How Hard Is It To Translate Japanese Fiction Into English? Haruki Murakami’s Translator Will Tell You

Jay Rubin: “You don’t have a grammatical structure that you can use in any way, when translating Japanese to English. You don’t have cognates. You certainly don’t have a sentence structure that’s anything like English.” Not to mention the intangibles in each language that don’t exist in the other. “I very often feel I’m writing original – almost original – fiction.”