All Intensive Purposes

Haruki Murakami translated Raymond Carver's work into Japanese, even before he was well known as a novelist in his own right. As Jay Rubin describes in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, at pages 98-100, Murakami and his wife visited Carver and his wife, Tess Gallagher, on a visit to the United States in 1984:

Carver was deeply involved in a writing project, but he was determined to make time for Murakami, so honoured was he to think that a translator would come all the way from Japan to meet him. Tess Gallagher reports that "Ray was eager, almost childlike with delight, to meet Murakami, to see who he was and why Ray's writing had brought them together on the planet." Haruki and Yoko arrived in the early afternoon and were served a simple snack of tea and smoked salmon and crackers.

In his account of the meeting, Murakami notes that it took place after Carver had overcome his drinking problem.

In the waning of that quiet afternoon, I remember with what distaste he was sipping black tea. Holding the teacup in his hand, he looked as though he was doing the wrong thing in the wrong place. Sometimes he would get up from his seat and go outside to smoke. From the window of Tess Gallagher's Sky House in Port Angeles, I could make out a ferryboat on its way to Canada.

Out on the deck of the hilltop house together, they lamented the death of small birds that had been crashing into a glass windbreak. They discussed why Carver's work should be so popular in Japan, and Murakami suggested it might be owing to Carver's theme of the many small humiliations in life, something to which Japanese people could readily respond. The discussion triggered just such memories in Carver, who later wrote the poem "The Projectile", dedicating it to Murakami:

We sipped tea. Politely musing
on possible reasons for the success
of my books in your country. Slipped
into talk of pain and humiliation
you find occurring, and reoccurring,
in my stories. And that element
of sheer chance. How all this translates
in terms of sales.
I looked into a corner of the room.
And for a minute I was 16 again,
careening around in the snow
in a '50 Dodge sedan with five or six
bozos. Giving the finger
to some other bozos ....

A snowball fight ensues, and "dumb luck" sends one projectile "into the side / of my head so hard it broke my eardrum", the intense pain drawing tears of humiliation in front of his friends. The victorious "bozo" drove off and probably never gave the incident

another thought. And why should he?
So much else to think about always.
Why remember that stupid car sliding
down the road, then turning the corner
and disappearing?
We politely raise our teacups in the room.
A room that for a minute something else entered.

...Tess Gallagher recalls that Murakami presented himself only as a translator, and that his still relatively untested spoken English led to some silences, but that "he was obviously very moved to be in Ray's presence". Afterwards, she and Carver agreed that they had just met an extraordinary couple to whom they felt somehow connected.

Three years later, the Murakamis looked forward to hosting Carver in Japan, and had a large bed frame built into their new home, but Carver was too ill to make the trip, and died of cancer the following year. "[A]ware of how much Carver meant to Murakami," Tess Gallagher "sent him a pair of Carver's shoes as a memento."