linguistically ambitious reading plans

so i have this friend i met when she was an exchange student in Student City and when she left, she gave me the book she'd been reading and that i'd had some fun trying to read. i don't actually know any Romanian, but it was fun trying to guess words using my knowledge of French. the book is La sud de graniță, la vest de soare by Haruki Murakami.

i still haven't read it because, well, language barrier (side note, it somehow feels like a very me thing to feel like i need to justify this). but today i went to the library and borrowed the Dutch version, Ten zuiden van de grens. my idea is to kind of read them side by side.

to be entirely honest, i am motivated more than a little by the prospect of being able to claim i've read a book in Romanian. but also, i've been watching lots of Kate Pfeil videos lately, so that also made me more interested in Murakami. however the thing that pushed me over the edge is my reread of La Princesse et le Pêcheur by Minh Tran Huy, which mentioned specifically this novel quite a lot.