Novelist as a Vocation(45)
On a whim he tells Sara about being cut off by his four close friends from high school. Sara ponders this, then tells him he has to go back to Nagoya and find out what happened eighteen years before to cause this rift. “Not to see what you want to see, but what you must see,” she tells him.
To tell the truth, until she said that, the idea that Tsukuru needed to go back to see his four friends was the farthest thought from my mind. I’d been planning to write a fairly short story in which Tsukuru lives a quiet, mysterious life, never knowing why he’d been rejected like that. But once she said that (and I merely wrote down what she said to him), I had to make Tsukuru go to Nagoya and, in the end, send him all the way to Finland. And I needed to then explore those four characters, Tsukuru’s former friends, all over again to show what sort of people they were. And give details of the lives they’d led up to this point. As a result, what started as a short story quite naturally turned into a novel.
In other words, in almost an instant, the words that Sara spoke completely changed the story’s direction, character, scope, and structure. This was a complete surprise to me. If you think about it, she wasn’t saying that to the protagonist, Tsukuru Tazaki, so much as to me, the author. “You have to write more about this,” she was saying to me. “You’ve stepped into that realm and you’ve acquired enough strength to do that.” So Sara was, again, perhaps a reflection of my alter ego, one aspect of my consciousness telling me not to stop at the place where I’d intended. “You have to delve deeper into this, write more about it,” she was saying. In that sense Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a work that holds no small significance for me. On a formal level it’s a realistic novel; yet I find that there are all sorts of intricate, metaphorical things going on below the surface.
The characters in my novels urge me—the writer—to go on, and they encourage me to forge ahead. I felt this keenly when I was writing 1Q84 in the words and actions of Aomame. It was as if she were forcibly expanding something inside of me. Looking back on it, it seems that most of the time it’s female characters, not male characters, who lead me and spur me on. Why that is, I have no idea.
What I want to say is that in a certain sense, while the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel as well.
* * *
—
I’m sometimes asked, “Why don’t you write novels with characters the same age as yourself?” I’m in my mid-sixties now, in 2015, so the question is, why don’t you write stories with characters that age? Why don’t you write about the lives of those kinds of people? Isn’t that a natural job of a writer?
But there’s one thing I don’t understand, which is, why is it necessary that a writer write about people the same age as him? Why is that a “natural job”? As I said before, one of the things I enjoy the most about writing novels is being able to become anyone I want. So why should I, on my own, give up such a wonderful right?
When I wrote Kafka on the Shore I was a little past fifty years old, yet I made the main character a fifteen-year-old boy. And all the time I was writing I felt like I was a fifteen-year-old. Of course these weren’t the “feelings” a present-day fifteen-year-old boy would be feeling. Instead I transferred the feelings I had back when I was fifteen onto a fictional “present.” Still, as I wrote the novel, I was able to vividly relive inside me, almost as they were, the air I actually breathed at age fifteen, the light I actually saw. Through the power of writing I could draw out sensations and feelings that had long lain hidden deep inside. It was a truly wonderful experience. Perhaps the sort of sensation only a novelist can taste.
But just me enjoying this by myself will not create a literary work. It has to be relativized. In other words, put into a form so readers can share that pleasure. Which is why I included the character Nakata, an “old man” in his sixties. Nakata was also, in a sense, my alter ego, a projection of me. And by having Kafka and Nakata act in parallel and in response to each other, the novel acquired a healthy balance. At least I felt that way as the author—and I feel that way even now.
Maybe someday I will write a novel with a protagonist my own age, but at this point I don’t feel it’s absolutely necessary. What pops up first for me is the idea for a novel. Then the story naturally, spontaneously reaches out from the idea. As I said in the beginning, it’s the story itself that decides what sort of characters will appear. It’s not something I think about and decide on ahead of time. As the writer, I merely follow directions as a faithful scribe.
I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act. That’s all it is. I don’t make the shoes fit my foot size but, rather, make my feet fit the shoes. It’s not something you can do in reality, but if you toil for years as a novelist, you find you’re able to accomplish it. The reason being that it’s all imaginary. And being imaginary, it’s like things that take place in dreams. In dreams—whether ones you have while asleep or dreams you have while awake—you have hardly any choice about it. Basically I just go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.