Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

Kabukicho

Waseda University system

course on Racine

Kokubunji

jazz café

Kokubunji Station’s

Sendagaya in downtown

leitmotif

It was thus that I spent my twenties laboring from morning to night to pay off debts. All I can remember of that decade, in fact, is how hard I worked.

Sendagaya jazz café

One day, however, it hit me that I was pushing thirty. What I thought of as my youth was coming to a close. I remember how weird that feeling was. “So this is how it is,” I thought. “Time just slips away.”

Yakult Swallows

Yakult

Yakult’s

Charlie Manuel,

Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel. I can still recall the exact sensation. It was as if something had come fluttering down from the sky and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe “epiphany” is a better word.

Shinjuku,

Kinokuniya bookstore,

Hear the Wind Sing

Yakult Swallows

Hear the Wind Sing

For several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it, but when I read through the result I was far from impressed.

In retrospect, it was only natural that I was unable to produce a good novel.

While it was easy to talk about setting down one’s impressions freely, though, actually doing it wasn’t that simple.

English composition

easy-to-understand way,

extraneous fat,

I was born and raised in Japan, so the vocabulary and patterns of Japanese—in short, the language’s contents—had filled the system that was me to bursting.

Ágota Kristóf

Kristóf

Having discovered the curious effect of composing in a foreign language, thereby acquiring a creative rhythm distinctly my own, I returned my Olivetti to the closet and once more pulled out my sheaf of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. Then I sat down and “translated” the chapter or so that I had written in English into Japanese.

Some people have said, “Your work has the feel of translation.” The precise meaning of this statement escapes me, but I think it may hit the mark in one way and entirely miss it in another.

Some see this as an affront to our national language. In fact, I have been criticized on precisely those grounds. Language, though, is tough and resilient, a tenacity backed up by a long history.

At any rate, I rewrote the “rather boring” novel I had just finished from top to bottom in the new style that I had just developed.

Hear the Wind Sing.

Writing in my new style felt more like performing music than composing literature, a feeling that stays with me today. It was as if the words were coming through my body instead of from my head.

Hear the Wind Sing

Writing in that style had been like exercising in clothes that didn’t fit.

Gunzo

Hear the Wind Sing

Hear the Wind Sing

Gunzo.

Sendagaya Elementary School

Meiji Avenue,

Omotesando,

Harajuku,

That’s when it hit me. I was going to win the prize. And I was going to go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success. It was an audacious presumption, but for some reason I was sure at that moment that it would happen.

Jingu Stadium;

There is no basic change today—I feel the same pleasure and excitement I felt when I wrote my first novel.

I do not consider myself a genius in any way, shape, or form. Nor do I think I am equipped with some special sort of talent.