Novelist as a Vocation(46)
Every time I’m asked “Why don’t you write novels with characters the same age as yourself?” that’s how I want to reply, but it’s too long an explanation, and I doubt people would easily get it, so I always give some suitably vague reply. I smile and say something like “Good question. Maybe someday I’ll do just that.”
But aside from this—aside from whether or not I’ll put them in a novel—in the ordinary sense it’s an extremely difficult task to observe yourself as you are now, objectively and accurately. To grasp yourself in the present progressive form is not easy. Maybe that’s precisely why I wear all kinds of shoes that aren’t mine. Through that I’m able to discover myself in a more comprehensive way, much like triangulating a location.
At any rate, there still seems so much I need to learn about the characters in my novels. And at the same time there seems to be so much I need to learn from the characters in my novels. In the future, I want my novels to bring to life all kinds of weird, eccentric, and colorful characters. Whenever I begin writing a new novel, I get excited, wondering what kind of people I’m going to meet next.
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* Editor’s Note: Haruki Murakami subsequently published Killing Commendatore in 2017 (with an English-language translation in 2018), another novel written in the first person.
Who Do I Write For?
Interviewers sometimes ask me, “What sort of readers do you have in mind when you write your novels?” And I’m always sort of stuck for an answer. The reason being that I’ve never had the sense that I’m writing for someone else. And I don’t particularly have that feeling even now.
It’s true in a sense to say that I write for myself. Particularly with my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, one that I wrote late at night at my kitchen table, I had no thought at all that ordinary readers would ever see it, and (truly) all I thought about as I wrote it was that writing made me feel good. Taking some images I had inside me, choosing words that satisfied me, putting those words together into sentences—that’s all I had in my mind at the time. But what sort of people might someday read this novel, whether they would feel drawn to it, what sort of literary message might be contained within it—I didn’t have the time to consider any of that, and there was no need to. It was a simple thing, really, very pristine.
When I was writing this first book there was also a sense of it being therapeutic. All creative activity is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify or fix yourself. In other words, by relativizing yourself, by adapting your soul to a form that’s different from what it is now, you can resolve—or sublimate—the contradictions, rifts, and distortions that inevitably crop up in the process of being alive. And if things go well, this effect can be shared with readers. Though I wasn’t specifically conscious of it at the time, I think I was instinctively seeking that kind of self-cleansing action. Which is why, in a very unselfconscious way, I started wanting to write novels in the first place.
But after that first novel won a newcomers award sponsored by a literary magazine, was published as a book, sold a bit, and was reviewed fairly well, and I was given the label “novelist,” I was, whether I wanted to be or not, compelled to start thinking about readers. My book was now lined up on shelves in bookstores, my name boldly printed on the cover, with the general public now reading it, so a certain tension inevitably began to color my writing. Which doesn’t mean that my basic stance of writing to enjoy myself had changed very much. I figured that as long as I enjoyed what I wrote, there had to be readers somewhere who also enjoyed reading it. Maybe not all that many, but that was fine with me. If I could communicate meaningfully with them, then that was all I needed.
My next novel, Pinball, 1973, and then my short-story collections A Slow Boat to China and A Perfect Day for Kangaroos were all written with that sort of optimistic, easygoing attitude. At the time I had a full-time day job and was able to get by okay on that income. Novels were, so to speak, more a hobby I wrote in my spare time.
One well-known literary critic (who is no longer alive) gave a scathing review of my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, saying, “You’re in big trouble if you think this kind of thing passes for literature.” When I read this, I simply thought, “Okay, I guess some people feel that way.” It didn’t make me upset or want to lash back. That critic and I had a very different way of viewing literature. What kind of ideological content my works had, what social role they played, whether they were avant-garde or reactionary, artistic fiction or not—I’d never given any of this a single thought. I’d started out with the stance that if I enjoy writing it, that’s sufficient; so from the start our ideas didn’t mesh. In Hear the Wind Sing I introduced a fictional writer named Derek Hartfield, one of whose novels is entitled What’s Wrong About Feeling Good? And that was exactly the way I felt about it at the time. What’s wrong about feeling good?
Looking back at it now, it seems a simplistic, slapdash way of thinking, but I was very young then (in my early thirties), the upheaval of the student movement was still fresh in my mind, and I had maintained a pretty disobedient attitude—an antithetical, defiant, resistant stance toward authority and the establishment. (Perhaps a bit impertinent and childish, granted, though things worked out okay.)
That attitude gradually began to transform around the time I started writing A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). I was growing aware that if I just kept up this “What’s wrong about feeling good?” attitude, as a professional writer I’d probably write myself into a corner. Even my readers who enjoyed my writing style, and found it “innovative,” would, though, soon tire of reading the same sort of thing. “What? This again?” they’d think. And of course as the one who writes the books, I’d get fed up with it, too.