Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes. I doubt many can tell you who won the Akutagawa Prize two years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner three years back. Can you? Truly great works that have stood the test of time, on the other hand, are lodged in our memory forever.

What carries more weight than anything else is the resolve to sit down at one’s desk to improve what one has written. Compared to that, the question of which direction to take in those improvements may be of secondary importance. A writer’s instinct and intuition derive less from logic and more from the level of determination brought to the task. It’s like beating the bushes to flush out the birds. What difference does it make what kind of stick you use or how you swing it? Neither matters as long as the birds take to the air. It is that flurry of movement that jolts our field of vision, allowing us to see things in a new light.

It’s not that I think running is a great thing. Running is just running. There’s no good or bad about it. If you think “I hate running,” then there’s no need for you to run. It’s up to each person whether they run or don’t run.

I’m gripped myself by a growing sense of anxiety as I say this—the sense that many people still expect novelists to conform to the classic image of people who lead a debauched life, ignore their family, pawn their wife’s kimono for money (perhaps an image that’s a bit out of date), get hooked on alcohol, or women, doing whatever pleases them—the antiestablishment writer who creates literature out of ruin and chaos. Or if not that, then the expectation that the writer be a man of action, the kind who takes part in the Spanish Civil War, pounding away at his typewriter as the shells whiz around him. I 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.