Something I enjoyed about reading Murakami both in Japanese and in translation is that there are a couple of translations of "Norwegian Wood". Seeing how two translators (Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin) handled the translation into English gave me different views of how one could approach Japanese from an English perspective (my native tongue).
I feel like I once heard of Jay Rubin say something like, if you don't know japanese, you've never read a word of Murakami, you've read Rubin. I suppose it's obvious but it did make me stop and think about how distant japanese actually is from English.
I can't actually find any reference to him saying this though.
