracies.

Yet at the same time, Mr. Tillerson also spoke of addressing differences with Russia and finding “places we can work together.” And indeed, Russia did support tough measures against North Korea at the United Nations on Aug. 5. It is also seeking cease-fires in Syria and renewing talks about its role in Ukraine.

For those who remember how the cold war was won against the Soviet Union, these latest US moves reflect a tried-and-true stance toward aggression by Moscow whether it be cyberattacks or military attacks. It is a policy of patience, restraint, and deterrence.

More than a dozen US presidents have now accepted the idea that Russia’s expansionist tendencies reflect more weakness than strength, and by containing Russia’s aggression, it can eventually reform or come to its senses. Bad ideas, in other words, collapse on their own fallacies.

This containment theory requires vigilance and statecraft – and a measure of hope that enough Russians will tire of isolation and economic stagnation. Then they will want to join the West rather than accept the Kremlin’s artificial fear of it.

The deterrence side of containment is certainly growing in many ways. Germany, for example, has improved its cyberdefenses after a shadowy group with ties to Russian intelligence broke into the computers of think tanks associated with Germany’s top two political parties. Sweden, which has long stayed out of NATO, plans a joint military drill with the alliance. And in Lithuania and Latvia, civic activists, who call themselves “elves,” are working to counter Russian misinformation in their countries’ media.

The new cyberdefenses reflect a deep faith in the values of Western democracy. “I see no reason why we should be losing,” says Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence. “It is about acknowledging the problem, resourcing solutions, and using what is best in our societies (free speech, civic engagement, innovation) to win it for our future.”

Russia’s aspirations to dominate its neighbors and split the Western alliance must be taken seriously. But the response must not be in kind. Rather the West can once again be firm when needed but offer opportunities for Russians to adopt another national identity. Russia’s illusions about imperial greatness do not have a long shelf life.