My pal Todd likes the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. I noticed this book a while back, mostly because of its title, which I immediately noticed was ripped off from a Raymond Carver short story. I thought this was a strike against the book until I started to read it. Then I learned that Murakami, himself an acclaimed novelist, is a noted translator of Carver's fiction. At the end of the book, be acknowledges in an 0ff-hand way that Carver's widow gave him permission to riff on the title. Um, wow.
He also reveals at the end that he went running with John Irving in Central Park in 1983 while he was translating Setting Free The Bears into Japanese.
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