That is pretty obscure. What the writer is saying is that Dylan was accused of plagiarizing (i.e. stealing) some of his lyrics from a Japanese book. So, "Love and Theft" might perhaps be the title of an album where he steals lyrics from some book that he loves.
This isn't really a pun, because a pun is a joke where one set of words is substituted for another set that it sounds like. This doesn't happen here. Here's an example of a real pun:

So, actually, you're confused because this is actually a bad bit of writing. If I were the writer's editor, I would say to delete it and come up with something else. For example:
That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (admission of guilt, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s.
Edit: An improvement to my improvement comes to mind:
That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (Freudian slip, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s.