Novelist as a Vocation, page 18
But for me, on the cusp of forty (a critical time for a writer), this wasn’t a welcome situation. There’s an expression, “The hearts of the people are chaotic,” and that was exactly the situation then. Society as a whole was uncertain, with people basically just concerned about money. It wasn’t the type of atmosphere where I could concentrate and take the time to work on a lengthy novel. I got the strong sense that before I knew it, I’d get completely spoiled. I wanted to put myself in an edgier environment and carve out a new frontier. And try out new possibilities for myself. That’s how I was thinking, and why, in the late 1980s, I left Japan and lived mainly abroad. This was after I had published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
* * *
—
One other thing is that in Japan, my books—and often me personally—were sometimes severely criticized. My basic attitude is that I’m an imperfect person writing imperfect works, so it doesn’t matter what people say, and I haven’t worried much about others’ opinions; but at the time I was still young, and when I heard these criticisms they often struck me as totally unfair. Criticism even ventured into my private life, my family, with things written that were totally untrue, and some personal attacks as well. “Why do people have to say those kinds of things?” I wondered, finding it all more puzzling than unpleasant.
Looking back on it now, I get the feeling this was the Japanese literary world (writers, critics, editors, etc.) at the time venting its frustration. The result of the discontent and gloominess inside the literary industry toward the rapid decline in the presence and influence of the so-called mainstream (pure literature). In other words, a gradual paradigm shift was taking place. People in publishing, though, found this cultural meltdown lamentable and they couldn’t stand it. Many of them thought of my works, and my very existence, as “one of the causes that has hurt and destroyed the way things should be” and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, tried to drive me out. That’s the feeling I got. For my part, I felt that if the likes of me could damage them, then the problem lay more with them than with me.
“Haruki Murakami’s works are merely a rehash of foreign literature,” I often hear. “The only place they’ll be read is in Japan.” I never ever thought of what I write as “a rehash of foreign literature”; rather, it was an attempt to use the tools of Japanese to actively seek and search for new possibilities—so to tell the truth I saw these remarks as a challenge, that whether my works were read and appreciated abroad would be a kind of test. I’m not really the type of personality who hates to lose, but when I’m not convinced by something I do tend to pursue it until I am.
Also, if my work is centered more on foreign countries, then there will be less of a need to deal with the troublesome domestic literary industry. Then they can say what they want and I can just ignore it. This possibility was another reason I decided to focus on doing my best abroad. If you think about it, since criticism within Japan was the opportunity for me to start up activities abroad, you might conversely say I was lucky to be disparaged in that way. It’s the same in every world, but nothing’s more scary than a backhanded compliment.
The thing that made me happiest when I published my books abroad was how many people (both readers and critics) said my books were really “original,” unlike anything by any other novelists. Whether they praised the works or not, the basic consensus was that “this writer’s style is totally unlike any other’s.” This assessment was quite different from that in Japan, and it made me very happy. To say that I was original, that I had my own special style—for me nothing could be higher praise.
But when my books started to sell abroad—or I should say when they found out my books were selling abroad—now people in Japan started saying, “Murakami’s books sell abroad because they’re written in easy-to-translate language, about things foreigners can easily understand.” When I heard this I was a bit disgusted. “Isn’t this the exact opposite of what you were saying before?” But I figured there was nothing I could do about it. All I could conclude was that there are a certain number of people in the world who check which way the wind’s blowing and make casual, completely unfounded remarks.
Novels well up naturally from within you, not something you can casually, strategically change. You can’t do market research or something and then intentionally rework the content based on the results. If you did, a work born from such a shallow base won’t find many readers. Such a work might find a readership for a time, but the work and the author won’t last long and will soon be forgotten. Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” can apply to novels, too. There are a lot of things in this world that are demonstrated over time that can only be demonstrated over time.
* * *
—
Let me get back on topic.
Knopf published hardcover editions of my novels, and its paperback imprint, Vintage Books, published the paperback editions; and over time, as a series of my books appeared, sales in the US gradually but steadily increased. When a new novel was published, it would land near the top of bestseller lists in newspapers in cities like Boston and San Francisco. A readership base developed in the US, just as it had in Japan—people who were sure to buy my new books whenever they appeared.
And after about 2000, my books, such as Kafka on the Shore (published in the US in 2005), started to appear, though near the bottom, as national bestsellers on The New York Times bestseller list. Which meant that around the country, my novelistic style was becoming appreciated. 1Q84 (published in 2011) made number 2 on the bestseller list, while Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014) debuted at number 1. But getting to this point took a long time. I wasn’t an overnight sensation. Instead, it felt like I finally established a foothold as one book steadily followed another. As this happened, sales of the paperback editions of my earlier books picked up, too. Which was definitely a favorable trend.
* * *
—
In the early stages, though, what stood out was less what was happening in the US than the increase in the number of copies of my books printed in Europe. Making New York the hub for overseas publishing seemed to have an influence on sales in Europe, a development I hadn’t foreseen. Truthfully, up till then I hadn’t realized that it was that important to have a hub based in New York. I’d simply made the US my temporary home, figuring that if the books are in English people will read them, and because I happened to live in the US.
Aside from Asia, the first place my books really took off was in Russia and Eastern Europe, and my impression is that this then spread into Western Europe. This was the middle of the 1990s. I was really surprised when I heard that about half of the top ten bestselling books in Russia at one time were mine.
This is just my personal impression, and I’d be hard pressed to give any proof or examples to back it up, but I get the feeling that if you compare sales of my books with a historical timeline there’s a tendency worldwide for my books to start being read widely after there is a major shake-up (or transformation) in the social foundations of a country. My books started selling rapidly in Russia and Eastern Europe after the seismic shift when communism collapsed. The heretofore seemingly solid, unshakable communist system collapsed overnight to be followed by a steadily surging soft chaos, a mix of hope and anxiety. In the midst of that shift in values, the stories I presented suddenly seemed tinged with a new, natural reality.
The wall separating East and West Berlin dramatically came down, and from around the time of German reunification, it seems like my books gradually started to be read more in Germany. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But it seems to me that a huge transformation in the foundations and structure of a society has a profound influence on people’s everyday sense of reality, and the desire for transformation is only to be expected. The reality of actual society and the reality of stories are inevitably connected at a fundamental level in people’s souls (or in their unconscious). In any age, when something major occurs and there’s a shift in social reality, there’s a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well.
Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric system—by, to put it another way, allowing movement between the objective world and the subjective world so they mutually modify each other—people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity. I get the sense that the reality in the stories I provide in my fiction just happens to function globally as a kind of cogwheel that makes that adjustment possible. Naturally, this is, to repeat myself, just my own individual sense of things. But I don’t think it’s entirely off the mark.
In that sense, Japanese society may have—at an earlier stage and as something more self-evidently understood—observed that overall landslide in a more natural, less dramatic fashion. It follows that my novels were more enthusiastically accepted in Japan—at least among ordinary readers—than in the West. The same thing might be said about the neighboring countries in East Asia—China, Korea, and Taiwan. Readers in these countries started enthusiastically appreciating my works before they were accepted in America and Europe.
It’s possible that this societal landslide had a reality for people in these East Asian countries before it did for people in Europe and the US. And this wasn’t the sort of sudden social transformation that occurred because of some particular events, but a softer landslide over time. In other words, in the Asian countries that went through rapid economic growth the social landslide wasn’t some sudden occurrence but, rather, a constant, sustained situation taking place over the last quarter of a century.
I know it’s a bit forced to make a simple assertion like this, since there are all sorts of other causes involved. But certainly there is a perceptible discrepancy in the reactions of readers to my novels in various Asian countries and the reactions of readers in Europe and the US. And I think in great part this comes down to differences in the way they perceived and coped with this landslide. For that matter, I get the sense that in Japan and Asian countries the “modern” that necessarily precedes the “postmodern” did not, in a precise sense, exist. The split between the subjective and the objective was never as logically clear there as in the West. But this takes us off in divergent directions, so I’ll leave that discussion to another time.
* * *
—
One other important reason I was able to make a breakthrough in the West was that I was blessed with several outstanding translators. Around the middle of the 1980s a shy young American named Alfred Birnbaum came to see me, saying he’d loved my work and was translating a few of my short stories, and asked whether it was okay that he do so. “Sure,” I replied. “Please go right ahead.” He translated even more stories over time, and eventually this led to me being published in The New Yorker. Alfred went on to translate A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance for Kodansha International. Alfred is an extremely talented, enthusiastic translator. If he hadn’t come to me with that request, I don’t think I would have even thought at that point of having my works translated into English. I didn’t think my works had reached that level yet.
Later on, I was invited to Princeton and started living in the US, and at this point I met Jay Rubin. He was a professor at the University of Washington then, and later taught at Harvard. An outstanding researcher in Japanese literature, he was known for his translations of several works by Natsume Sōseki. He was interested in my work, too, and asked me to contact him if I ever needed any of my works translated. “To start off with,” I asked him, “would you mind translating a few of my short stories that you like?” He selected a few and translated them, and his translations were outstanding. What I found most interesting was that he and Alfred chose completely different stories. It was amazing how they didn’t overlap in their choices. I keenly felt then how important it is to have several translators working on your fiction.
Jay Rubin is a very skilled translator, and I think his translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle really helped establish me in the US. In a word, Alfred is a more freewheeling translator, while Jay is more the steady type. Each one has his own distinctive flavor, but at the time Alfred was busy with his own work and didn’t have the time to work on long novels, so I was very happy that Jay appeared on the scene. I also think that a translator like Jay, who makes sure to get the accurate, literal meaning, was well suited to translating a novel like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, with its relatively intricate structure (compared to my earlier works). Another aspect of his translations I enjoy is his unaffected sense of humor. Not merely his accuracy and dependability.
Next come Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. They are both quite skilled translators, and both of them were quite interested in my work, too. I’ve known them both for a long time, since I was young. Each one approached me saying he’d like to translate my work or that he had already translated some. I felt very grateful for this. Meeting them, making a personal connection with them, made me feel like I’d made some invaluable allies. I myself am a translator (English into Japanese), so I well know from personal experience the struggles and joys of being a translator. So I try to keep in close touch with them and am always happy to answer any translation questions that might crop up. I do my best to make things more convenient for them.
If you try it yourself, you’ll discover that translating is painstaking, arduous work. But it shouldn’t be a one-sided undertaking. There’s got to be an element of give-and-take involved. For a writer wanting to be read abroad, a translator is the most important partner of all. It’s critical to find a translator who understands you, because even with an outstanding translator, if he isn’t on the same wavelength as the text or the author, or can’t get used to the distinct qualities of the work, you can’t expect any good results. All you’ll get is both sides stressed out. And if the translator has no affection for the text he’s working on, it’ll just be an irksome “job” he has to slog through.
* * *
—
There’s one more thing—maybe something I don’t need to actually put into words—but abroad, especially in the West, the individual is paramount. You can’t act the way you do in Japan, and just let somebody else handle things and tell them “Thanks for taking care of everything.” At each step of the way you have to take responsibility and make decisions yourself. This takes time and effort, as well as a certain linguistic ability. Literary agents, of course, will take care of all the basics, but they can be busy with other work, and to tell the truth they can’t get around to doing enough for unknown writers or ones who don’t sell well. So to a certain extent you have to take care of things yourself. I’m pretty well-known in Japan, but abroad at first I was an unknown. Except for people in publishing and a handful of readers, ordinary people in America didn’t know my name, and couldn’t even pronounce it right, often mispronouncing it as “Myurakami.” But that only motivated me all the more. I put everything I had into it, really wanting to see how much I could open up a market starting from a blank slate.
As I said earlier, if I’d stayed in Japan, where times were good, as the bestselling author (if I can put it that way myself) of Norwegian Wood, I would have had one request after another and could have, if I’d wanted to, made a lot of money. But I wanted to leave that environment and, as an (almost) unknown writer, see how far I could go as a newcomer in the market outside Japan. That became my personal goal. And looking back on it now, I think having that goal as a kind of slogan was a great thing. It’s important for those who deal with creativity to always want to push forward into new frontiers. Being content with where you are and staying in one place (“place” in a metaphoric sense) means your creative urge will atrophy and eventually be lost. I may have, at exactly the right time, found a worthy goal and a healthy sense of ambition.
Temperamentally I’m not good at being in front of other people, but abroad I have done interviews, and when I win an award I attend the ceremony and give a speech. I also have accepted a few opportunities to give readings and speeches. Not that many—even abroad I have the reputation of being a writer who doesn’t make many personal appearances—but I do what I can, pushing the limits of my personal boundaries and being more open to the outside. I’m not that good at speaking English, but I try to speak without an interpreter as much as I can and give my opinions in my own words. In Japan, though, with rare exceptions, I don’t do those things. And I get criticized for it, people saying I only provide this kind of service abroad, that I’m following a double standard.
