Novelist as a Vocation(53)

I decided this the first time I met Binky and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that she doesn’t deal with works she can’t read in English. She reads works herself, determines their value, and only then starts to work on getting them published. So if you bring in books she can’t read, you won’t get anywhere. It’s only natural, I suppose, for a literary agent. That’s why I made sure, at the time, to have satisfactory English translations ready.

People in publishing in Japan and Europe often say American publishers are commercialized, only concerned about sales, and don’t take the time needed to develop writers. It doesn’t rise to the level of being anti-American, but I often feel an antipathy (or lack of goodwill) toward the American-style business model. It would be a lie to say that the American publishing industry is totally free of that aspect. I’ve met several US writers who’ve told me, “Agents and publishers are wonderful to you when you’re selling well, but if you don’t sell, then they give you the cold shoulder.” I do believe that does happen. But that’s not all there is to it. I’ve seen examples where for a certain work they’re fond of, or an author they think is the one, agents and publishers will concentrate on developing them without worrying about the short-term bottom line. Here an editor’s personal devotion and enthusiasm for a work plays a key role. I think this must be about the same anywhere in the world.

As far as I can see, in any country people who go into the publishing field or want to become editors basically love books. Even in America, if someone wants to earn a lot and have a huge expense account, they don’t go into publishing. They either work on Wall Street or on Madison Avenue. Other than a few rare exceptions, salaries in the publishing industry aren’t that high. So the people who work there, for the most part, have the pride and spirit that come from knowing they are doing it because they truly love books. Once they love a book, they work hard to promote it, but not because they’re concerned about sales.

Since I lived on the East Coast of the US for a time (New Jersey and Boston), I got to develop a close personal relationship with Binky, Sonny, and Gary. I live far away now, but when I was nearby or visiting, I tried to get together every once in a while to talk and have a meal together. This applies in any country, I think. If you let your agent handle everything and never meet the people involved, thinking you’ll leave it all up to them, then nothing will ever get going. Naturally, if you’re talking about an immensely powerful literary work, then those things aren’t so necessary; but truthfully, I wasn’t that confident, and I’m the type who, in anything, likes to do whatever I can do myself, so that’s what I did. What I did when I debuted in Japan I did all over again in America. In my forties I pushed the reset button back to being a newcomer.



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I actively set out to develop a market in the US like this because all sorts of unpleasant things had happened back in Japan, and I felt that I couldn’t just sit around idly in Japan, content with the status quo. This was during Japan’s so-called bubble economy, and back then making a living as a writer wasn’t all that difficult. First of all, there’s a pretty large readership base (the population is over one hundred million, nearly all of whom read Japanese). On top of this the Japanese economy was booming globally, and business in the publishing industry was brisk. The stock market was booming, land prices were soaring, and there was a glut of money, and new magazines appeared one after the other and were able to get as much advertising as they wanted to. Writers had no trouble getting requests for work. At the time, I got any number of tempting offers. “Travel wherever you want in the world,” I was told once, “all expenses paid, and write any kind of travel essay you wish.” Once a person I didn’t even know made a tantalizing offer: “I just bought a chateau in France, so why don’t you live there for a year and enjoy writing a novel there?” (I politely declined both offers.) It’s hard to believe now that such a time ever existed. For novelists, even if their staple work, novels, didn’t sell that well, they could make a good living on all these “side dishes.”

But for me, on the cusp of forty (a critical time for a writer), this wasn’t a welcome situation. There’s an expression, “The hearts of the people are chaotic,” and that was exactly the situation then. Society as a whole was uncertain, with people basically just concerned about money. It wasn’t the type of atmosphere where I could concentrate and take the time to work on a lengthy novel. I got the strong sense that before I knew it, I’d get completely spoiled. I wanted to put myself in an edgier environment and carve out a new frontier. And try out new possibilities for myself. That’s how I was thinking, and why, in the late 1980s, I left Japan and lived mainly abroad. This was after I had published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.



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One other thing is that in Japan, my books—and often me personally—were sometimes severely criticized. My basic attitude is that I’m an imperfect person writing imperfect works, so it doesn’t matter what people say, and I haven’t worried much about others’ opinions; but at the time I was still young, and when I heard these criticisms they often struck me as totally unfair. Criticism even ventured into my private life, my family, with things written that were totally untrue, and some personal attacks as well. “Why do people have to say those kinds of things?” I wondered, finding it all more puzzling than unpleasant.