Dmitrii Kovalenin, Russian translator of Murakami has written a book on Murakami which is 1/3rd about the translation process, 1/3rd literary analysis of Muraka

Dmitrii Kovalenin, Russian translator of Murakami has written a book on Murakami which is 1/3rd about the translation process, 1/3rd literary analysis of Murakami's novels and 1/3rd about author's experiences with Japan and Japanese people. Kovalenin's chapter on the difficulty and involvement of translation the 'Hard-boiled Wonderland' is especially striking and goes into much similar details of how he had to be immersed in the book to a great extent to pull off a translation that would honor the original. It is his literary analysis chapters that shed a great deal of light on 'why'. Turns out that Murakami's prose is highly structured, with subtle cross-refereces that, if translated differently will 'de-sync' and leave the reader of a translated version without the clues to understanding the real structure of the novel. While an example of a structurally meaningful cross-reference escapes me at the moment, I do remember a different example of a structural clue. It occurs in the 'Hear the Wind Sing', the first book of the Sheep Trilogy, which ends in the much-recommended 'A Wild Sheep Chase' (technically it was later followed with a 4th book in 'Dance, Dance, Dance' so it's a 4-book trilogy). In the very beginning of the 'Hear the Wind Sing' there is a small unassuming line: 'This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later — in other words, on August 26 of the same year'. If you follow the other time references given in the book -- such as days of the week mentioned on the radio etc -- this time frame given cannot possibly be true. The assumption that it is not an author's mistake gives a hint that there is a hidden structure to the novel, which on its face looks fairly simple and linear. I personally think that it is very difficult to get to like Murakami if you start with 'Kafka' or, god forbid, the 'Wind-up Bird'. These are hard books and they require a specific mindset to enjoy. 'Sheep' into 'Dance' is much easier to enjoy and 'Norwegian Wood' and 'South of the Border' both provide a large tractable multi-layered experience that can be explored up to an individual desire for complexity in undertones. According to Kovalenin, Murakami himself refuses to elaborate on his books' structures and recommends instead to 'understand [the books] via the way you feel about them'.