Novelist as a Vocation(48)

I can imagine people might ask, “Are you saying you write your novels with no idea who your readers are?” Well, come to think of it, that’s absolutely right. I have no clear mental image of my readership.

As far as I know, most writers age along with their readers. What I mean is that a writer’s readers generally age in tandem with him. So in many cases the writer’s age and the readers’ ages overlap. Easy enough to understand. If that’s the case, then you write novels assuming that your readers are the same age as you. But for me that doesn’t seem to be true.

There are genres, of course, that target a predetermined age group or audience. Young-adult fiction, for instance, targets teenage boys and girls, romance fiction is written for women in their twenties and thirties, while historical novels and period fiction mainly targets middle-aged and older men. Again, easy to understand. But the novels I write seem a bit different.

Which takes us all the way around, back to where I began. Since I have no idea what kind of people read my novels, all I can do is write them so I myself enjoy them. Back to the starting point, you might say, which is kind of strange.

Since I became a writer, though, and started regularly publishing books, there is one lesson I’ve learned. Which is that no matter what or how I write, somebody’s going to say something bad about it. Say I write a really long novel, someone is bound to say, “It’s too long. Too verbose. Half that length would be fine.” If I write a short novel, some complain that it’s too “shallow,” too “hollow,” that I’m “just phoning it in.” If I write a novel similar to an earlier one, they say, “He’s just repeating himself. He’s stuck in a groove and it’s boring.” And others will say, “His earlier work was better. This new approach is just going round and round and getting nowhere.” Come to think of it, for the last twenty-five years there have been people who say, “Murakami’s out of step with the times. He’s finished.” It’s easy to criticize—all you have to do is say what you’re thinking, and you don’t have to take any responsibility for anything. For the person who’s being criticized, though, if he takes each and every criticism seriously he’ll never survive. So I’ve concluded, “Whatever. If people are going to say terrible things, then I’m just going to write what I want to write, in the way I want to write it.”

Rick Nelson had a song late in his career called “Garden Party.” The lyrics included the following:

See, you can’t please everyone

So you got to please yourself.

I know exactly how he feels. It’s impossible to please everyone, and all you end up doing is spinning your wheels and wearing yourself out. In that case it’s better to stand up for yourself and do what makes you happy, what you really want to do, the way you want to do it. Do that, and even if your reputation isn’t so great, if your books don’t sell well, you can tell yourself, “It’s okay. At least I enjoyed myself.” You’ll be convinced it was all worthwhile.

Thelonious Monk said something apropos of this: “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”

Enjoying yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll produce an outstanding work of art. A process of rigorous self-examination is a crucial element. Also, as a professional, of course you need a minimum number of readers. But clear that hurdle and I think that your goal should be to enjoy yourself and write works that satisfy you. I mean, a life spent doing something you don’t find enjoyable can’t be much fun, right? I return again to our starting point: What’s wrong about feeling good?



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Still, if someone asks me straight up, “Do you mean to tell me you really write novels only thinking about yourself?” I’d have to respond that of course that’s not the case. As I’ve said before, as a professional writer I always have readers in mind as I write. Forgetting about the existence of readers—if you wanted to—is impossible, and is also not a healthy thing to do.

But saying I keep readers in mind isn’t the same as a company, when it’s developing a new product, surveying the market, analyzing consumers, and zeroing in on a target audience. What always comes to my mind is more an “imaginary reader.” That person doesn’t have an age, an occupation, or a gender. In reality he would, but those are interchangeable in my mind. In other words they’re not important elements. What is important, what is not interchangeable, is the fact that that person and I are connected. I don’t know the details of where and how we’re connected. Yet I get the distinct sense that deep down, in some dark recesses, my roots and that person’s roots are linked. It’s such a deep, dark place, not something you can casually drop by and see. Yet through the system of narrative, I feel that we are connected, the real sense that nourishment is passing back and forth.

Yet if that person and I were to pass each other in some back street, or be seated next to each other on a train, or lined up together at the same checkout counter in a supermarket, we wouldn’t (in most cases) notice that our roots are connected in that way. We’d just pass by each other, strangers, and go our separate ways without ever realizing it. Probably never to see each other again. But in reality, down deep in the ground, in a place that penetrates below the hard crust of everyday life, we are, novelistically, connected. Deep within our hearts we share a common narrative. That’s probably the type of reader I assume. And every day I write my novels with the hope that that reader will enjoy them a little, and feel something when he reads them.