Novelist as a Vocation(41)

In every age, in every society, imagination plays a crucial role.

One opposite of imagination is “efficiency.” And one of the factors that drove tens of thousands of people from their homes in Fukushima was this very “efficiency.” The notion that nuclear-power generation is efficient energy and is good for the community, and the lie cooked up out of the notion—namely, the so-called safety myth—brought this tragic situation, this unrecoverable disaster, upon our nation. It’s fair to say that this was a defeat for our imagination. But even now it’s not too late. We have to establish an axis of free thought and individual ideas that can counter this short-circuited, dangerous set of values. And then extend this ideological axis to the broader community.

This isn’t to say that I hope school education simply “enriches children’s imagination.” I’m not hoping for that much. When all is said and done, the ones who will enrich children’s imaginations are children themselves. Not teachers, not educational facilities. And certainly not educational policies of the country or local government. Not all children have a rich imagination. Just like some children are fast runners and others are not. Some children have a rich imagination, and others—though no doubt they display amazing talents in other areas—aren’t what you’d called very imaginative. It’s only to be expected. That’s society. If “Let’s enrich children’s imagination” becomes a set goal, though, then things will go bad all over again.

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.

As one novelist, those are my thoughts. Not that my thinking about this will change anything.





What Kind of Characters Should I Include?





I’m often asked if any characters in my novels are based on real people. On the whole, the answer is no, though sometimes it’s yes. I’ve written a lot of novels, but only two or three times have I intentionally, from the start, had a real person in mind when I created a character. When I did, I was a bit nervous that somebody might detect that the character was modeled on somebody—especially if the person who did was the one the character was based on (in all cases they were secondary characters in the novels)—but fortunately no one’s ever pointed that out, not even once. I might model the character after a real person, but I always carefully and diligently rework the character so people won’t recognize him. Probably the person himself doesn’t, either.

What happens more often is that people claim that the characters I haven’t based on anyone, the imaginary ones I totally made up, are modeled after real people. In some cases there are even people who swear that a certain character is based on them. Somerset Maugham was actually sued by a person he’d never met and never even heard of, who claimed that one of Maugham’s novels was based on him. In the novel Maugham depicted each of the characters in a very vivid, real way, in some cases quite nastily (or, to put a better spin on it, satirically), which made the person’s reaction even more intense. When he read Maugham’s skillful depictions of the characters, this person must have felt he was being personally criticized and belittled.

In most cases, the characters who appear in my novels naturally emerge from the flow of the story. Except for a few rare cases, I never decide ahead of time that I’ll present a certain type of character. As I write, a kind of axis emerges that makes it possible for the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and add one detail after another as I see fit, like iron scraps attach to a magnet. And in this way an overall picture of a person emerges. Afterwards I often think that certain details bear a resemblance of sorts to a real person, but I never start out thinking I’ll use an aspect of a real person to create a character. Most of the process happens automatically. In other words, as I create the character, I think it’s more that I almost unconsciously pull out information and various fragments from the cabinets in my brain and then weave them together.

I have my own name for this automatic process: the Automatic Dwarves. I’ve almost always driven stick-shift cars, and the first time I drove an automatic, I had a feeling like there must be dwarves living inside the gear box, each in charge of operating a separate gear. And I also had a faint anxiety that someday those dwarves would decide they’d had enough of slaving away for someone else, stop work, and go on strike, and my car would suddenly stop working right in the middle of the highway.

I know you’ll laugh to hear me say this, but when it comes to the process of creating characters it’s like those Automatic Dwarves living in my unconscious are, despite a bit of grumbling, somehow managing to work hard. And all I do is diligently copy it all down. Naturally what I write isn’t neatly organized as a ready-to-go novel, so later I rework it a number of times, changing its form. That rewriting process is more conscious and logical. But the creation of the prototype is an unconscious and intuitive process. There’s no choice, really. I have to do it this way or my characters will turn out unnatural and dead. That’s why, in the beginning stage of the process, I leave everything up to these Automatic Dwarves.