How to Be a Writer

Haruki Murakami’s new essay collection Novelist as a Vocation gives a deep insight into his work and might serve as a practical guide for aspiring writers.

Haruki Murakami on his secrets of writing /// Penguin Books (c)

Becoming a Novelist

“Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study.”

So goes Haruki Murakami, remembering his early steps as a novelist. Many of his fans have already read the autobiographical What I talk about when I talk about running, published 15 years ago, where he speaks clearly of his writing discipline and how extremely close to physical activities, in his case running and swimming, it is. Being a brilliant writer is entirely coincidental, at least that’s what he states in Novelist as a Vocation; he takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of his most notable works such as Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and his most famous novel Norwegian Wood - yet the least murakamiesque, I’d dare to say.

On an April day in 1978, when he was almost 30 years old and a fresh entrepreneur running a jazz bar in Tokyo with his wife, he suddenly decided to write a novel. So he did, ending up winning a literary competition for new writers. That’s when he decided to continue doing it, mostly late at night, after coming home from his bar, at his kitchen table.

“I’m sure there are many people who will say, “But wait, I don’t have anything like a study.” The same was true for me when I started out writing—I had nothing resembling a study to work in. In my tiny apartment near the Hatonomori Hachiman Shrine in Sendagaya (in a building that’s since been torn down) I sat at the kitchen table late at night after my wife had gone to bed, scratching away with a pen on Japanese-style manuscript paper. That’s how I wrote my first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. “Kitchen-table” fiction is what I’ve dubbed these early works.”

What’s the Purpose of Writing?

An essential part of Novelist as a Vocation is literary prizes and criticism. Only a few writers express their indifference toward awards. Since he never intended to become a writer in the first place, little did he care or have time for the literary world in general. This section perfectly connects with another chapter in the book, where Murakami writes about originality. If we were to be woken up in the middle of the night and asked to define Murakami in one word, that would be “original.” There’s nothing or no one to compare it with.

Regarding originality, Haruki Murakami has often expressed with joy that he never wrote because he was asked to or had to fulfil a publisher’s deadline. Therefore, writing what you want, whenever you want, could be the key to originality. The influence of western literature and writers, for example, Dostoyevsky, has made him think deeper about how he writes novels. As told in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where the protagonist goes deep down a well to discover who he is, Murakami eventually goes deeper into the human spirit to help us understand who we are.

“When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day. This works out to about two and a half pages on my computer, but I base my calculations on the old system out of habit. On days when I want to write more, I still stop after ten pages; when I don’t feel like writing, I force myself to somehow fulfil my quota.”

No Novels Without Music

Famous for his massive record collection (+10,000 pieces of vinyl), which he decided to donate in 2018, he doesn’t skip mentioning music as a long-time companion during his writing. As a big jazz fan, the fluence of the genre can easily be spotted in most of his novels, especially in Norwegian Woods.

“When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the waiting lobbies of airports, in shady spots in parks, and at desks in cheap hotels. Hauling around oversized, four-hundred-character-per-page Japanese manuscript paper was too much, so in Rome I bought a cheap notebook (the kind we used to call college-ruled notebooks) and wrote the novel down in tiny writing with a disposable Bic pen. I still had to contend with noisy cafés, wobbly tables that made writing difficult, coffee spilling on the pages, and at night in my hotel room when I’d go over what I’d written, sometimes there would be couples getting all hot and heavy beyond the paper-thin walls separating my room from the room next door. Things weren’t easy, in other words. I can smile at these memories now, but at the time it was all pretty discouraging. I had trouble finding a decent place to live, and moved all over Europe, all the while continuing to work on my novel. And I still have that thick old notebook, with its coffee stains (or whatever they are; I’m not really sure about some of them).”

Oh, Let’s Go Back to The Start…

One last thing that attracts attention when reading the book is that as much as we love his novels, in Japan, he has always been an introverted character. Like his novel characters. Translated into more than fifty languages, Murakami has never received the ground-breaking appraisal in Japan in the same way he has received worldwide. That’s why, for many years, he lived abroad.

Even though the essays are new for the non-Japanese-speaking world, they still tend to repeat themselves. They are indeed just published as they were. In Japan, they were published over five years and may be varied. But when read in a non-big volume, the reader receives the same information many times. Still, Novelist as a Vocation is an exciting guide to novel writing and deep, intimate conversation with such a beloved writer as Haruki Murakami. In the end, he doesn’t care about critics. He couldn’t care less about this one, too.