Review: Novelist as a Vocation

 I enjoyed Norwegian Wood enough to check out what Haruki Murakami thought about his career as a novelist. Novelist as a Vocation is an original, unique work on the topic. Murakami is humble enough not to prescribe his working style to anyone else, and his unique life means that he has a lot to offer in his thoughts.

The early essays focus on his start as a novelist, and how one day he decided to write a novel, hand-wrote a manuscript over a few months, and then decided it was trash. He then gave up pen and paper and got out a typewriter and rewrote the story in English, not his native language. He claimed that this experience forced him to use simplified language and short words, and after he was done he translated the chapter(s) into Japanese and finished the novel that way, winning a literary price. What a unique experience and insight! By the way, this probably explains why Norwegian Wood didn't feel very much like a Japanese novel. The guy is completely steeped in Western literature, music, and even culture!

His thinking about writing a novel is that a novel is a uniquely inefficient way to get a message across:

Someone whose message is clearly formed has no need to go through the many steps it would take to transpose that message into a story. All he has to do is put it directly into words—it’s much faster and can be easily communicated to an audience. A message or concept that might take six months to turn into a novel can thus be fully developed in a mere three days. Or in ten minutes, if the writer has a microphone and can spit it out as it comes to him. Quick thinkers are capable of that kind of thing. The listener will slap his knee and marvel, “Why didn’t I think of that?!” In the final analysis, that’s what being smart is really all about. (kindle loc 225)

I love that rather than the moaning and groaning about how hard writing is, he talks about how writing was never hard for him. He basically works on the side as a translator of English books, and only writes when the urge consumes him:

 I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English. Since translation is essentially a technical operation, I can pursue it on a daily basis, quite separate from my creative desire; yet at the same time it is a good way to hone my writing skills—were I not a translator, I’m sure I would have found another related pursuit. If I am in the mood, I may also turn to writing essays. “What the heck,” I defiantly tell myself as I peck away at those other projects. “Not writing novels isn’t going to kill me.” (kindle 956)

There are some interesting things that betray Murakami's protestations about his character. Early on in the book he has an entire chapter devoted to how he was glad he didn't win this prestigious prize for upcoming new writers. Later, he writes about how the Japanese criticism of his work led him to leave Japan to write Norwegian Wood so that he didn't have to listen to the critics while he was writing. Clearly the guy is much more sensitive to criticism than he lets on.

I love that his writing habits is to do a certain number of pages a day, and then stop. No more and no less. He also has a devotion to physical fitness, having run an hour a day for almost his entire working life. This of course disturbs the common image of a writer:

I have the sense that no one is hoping that a writer lives in a quiet suburb, lives a healthy early-to-bed-early-to-rise lifestyle, goes jogging without fail every day, likes to make healthful vegetable salads, and holes up in his study for a set period every day to work. I have the anxious sense that all I’m doing is throwing a damper on people’s sense of the romantic. (kindle loc 1624)

Finally there's a great implicit criticism of Japanese academic approach to schools and teaching. Murakmi always refers to himself as being a mediocre student who effectively dropped out of school (he did finish his degree but over a period of years) to start a Jazz cafe. His criticism of Japanese schools will give you much to think about if you were to apply it to the Bay Area parenting hothouse culture:

There were lots of kids who had better grades on English tests than me, but as far as I could tell, none of them could read a book in English from cover to cover. Yet I could easily plow through an entire book. Then why were my grades in English class so mediocre? The conclusion I came to was that the goal of English classes in Japanese high schools was not to get students to use actual, living English. Then what was the goal? There was only one: for students to get high marks on the English section of the college entrance exams. At least for the teachers in the public high school I attended, being able to read books in English or have ordinary conversations with foreigners was beside the point... This goes beyond English, or the study of foreign languages. I can’t help thinking that in almost every subject, Japan’s educational system fundamentally fails to consider how to motivate each individual to improve their potential. Even now the system seems intent on going by the book to cram in facts and teach test-taking techniques. And teachers and parents live and die by how many of their students and children get into various universities. It’s all kind of sad. When I was in school my parents and teachers always warned me, “You’ve got to study as hard as you can while you’re in school. Otherwise when you grow up you’ll regret not having studied more when you were young.” But after I left school I never thought that, not even once. For me it was more regret that I hadn’t done more things I enjoyed doing. Being forced to do that kind of rote memorization, I felt, wasted my life. (kindle loc 1774-1798)

All in all, the book is short, but full of stuff worth reading. I certainly found it more enlightening or maybe even enjoyable than his fiction!