Review of Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is not an authority on writing.

Rather, he is an expert on music. See his other nonfiction book for proof. He is untrained in the craft of writing, as he admits in the opening pages. He also does not play an instrument. What does that tell you?

Established rules mean little to him when he sets out to write a novel. In this memoir, he recounts his first time sitting down to write anything of any fictive quality, at the age of thirty, after that miraculous baseball game epiphany, after which point he has led the ideal career of a professional writer seemingly without much struggle. Yet, in these pages, he does whine an awful lot about the negative criticism he’s received. I am continually surprised by how often he brings up the negativity surrounding his literary accomplishments. Any novelist as successful as him has no need to remind the audience of his dissenters. Neither does he need to toot his own horn.

Apart from all this, he talks about his process a lot, and some of it is interesting. A lot of it has been said in previous interviews, and he has a habit of apologizing for things he is about to say, and hedging – he has taken to hedging a lot. Why is he so polite in his nonfiction and as blatant as Updike in his fiction? The mysteries of Murakami are manifold.

What I really wanted from this book (like Henry Miller’s memoir) was a list of books Murakami loved at the back of the book, which is where I look every time I pick up a book on writing. Murakami does not provide us with a bibliography of his faves. You will have to scour additional resources for those tidbits.

In the end, his autobiographical essay collection reads like an apologetics on the topic of his success. He at once seems like the luckiest and most incompetent writer to reach such heights of cultishness. He has achieved every milestone that matters in the publishing world without conforming to industry standards. He talks about the Nobel Prize, which is a sore subject for him. He cries foul at the literary establishment in Japan. I am also a skeptic about the industry in Japan, and I’m an outsider who can only read the translations. Murakami has floated to the top of the translation market on his own merits, he claims, and by virtue of much toil. He landed some huge deals with big name agents, and skillful translators. He could have made a living off his translations of English works to Japanese alone, or just his short stories, or his novels or nonfiction. Pick any genre and Murakami probably could have staked his claim on it.

He writes commercial fiction, but not really. It does not resemble other commercial fiction in my opinion. It’s not literary either, at least not in translation. Its only possible genre is magical realism, but it bears little resemblance to Garcia Marquez. He might be compared to Ágota Kristóf in terms of sentence structure, and she is one of his acknowledged influences, but his preoccupations and subject matter are too idiosyncratic to bear out a comparison with anyone but David Mitchell.

So what is it that makes Murakami so great? I think it is the immediacy of his writing. It is easy to recline into. It is the easy chair of writing. The immersiveness. Critics should stop trying to overthink his works and just learn to stop worrying and love what they’re reading. Sure, he’s repetitive, dumbed down, quirky, offensively weird, predictably unpredictable, but why do we read his novels if not to seek out these wacky and inveterate pleasures? Vicariously experiencing the absurd alongside the profound is what he is all about. His subtlety and ambiguity outweigh his obvious oversimplifications. When random stuff happens, you just roll with it.

Foremost, he is different. One of his strongest abilities lays in summoning a mood. First, he establishes a rhythm. This is an unmistakable through-line in his works. From there he proceeds by feel, only grasping onto structure and typical tropes when he risks losing his reader as they wander through the wonderland of his imaginative ruminations. He has a keen sense for attunement with the reader, and hones his rhythm via subsequent drafts. Despite his breezy tone, he meticulously crafts his works down to the sentence level. The effortlessness is the result of much effort. The man works hard, even if he couldn’t write himself out of an Agatha Christie scenario.

You mustn’t seek to understand or apply labels to his writing, but instead feel the flow. Let the experience of reading his books wash through you. The novels all provide a distinctive afterglow if you read them in the correct frame of mind. Reading and rereading Wind-Up Bird, 1Q84, and the first short story collections were some of the most satisfying reading experiences I have had.

Murakami has little to teach anyone who wishes to pursue the art. One might do well to live by some of his examples, but in the end every writer must forge their own path. Anyone who knows the bare minimum about hooking words together to create sentences already knows as much as Murakami. You too, can write a Murakami novel. I’ve done it, trust me. But to get it out in the world – the recognition part – that’s a whole different ballgame. That takes endless work and a lot of luck. He reiterates the luck part. He admits it’s a little suspicious how lucky his trajectory has been and cites numerous bizarre windfalls that wafted into his lap.

Murakami has nothing new to say about novel writing or the industry. He reaffirms what we all know. You should read this book to learn more about the author you adore, only after finishing all of his fiction. Don’t expect it to teach you how to become the next Murakami. That’s not something a book can teach you. This will only explain a tiny fraction of how Murakami became Murakami.