Novelist as a Vocation(8)

For three years, I ran my jazz café in the basement of the building near Kokubunji Station’s south exit. We attracted enough customers to start paying back our debts, but then, quite suddenly, the owner ordered us out, saying that he wanted to make the building bigger. Resigning ourselves (he really screwed us over, but if I get into that there’ll be no end), we looked around and found a place in Sendagaya in downtown Tokyo. It was brighter than our Kokubunji digs and big enough to install a grand piano for live performances, but that also meant that we had to borrow more money, so we couldn’t take it easy. (Not being able to “take it easy” seems to form the leitmotif of my life!)

It was thus that I spent my twenties laboring from morning to night to pay off debts. All I can remember of that decade, in fact, is how hard I worked. I imagine others have a lot more fun in their twenties, but I had neither the time nor the money to enjoy the “sweet days of youth.” Still, I read whenever I had the chance. Life might have been hectic and things might have been rough, but the joy I took in books and music never wavered. That, at least, was something no one could take from me.

As the end of my twenties approached, our Sendagaya jazz café was, at last, beginning to show signs of stability. True, we couldn’t sit back and relax—we still owed money, and our business had its ups and downs—but at least things seemed to be headed in a good direction.

I have no special talent for business, nor am I particularly friendly or social, which makes me ill suited to deal with customers. Yet I do have one redeeming feature—I work my butt off when I’m engaged in something I like. This, I think, is why our café did pretty well. Jazz was one of my great loves, after all, so I was basically quite happy with my work. One day, however, it hit me that I was pushing thirty. What I thought of as my youth was coming to a close. I remember how weird that feeling was. “So this is how it is,” I thought. “Time just slips away.”



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One bright April afternoon in 1978, I attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in downtown Tokyo. It was the Central League season opener, first pitch at one o’clock, the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp. I was already a Yakult fan in those days, and the stadium was close to my apartment (not far from Sendagaya’s Hatonomori Hachiman Shrine), so I sometimes popped in to catch a game when I was out for a stroll.

Back then, Yakult was a perennially weak team, with little money and no flashy big-name players. Naturally, they weren’t very popular. Season opener it may have been, but only a few fans were sitting beyond the outfield fence. I stretched out with a beer to watch the game. At the time there were no bleacher seats, just a grassy slope. It was a great feeling. The sky was a sparkling blue, the draft beer as cold as cold could be, and the ball strikingly white against the green field, the first green I had seen in a long time. To fully appreciate a baseball game, you really have to be there in person!

Yakult’s first batter was Dave Hilton, a rangy newcomer from the United States and a complete unknown. He batted in the leadoff position. The cleanup hitter was Charlie Manuel, who later became famous as the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. Then, though, he was a real stud, a slugger Japanese fans had dubbed “the Red Demon.”

I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Satoshi Takahashi. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Takahashi’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when bat met ball resounded through Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It was as if something had come fluttering down from the sky and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe “epiphany” is a better word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant when leadoff batter Dave Hilton belted that beautiful ringing double at Jingu Stadium.

After the game (Yakult won, as I recall), I took the train to Shinjuku, went to the Kinokuniya bookstore, picked up a sheaf of writing paper, and splurged on a Sailor fountain pen for two thousand yen. Word processors and computers weren’t around back then, which meant I had to write everything by hand, one character at a time. The sensation of writing felt very fresh. I was thrilled. It had been such a long time since I had put fountain pen to paper.

Each night after that, when I got home from work, I sat at my kitchen table and wrote. Those few hours before dawn were practically the only time I had free. Over the six or so months that followed, I wrote Hear the Wind Sing (though it had another title at that stage). I wrapped up the first draft right when baseball season ended. Incidentally, that year the Yakult Swallows bucked the odds and almost everyone’s predictions to win the Central League pennant, then went on to defeat the Pacific League champions—the pitching-rich Hankyu Braves—in the Japan Series. It was a glorious, miraculous season.



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Hear the Wind Sing is a short novel, less than two hundred manuscript pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it, but the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff—my favorites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks—I had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in the Japanese language.