Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

Physically moving my hand as I write, rereading what I write, over and over, and closely reworking it—only then am I finally able to gather my thoughts and grasp them like other people do.

I had stepped on the tails of the tigers who guard the sacred sanctuary of nonfiction, and they were angry.

Novelists (at least most of them) tend to be more like the second man—in other words, the stupider guy. They are the type who has to climb to the top to understand Mount Fuji. Or perhaps it is in their nature to climb the mountain over and over without ever figuring it out; or, again, to find that the more times they climb it, the less they understand. So much for efficiency! Whichever the case, it’s the sort of thing a smart person could never stand doing.

Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that it entailed, removed this obstacle. It also led me to the realization that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner.

It was as if the words were coming through my body instead of from my head. Sustaining the rhythm, finding the coolest chords, trusting in the power of improvisation—it was tremendously exciting.

Life is strange, when you think about it.

that important, and I don’t care if the words appear on paper or on a screen (or are transmitted orally, à la Fahrenheit 451). As long as book lovers keep on reading books, I’m happy.

The task set before me is to survive, and to try and keep moving ahead.

People instinctively dislike those things they can’t understand, a pattern characteristic of members of the establishment who are buried up to their ears in the dominant forms of expression. They tend to apprehend the newcomer with abhorrence and disgust, because, in a worst-case scenario, the very ground upon which they stand might fall away from under them.

Better to evoke a strong response, even a negative one, than to elicit nothing but humdrum comments and lukewarm praise.

I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels.

Next, before you start writing your own stuff, make a habit of looking at things and events in more detail. Observe what is going on around you and the people you encounter as closely and as deeply as you can. Reflect on what you see. Remember, though, that to reflect is not to rush to determine the rights and wrongs or merits and demerits of what and whom you are observing. Try to consciously refrain from value judgments—conclusions can come later. What’s important is not arriving at clear conclusions but retaining the specifics of a certain situation—in other words, your material—as fully as you can.

Of course, my brain doesn’t work that fast in the first place, so when I do voice a quick opinion on something it often turns out to be wrong (or inadequate, or completely off the mark),

Your mental chest of drawers is a great asset when you set to work on a novel. Neatly put-together arguments and value judgments aren’t much use for those of us who write fiction.

James Joyce put it most succinctly when he said, “Imagination is memory.” I tend to agree with him. In fact, I think he was spot-on. What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but when we bring such fragments together our intuition is sparked, and we sense what the future may hold in store. It is from their interaction that a novel’s true power emanates.

You can realize the glorious feeling of practicing magic. For writing a novel is in the end forging a link with people on other planets. For real!

This says something important about novel writing as well. The possibilities are limitless—or virtually limitless—even if we use the same limited material. The fact that a piano has only eighty-eight keys hardly means that nothing new can be done with it.

If I were an airplane, I would be the kind that requires a lengthy runway to get off the ground.

Anyone who has just finished writing a long novel is bound to be in an emotional, overstimulated state.

have the sense that no one is hoping that a writer lives in a quiet suburb, lives a healthy early-to-bed-early-to-rise lifestyle, goes jogging without fail every day, likes to make healthful vegetable salads, and holes up in his study for a set period every day to work. I have the anxious sense that all I’m doing is throwing a damper on people’s sense of the romantic.

I think chaos exists in everyone’s minds. Chaos is in my mind, and in yours as well. It’s not the sort of thing, though, that in daily life needs to be given form and openly shown to others. Not something you brag about, saying, “Hey, get a load of how huge the chaos is inside me,” or anything. If you want to come face-to-face with the chaos inside you, then be silent and descend, alone, to the depths of your consciousness.

Living is (in most cases) a tiresome, lackadaisical, protracted battle. If you don’t make the effort to persist in pushing the body forward, then keeping a firm, positive hold over your will and soul becomes, in my opinion, realistically next to impossible.

I believe my theory might be of some value. You toughen up your will as much as you can. And at the same time you equip and maintain the headquarters of that will, your body, to be as healthy as possible, as sturdy as possible, so it doesn’t, as much as possible, hinder you—and this will link up with an overall balanced, enhanced quality of your life. My basic idea is that as long as you don’t mind putting in honest effort, the quality of the work you produce will also naturally be improved.

And teachers and parents live and die by how many of their students and children get into various universities. It’s all kind of sad.

If you divide people into dog types and cat types, I am most definitely the latter. Order me to go right and you can count on me going left. Sometimes I’ll feel bad about it, but that’s just the way I am.

It would be a place where the individual and the larger system can each move freely, and gently interact and negotiate with one another. In other words, a place where each person can freely stretch out their arms and legs and take a good, long breath. A place apart from hierarchy, efficiency, and bullying. Simply put, a warm, temporary shelter. One that anyone can enter and is free to leave. A serene middle ground between individual and community. Whatever position one takes up in it is left up to the person’s discretion. I’d like to call it a space of individual recovery.

It can be a small space at first. It doesn’t have to be anything big. A compact, handmade sort of place where all kinds of possibilities can actually be tried out, and if something works, it can become a model or springboard and then develop further. That space can gradually be extended even more. That’s the way I see it. It might take time, but I think that’s the most correct and rational way to go. It would be great if these spaces could spring up spontaneously everywhere.

If you always see things from your own standpoint, the world shrinks. Your body gets stiff, your footwork grows heavy, and you can no longer move. But if you’re able to view where you’re standing from other perspectives—to put it another way, if you can entrust your existence to some other system—the world will grow more three-dimensional, more supple.

If there hadn’t been any books, or if I hadn’t read so many, I think my life would have been far drearier. For me, then, the act of reading was its own kind of essential school. A customized school built and run just for me, one in which I learned so many important lessons. A place where there were no tiresome rules or regulations, no numerical evaluations, no angling for the top spot. And, of course, no bullying. While I was part of a larger system, I was able to secure another, more personal system of my own. The mental image I have of a space of individual recovery is exactly like that. It’s not limited just to reading.

No wonder the “haven” in Kafka on the shore is a library.

What I hope for from schools is simply that they do not suppress the imagination of children who are naturally imaginative. That’s enough. I want them to provide an environment in which each person’s individuality can thrive. Do that, and schools will become fuller, freer places. Simultaneously, society itself will also become a fuller, freer place.

course it’s the writer who creates the characters; but characters who are—in a real sense—alive will eventually break free of the writer’s control and begin to act independently. I’m not the only one who feels this—many fiction writers acknowledge it. In fact, unless that phenomenon occurs, writing the novel becomes a strained, painful, and trying process. When a novel is on the right track, characters take on a life of their own, the story moves forward by itself, and a very happy situation evolves whereby the novelist just ends up writing down what he sees happening in front of him. And in some cases the character takes the novelist by the hand and leads him or her to an unexpected destination.

What is important, what is not interchangeable, is the fact that that person and I are connected. I don’t know the details of where and how we’re connected.

Yet through the system of narrative, I feel that we are connected, the real sense that nourishment is passing back and forth.

The reality of actual society and the reality of stories are inevitably connected at a fundamental level in people’s souls (or in their unconscious). In any age, when something major occurs and there’s a shift in social reality, there’s a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well.

It’s important for those who deal with creativity to always want to push forward into new frontiers.