Novelist as a Vocation

Writing fiction is an entirely personal process that takes place in a closed room. Shut away in a study, you sit at a desk and (in most cases) create an imaginary story out of nothing and put it in the form of writing. The formless and subjective is transformed into something tangible and objec-tive (or at least something that seeks to be objective). Defined sim-ply, this is the day-to-day work we novelists perform.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.

When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the wait-ing 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 dis-posable 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, some-times 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

Haruki Murakami

Named one of the best books of the year by Esquire, Open the Magazine

"[A] very personal guide to fiction writing peppered with biography and opinion, contains a handful of strange, and strangely revealing, moments...Novelist As a Vocation is a series of intriguing glimpses inside the singular mind of Murakami" --Sean O Hagan, The Guardian

"Haruki Murakami s splendid second memoir of sorts...Novelist as a Vocation is an indispensable contribution to understanding Murakami s astounding mind and method. It shows what makes Murakami run on the street and on the page." --Robert Allen Papinchak, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Murakami has written 14 acclaimed novels, including Hear the Wind Sing, Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, and his best-selling IQ84; dozens of short stories; and over a dozen books of essays and other nonfiction...Novelist is indeed his true vocation, and in this collection of 11 interconnected essays, he tells would-be fiction writers, struggling novelists, and his many devoted readers about the path he s followed and the ideas and thoughts he s had in the process...Although this is a concrete and practical guide, as Murakami intended, it is also a fascinating personal and professional memoir." --Marcia Welsh, Library Journal (starred review)

"In this winsome volume, one of our greatest novelists invites readers into his creative process. The result is a revealing self-portrait that answers many burning questions about its reclusive subject, like: where do Murakami s strange and surreal ideas come from? When and how did he start writing? How does he view the role of novels in contemporary society? Novelist as a Vocation is a rare and welcome peek behind the curtain of a singular mind." --Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire ("The Best Books of Fall 2022")

"[A] very personal guide to fiction writing peppered with biography and opinion, contains a handful of strange, and strangely