Love and Theft? Oddball investigative article in the WSJ asks whether Bob Dylan was a plagiarist.

As a 62-year-old physician and writer in a small town north of Tokyo, Junichi Saga knows almost nothing about 62-year-old Bob Dylan.

"Bob Dylan is a very famous American country singer, yes?" asks Dr. Saga. "I'm not familiar with these things."

Mr. Dylan , on the other hand, would seem to be quite familiar with Dr. Saga's work. On the legendary singer-songwriter's most recent studio album, "Love and Theft," he appears to have lifted about a dozen passages from Dr. Saga's book, "Confessions of a Yakuza."

Maybe I'm the only one who finds this hilarious, possibly because Dylan's lyrics have always been so awful that I can't imagine him taking the trouble to steal them. Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, offered this piece of non-answer information: "As far as I know, Mr. Dylan's work is original."

The man who discovered the passages suggesting less-than-full authorship, Chris Johnson, is quoted, too:

Mr. Dylan didn't choose the most poetic or most powerful lines from the book, Mr. Johnson says. He appears at times to have clipped phrases almost randomly. Mr. Johnson has given a lot of thought to the process by which Mr. Dylan wrote his lyrics. He imagines the singer sitting in a hotel in Japan, where he has often appeared over the years, and browsing through "Confessions" as he worked on a new batch of tunes, using lines from the book as kindling for his imagination.

"I kind of wondered if he had done a lot of that before on other albums," says Mr. Johnson. "But if he'd been doing this all along, somebody would have caught him a long time ago."

Not if he's using obscure enough books. Actually, that strategy of "clipp[ing] phrases . . . randomly" might explain some of Dylan's work.