Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

I was young and strong, and able to listen to the music that I loved all day as the ruler of my own little domain. I didn’t have to commute to work on packed rush-hour trains or attend boring meetings or suck up to a boss I disliked.

LOOKING BACK, I think I was just an “average boy” until I started working.

A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.

Art lovers were shocked, on occasion even repulsed, when they first beheld the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. I doubt many still feel that way. To the contrary, their art is now found to be deeply moving, invigorating, even psychically healing. That’s not because it has lost its originality with time; rather, that originality has become one with our perception, so that, naturally, it has become a part of us, a reference point, as it were.

Only trash swims downstream.”

What is originality, after all, but the shape that results from the natural impulse to communicate to others that feeling of freedom, that unconstrained joy?

I don’t make promises, so I don’t have deadlines. As a result, writer’s block and I are strangers to each other.

When Paul Valéry was interviewing Albert Einstein, he asked the great scientist, “Do you carry a notebook around to record your ideas?” Einstein was an unflappable man, but this question clearly unnerved him. “No,” he answered. “There’s no need for that. You see I rarely have new ideas.”

What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another.

things that stay with you over time are far more important.

But in my view, the goal of the Japanese educational system appears to be to create doglike people who will be of use to the community … and even sometimes to create sheeplike people they can lead as a group to a common destination.

A society in which there is not enough room to escape produces deep problems in the educational arena, and necessitates new solutions.

One opposite of imagination is “efficiency.”

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.

Tell people in America that your novel sold a million copies in Japan or won some literary prize and they’re basically unimpressed, but get published in The New Yorker and they start treating you very differently. I often find myself envious of a culture like this, where such a landmark magazine exists.