Haruki Murakami is not one for getting out and about much. Famously, the Japanese’s novelist’s day consists of running, writing, listening to jazz and going to bed at nine o’clock. He doesn’t waste his time getting gussied up for television appearances or prize-giving shindigs; the organisers of literary festivals are used to having their invitations politely declined.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Murakami wants to remove himself completely from the world. Indeed, in many ways he seems to long to be known by it. His 2007 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was a meditation not just on the pain and glory of doing the 2005 New York City marathon, but also a slant-wise glimpse into what he almost certainly doesn’t call his “process”. Now he is back again, but this time looking straight and hard at the whole business, or rather the vocation, of writing novels.
There are 11 essays here. Some have been published previously and others have been written just for this collection. They deal with all the things that you’d like to ask the author of Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore in the highly unlikely event that you were able to corner him at a book-signing session. Such questions might include: “Is it true you had an epiphany at a baseball game that you were going to be a novelist?”; “How do you manage to write such simple words that run so deep?” and, most cheekily, “Is it true you don’t value literary prizes, or is it because you haven’t won that many?”
On the first matter, Murakami repeats the story that he has told before, but which never loses its talismanic power. One day in 1978 the 29-year-old jazz cafe owner attended a baseball game at Jingu stadium in downtown Tokyo. His team, the poorly performing Yakult Swallows, had recently signed an unknown American hitter called Dave Hilton. At his first appearance Hilton belted the ball with a satisfying stadium-ringing smack, and at that point Murakami experienced an epiphany: “I think I can write a novel.” He left the match in a daze and went home via a bookstore where he splurged on an expensive fountain pen. That evening, in one feverish all-nighter, he embarked on the first draft of his novella Hear the Wind Sing.
On the point about style, Murakami gives an extraordinary account of how, at first, he couldn’t produce a literary voice that he could bear to read. So he translated one of his try-too-hard, over-burdened paragraphs into fairly rudimentary English and then translated the result back again into a correspondingly simple Japanese. At a stroke he had found the famously “neutral”, unadorned voice that, duly translated into scores of other languages, has made him into one of the most read authors around the world.
Then there’s the business of literary prizes. Murakami declares that he thinks they don’t matter and, no, it’s not because he hasn’t won quite as many as you might expect. The truth is that the razzmatazz of the event, the psychic and physical disruption it entails, would cause more trouble than it’s worth. “A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.” And, honestly, it probably is. You end this collection of beautiful essays vowing to never let life, or writing, get so complicated again.
• Novelist as a Vocation is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
