Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

One thing I do want you to understand is that I am, when all is said and done, a very ordinary person. I do think I have some innate ability to write novels (if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to write novels all these many years). But that aside, if I do say so myself, I’m the type of ordinary guy you’ll find anywhere. Not the type to stand out when I stroll around town, the type who’s always shown to the worst tables at restaurants. I doubt that if I didn’t write novels, anyone would ever have noticed me. I would have just lived out an ordinary, nondescript life in a totally ordinary way. In my daily life I’m hardly ever conscious of myself as writer.

The last thing I’d like to note is that I’m not the kind of person who is very good at thinking things out purely using my mind. I’m not that good at logical argument or abstract thought. The only way I can think about things in any kind of order is by putting them in writing. 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.

There are exceptions, of course, but from what I have seen, most novelists aren’t what one would call amiable and fair-minded. Neither are they what would normally be considered good role models: their dispositions tend to be idiosyncratic and their lifestyles and general behavior frankly odd. Almost all (my guess is 92 percent, including yours truly) live under the unspoken assumption that “my way is right, while virtually all other writers are wrong.” I doubt that many of us would want to have much contact with such people, whether as neighbors or—heaven forbid—as friends.

The thing that makes novels different is that practically anybody can write one if they put their mind to it.

While entering the ring may be easy, however, remaining there for long is hard.

To the contrary, a runaway bestseller by a new writer can give the whole publishing industry a boost.

The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.

In my considered opinion, anyone with a quick mind or an inordinately rich store of knowledge is unlikely to become a novelist. That is because the writing of a novel, or the telling of a story, is an activity that takes place at a slow pace—in low gear, so to speak.

An extreme way of putting it is that novelists might be defined as a breed who feel the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary.

Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise.

A tenacious, persevering temperament that equips them to work long and lonely hours. It is my belief that these are the qualifications required of a professional novelist.

So how do you discover if you have what it takes to be a novelist? There is only one answer: you have to jump in the water and see if you sink or swim.

One night my wife and I were trudging home with our heads down, too broke to make the bank payment that was due the next day, when we stumbled upon a crumpled wad of bills lying in the street. Whether it was synchronicity or some kind of sign, I don’t know, but strange to say, it was exactly the amount we needed. It really saved us, since otherwise our check would have bounced. (For some reason, strange things like this happen from time to time in my life.) We should have turned the money in to the police, but we were strapped, so we kept it. There isn’t much point in apologizing now. I guess I’ll have to repay my debt to society through other means.

Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.

I have been writing fiction for more than thirty-five years at the time of this book’s writing; yet I have never experienced what is commonly known as “writer’s block.” Wanting to write but being unable to is unknown to me. That may make it sound as if I am overflowing with talent, but the actual reason is much simpler: I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English. Since translation is essentially a technical operation, I can pursue it on a daily basis, quite separate from my creative desire; yet at the same time it is a good way to hone my writing skills—were I not a translator, I’m sure I would have found another related pursuit. If I am in the mood, I may also turn to writing essays. “What the heck,” I defiantly tell myself as I peck away at those other projects. “Not writing novels isn’t going to kill me.”

when I think about “originality” I am transported back to my boyhood days. I can see myself in my room sitting in front of my little transistor radio listening for the first time to the Beach Boys (“Surfin’ U.S.A.”) and the Beatles (“Please Please Me”). “Wow!” I’m thinking. “This is fantastic! I’ve never heard anything like this!” I am so moved. It is as if their music has thrown open a new window in my soul, and air of a kind I have never breathed before is pouring in. I feel a sense of profound well-being, a natural high. Liberated from the constraints of reality, it is as if my feet have left the ground. This to me is how “originality” should feel: pure and simple.

I came across this line recently in The New York Times, written about the American debut of the Beatles: “They produced a sound that was fresh, energetic and unmistakably their own.” These words may provide the best definition of originality available. “Fresh, energetic, and unmistakably your own.”

Remember the scene in Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. where E.T. assembles a transmitting device from the junk he pulls out of the garage? There’s an umbrella, a floor lamp, pots and pans, a record player—it’s been a long time since I saw the movie, so I can’t recall everything, but he manages to throw all those household items together in such a way that the contraption works well enough to communicate with his home planet thousands of light years away. I got a big kick out of that scene when I saw it in the movie theater, but it strikes me now that putting together a good novel is much the same thing. The key component is not the quality of the materials—what’s needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication.

I have long held that no generation is superior or inferior to another. Although stereotypes about age groups being better or worse are common, I am convinced such criticisms don’t hold water. Generations should never be ranked that way. Of course each has its own tendencies. But there are no differences in the quantity or quality of talent. At least not enough to matter.

Each generation has its own deficiencies as well as its own fields of expertise. It’s that simple. Correspondingly, each generation should stress its respective strengths in its creative activities. Writers should use their own language as a weapon, choosing words that come naturally to them to depict what they see as clearly as they can. There is no need for them to be intimidated by their elders; nor, on the other side of the coin, do they have any justification for feeling superior.

So if your aim is to write fiction, take a close look around you. The world may appear a mundane place, but in fact it is filled with a variety of enigmatic and mysterious ores. Novelists are people who happen to have the knack of discovering and refining that raw material. Even more wonderful: the process costs virtually nothing. If you are blessed with a pair of good eyes, you too can mine the ore you choose to your heart’s content! Can you think of a more wonderful way to make a living?

Raymond Carver, a writer I love and respect, also enjoyed tinkering. He wrote, about another writer, that “he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places.” I know that feeling exactly, for I have had the same experience many times. You reach the limit. If you tinker any more you will only damage what you have written. It’s a subtle point, easy to miss. The bit about replacing commas hits it right on the head.

Honestly, from elementary school through college I was never that good a student. Not that I had bad grades or I was a dropout or anything—I managed to get by okay—but the act of studying itself was something I basically disliked, and I really didn’t study much.

The reason I didn’t study hard was simple. It was boring. I just wasn’t interested. There were so many other things in life more fun than studying for school.

deep down, I knew that reading lots of books, listening intently to music—and maybe I should include going out with girls, too—was, for me, a personal form of study that had real significance, a significance greater than studying for any tests for school. I can’t recall now to what extent I was explicitly aware of this or could have articulated it, but I was aware of being sort of defiantly anti-schoolwork.

Another thing I’ve never been much interested in is competing with others for ranking.

Anyway, back then, for me reading was more important than anything else. It goes without saying, but there are tons of books that are much more exciting than any textbook. As I turned the pages of those books, I had a vivid, physical sensation, as if the content was becoming part of my flesh and blood. That’s why I couldn’t buckle down to study for exams. I couldn’t see how mechanically cramming information into my head—historical dates, English vocabulary words, and the like—was going to be of any use in the future. Technical knowledge that’s memorized mechanically, not systematically, will, over time, scatter away, to be sucked in somewhere and vanish—maybe into some dark graveyard of useless knowledge. Because there’s no need to retain it in your memory.

Compared to that, things that stay with you over time are far more important. Obviously. The thing is, though, that sort of knowledge isn’t immediately useful. It takes a long time for it to show its true value. That kind of knowledge doesn’t directly link up to grades on exams.

From about the middle of my time in high school, I started reading English books in the original. My English wasn’t great, but I wanted to read the novels in the original, or books that hadn’t yet been translated into Japanese, so I bought a pile of English paperbacks from a used-book store down near Kobe harbor, the kind that basically sells them by the pound, and tore through them from cover to cover, whether I understood the meaning completely or not. At first it was more out of curiosity, but then reading in English started to feel more familiar, I suppose, and I could read through books in English pretty smoothly.

There were lots of kids who had better grades on English tests than me, but as far as I could tell, none of them could read a book in English from cover to cover. Yet I could easily plow through an entire book. Then why were my grades in English class so mediocre? The conclusion I came to was that the goal of English classes in Japanese high schools was not to get students to use actual, living English.

Then what was the goal? There was only one: for students to get high marks on the English section of the college entrance exams. At least for the teachers in the public high school I attended, being able to read books in English or have ordinary conversations with foreigners was beside the point (I won’t go so far as to say superfluous). For them it was far more important for us to memorize as many English vocabulary words as we could, master the past perfect subjunctive,

Language is a living thing, as are human beings. When living people try to acquire a living language, flexibility is a must. Each side is in motion, and you have to find the most effective point of contact. This may seem obvious, but within the school system it wasn’t obvious at all.

If you go to Europe, you’ll find most young people speak pretty fluent English, and they read a lot of books in English as well (which leads publishers of books translated into their various countries’ languages to lament the fact that sales aren’t so good). But most young Japanese are still not good at handling English outside of school—whether it be speaking, reading, or writing. And this is a major problem. If you leave this kind of distorted educational system in place, I don’t think even including English study starting at the elementary-school level, a fairly recent move in Japan, will help much. All it does is increase profits in the education industry.

This goes beyond English, or the study of foreign languages. I can’t help thinking that in almost every subject, Japan’s educational system fundamentally fails to consider how to motivate each individual to improve their potential. Even now the system seems intent on going by the book to cram in facts and teach test-taking techniques. 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.

When I was in school my parents and teachers always warned me, “You’ve got to study as hard as you can while you’re in school. Otherwise when you grow up you’ll regret not having studied more when you were young.” But after I left school I never thought that, not even once. For me it was more regret that I hadn’t done more things I enjoyed doing. Being force...

In any case, in the same way that you have to read a lot of books in order to write novels, to write about people you need to know a lot of them.

When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters.

One of the things I most enjoy about writing novels is the sense that I can become anybody I want to be.

Thelonious Monk said something apropos of this: “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”

Which reminds me of a phone call I got once from a former classmate. “My son, who’s in high school, has read all your books,” he told me, “and we often talk together about them. We normally don’t talk too much, but when it comes to your books we’re able to say a lot to each other.” He sounded happy when he said this. “Oh,” I thought, “so my books do have a small role to play in the world.” At least to help a parent and child communicate. That’s an achievement. I don’t have children myself, and if other people’s children enjoy reading my books, and that arouses a response in them, that means I’ve passed on something to the next generation, albeit in a modest way.

if my work is centered more on foreign countries, then there will be less of a need to deal with the troublesome domestic literary industry. Then they can say what they want and I can just ignore it.

The thing that made me happiest when I published my books abroad was how many people (both readers and critics) said my books were really “original,” unlike anything by any other novelists. Whether they praised the works or not, the basic consensus was that “this writer’s style is totally unlike any other’s.” This assessment was quite different from that in Japan, and it made me very happy. To say that I was original, that I had my own special style—for me nothing could be higher praise.

One other important reason I was able to make a breakthrough in the West was that I was blessed with several outstanding translators.