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I recently started reading "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami in English and I'm quite enjoying it.

However, I learned that the English version — although well-translated — omits several whole chapters from the original! I also happen to speak Russian, and I discovered that there's a Russian version by Sergei and Ivan Logachev which is apparently translated from the original Japanese. (The page count seems to confirm this: 600 for English vs. 770 for Russian.)

However, I could find no information about the quality of this translation. Would anyone happen to know whether the Russian version is a high quality translation, and if so, if it's worth reading over the English version on account of the additional content?

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    I'm upvoting because, as noted in this related meta thread, questions like this aren't your run-of-the-mill "shopping questions" - the availability of translations of a particular work isn't likely to change rapidly, so this question should have lasting value.
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Feb 25, 2017 at 1:03
  • Fascinating. Why would one translation keep more chapters than the other? Is this a Les Misérables situation, where those chapters have material which isn't relevant to the plot?
    – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum
    Feb 25, 2017 at 11:45
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    @Randal'Thor I wonder whether the lasting value could be improved by framing the question such that answers could cover translations in any languages. The next person wondering about this might not speak Russian but some other non-English, non-Japanese language, and I'm not sure it's worth ending up with the same question for every other language the book has been translated to.
    – Martin Ender
    Feb 27, 2017 at 12:05
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    I'm putting this question on hold as 'Unclear what you're asking' until 'high quality translation' is defined. As it stands, it's not clear what you mean by high quality. Please edit to make it clearer :)
    – Mithical ♦
    Mar 4, 2017 at 21:49
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    @Randal'Thor - I disagree; that question is asking for a reliable translation, while this is asking for a high-quality translation (and also has a POB question stuck in it as well).
    – Mithical ♦
    Nov 16, 2017 at 10:05

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