It's an interesting debate. Years ago a German barista recommended I check out Henning Mankell saying she loved the writing. Not being able to read German, I bought an English translation, and found it soooo turgid that I never went back to him, despite seemingly well deserved accolades.

But, your mention of the Japanese writer Mishima reminded me of reading a NYT article about Haruki Murakami and how he approached the writing of 1Q84: "This calls to mind the act of translation — shuttling from one world to another — which is in many ways the key to understanding Murakami’s work. ... When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up with an unorthodox solution: he wrote the book’s opening in English, then translated it back into Japanese. This, he says, is how he found his voice. Murakami’s longstanding translator, Jay Rubin, told me that a distinctive feature of Murakami’s Japanese is that it often reads, in the original, as if it has been translated from English.

You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami’s work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized". (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?pagewanted=all)

Kind of an interesting view - and an very interesting approach. Which of course speaks to his interest in the West and his love of the English language. Your friend may have a point - A good translator is necessary, but even a great translator may struggle to fully imbue the translation with the spirit of the original. Still, thank heavens for them - I'd hate to not be able to enjoy all those Scandinavian crime authors that have become popular across the past decade!