Onyx reviews: Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 11/24/2022

Novelist as a Vocation isn't a how-to book for fledgling writers. People looking for concrete advice about the use of language, plot development, world building or character creation will not find much along those lines here. Instead, Murakami collects a number of essays written between 2010 and 2015 (with only minor updates for the English edition) relating his career trajectory and the things he has learned along the way. He does address such questions as "What Should I Write About?", "What Kind of Characters Should I Include?" and "Who Do I Write For?" but the answers pertain primarily to Murakami himself and may not be broadly general.

His path to becoming a full-time novelist is probably not a model for anyone else, either. Like some of the incidents in his numerous novels, his early life lacked deliberation. He makes arbitrary and spontaneous decisions that are unique to his experience. Who else, for example, could be lying on a grassy outfield watching a baseball game and suddenly decide he's going to write a novel? And then, having written a draft of that book, decide to scrap it, start writing in English—a language in which he has limited vocabulary and facility with sentence structure—and then translate the work into Japanese, creating for himself a new, simple, pared-down style that he then emulates moving forward in his native language.

His experiences are, without a doubt, interesting. His early life followed a path the exact opposite of most of his fellow countrymen. Instead of getting a degree, finding a job and getting married, he got married, found a job and eventually finished his degree. To make ends meet, he started a jazz club in Tokyo, although he and his wife were perpetually in debt. He had so little regard for his first novel that he submitted the only copy in existence to a literary contest. Had it not won first place, ensuring publication and becoming his entry point as a novelist, he might well have forgotten about writing completely and moved on to something else. It's the kind of magical incident that seems ripped from the pages of one of his books.

In Murakami's opinion, anyone can write a book. No particular skill is involved, unlike with most arts. In fact, he claims that people who are sufficiently intelligent have no need to write a novel; instead, they could convey their ideas in a much briefer, more straightforward fashion, although he appears to argue with himself over this point in later essays. He also advises authors to not use an idea in a work of non-fiction that might be useful in a novel or story because it will rob the idea of its fictional potential, which may not be the generality he claims it is.

Japanese culture is significantly different from the rest of the world, something Murakami addresses on occasion, in particular in an essay about the Japanese education system, where English is taught to students so they can pass exams rather than become conversant in the language. The publishing industry there, too, is different from the American model. Advances are not common, so new writers often rely on awards and prizes offered by publishers. According to Murakami, a lot of attention is paid to these awards in literary circles. After his initial win, subsequent novels failed to garner a prestigious award, which led critics to claim that his nascent career was over almost before it began. A number of times in this collection, Murakami discusses the contentious relationship he has with critics in Japan, who seem to regard his success with disdain, perhaps because he refuses to serve as a judge for literary awards or to appear in public in Japan, either on television or in person. He in turn seems to regard these critics with the same contempt, although his apparent nonchalance about not winning awards in his native land feels insincere.

One of the more interesting essays in this collection relates Murakami's experience with translations. He has translated numerous authors from English into Japanese and selected people to translate his novels into English before presenting them to American publishers as part of a deliberate effort to expand his readership into foreign markets.

Although there may not be many concrete lessons here for other writers, the book provides an interesting glimpse behind the curtain of a widely read and much beloved writer who does not often make himself available to the public.