Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

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

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. I know this sounds blunt, but when you get right down to it, I guess that’s the way life is.

Japan is a country where most people really hate it when you go against the flow. For better or for worse, our culture places an extreme emphasis on harmony, which means that Japanese care way too much about “making waves.”

Two principles guided me. The first was to omit all explanations. Instead, I would toss a variety of fragments—episodes, images, scenes, phrases—into that container called the novel and then try to join them together in a three-dimensional way. Second, I would try to make those connections in a space set entirely apart from conventional logic and literary clichés. This was my basic scheme.