On the morning of 1 October 1987, the day Raymond Carver was scheduled for surgery to remove three-quarters of a lung, Haruki Murakami received a telephone call to say that the bed was finally ready.

It was almost a year since Murakami had travelled from his Tokyo apartment to visit the futon manufacturing company in Yokohama. There, he’d sat with the owner and described what he’d wanted. The owner, an old man who’d played a villager in Akira Kurosawa’s Roshomon, sat nodding, curled shavings of maple falling from his thin grey beard. He raised his eyebrows when Murakami requested the bed to be six-feet wide and seven-feet long. ‘It’s an important bed,’ Murakami said, and then went on to describe the timber he had collected. ‘I’ll have it brought to you by the end of the week.’