Novelist as a Vocation(42)

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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.

By “know” I don’t mean you have to comprehend them, or go so far as to really understand them deep down. All you need to do is glance at the person’s appearance, how they talk and act, their special characteristics. Those people you like, ones you’re not so fond of, ones that, frankly, you dislike—it’s important to observe people without, as much as possible, choosing which ones you observe. What I mean is, if the only people you put in your novels are the kind you like, ones you’re interested in or can easily understand, then your novels, ultimately, will lack a certain expansiveness. There are all sorts of different people, doing all sorts of different actions, and it’s through that clash of difference that things get moving and the story is propelled forward. So you shouldn’t just avert your eyes when you decide you can’t stomach somebody, but instead ask yourself “What is it I don’t like about them?” and “Why don’t I like that?” Those are the main points to keep in mind.

A long time ago—I think I was in my mid-thirties—someone told me, “There are never any bad people in your novels.” (Later on I learned that Kurt Vonnegut was told the same thing by his father just before his father passed away.) I could see the point. Ever since then, I’ve consciously tried to include more negative characters in my novels. But things didn’t work out as I’d hoped. Back then, I was more inclined toward the creation of a private world—one that was, if anything, harmonious—than creating large-scale narrative-driven books. I had to build my own neat little world as a shelter from the harsh realities of the larger world around me.

But as time has passed and I’ve matured, you might say (as a person and as a writer), I’ve ever so gradually been able to include more negative characters in the stories I write, characters that introduce an element of discord. I’ve been able to do this first of all because the novelistic world I’ve created has taken shape more and functions fairly well, so as a next step my project was to make this world broader and deeper, and more dynamic than before. Doing that meant adding more variety to my characters and expanding the scope of their actions. I keenly felt the need to do this.

Additionally, I’d experienced many things in my life. At age thirty I became a professional writer, with a public presence, and like it or not had to face a lot of pressure. I don’t naturally gravitate to the spotlight, but there were times when, reluctantly, I was forced to put myself there. Sometimes I had to do things that I didn’t want to do, or was very disappointed when a person I was close to spoke out against me. Some people would praise me with words they didn’t really feel, while others—pointlessly, as far as I can see it—heaped ridicule on me. And others spoke half-truths about me. Additionally, I went through other experiences I can only characterize as strange and out of the ordinary.

Every time I went through these negative experiences, I tried to observe in detail the way the people involved looked and how they spoke and acted. If I’m going to have to go through all this, I figured, I should at least get something useful out of it (to get back what I put into it, you could say). Naturally these experiences hurt me, even made me depressed sometimes, but now I feel they provided a lot of nourishment for me as a novelist. Of course, I had plenty of wonderful, enjoyable experiences as well, but for whatever reason the ones I recall now are the negative ones. It’s the unpleasant memories that remain, the ones I don’t want to remember. Perhaps there’s more to learn from them.

When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters. The one that leaps to mind is Dostoevsky’s Demons. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean; there are plenty of oddball minor characters throughout the novel. It’s a long novel but holds my interest to the end. One colorful, weird character after another appears, the kind that makes you wonder, “Why this kind of person?” Dostoevsky must have been someone with a huge mental cabinet to work with.

In Japanese literature the novels of Natsume Sōseki contain all kinds of appealing, colorful characters. Even the ones who only appear briefly are vividly portrayed and unique. A line they might utter, or an expression or action of theirs, will strangely linger in the mind. What impresses me about Sōseki’s novels is that there’s hardly ever any makeshift character, one that is there because the author decided he needed that sort of person to appear at that point. These are novels not created by the mind but rather through sensations and experience. Sōseki paid his dues in each and every line, and you feel a sort of peace of mind as you read them.

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

I started off by writing novels in the first person, using the first-person male pronoun boku, and continued in the same vein for some twenty years. Occasionally I’d write short stories in third person, but my novels were consistently in first person. Naturally this “I” didn’t equal me, Haruki Murakami (just like Philip Marlowe isn’t Raymond Chandler), and in each novel the image of the first-person male protagonist changes, but as I continued writing in first person, the line between the real-life me and the protagonist of the novels to a certain extent inevitably blurred, both for the writer and for the reader.