How, then, can we distinguish between those contents that are crucial, those that are less necessary, and those that are entirely unnecessary?
Speaking again from experience, I have found that these distinctions are actually quite easy to make. One rule of thumb is to ask yourself, “Am I having a good time doing this?” If you’re not enjoying yourself when you’re engaged in what seems important to you, if you can’t find spontaneous pleasure and joy in it, if your heart doesn’t leap with excitement, then there’s likely something wrong. When that happens, you have to go back to the beginning and start discarding any extraneous parts or unnatural elements.
That can be a lot harder than it sounds.
Right after I won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers for Hear the Wind Sing, a high-school classmate of mine stopped by my jazz café to offer his comments on my novel. “If something that simple can make it, I could write a novel, too,” he sniffed, and left. I was a little put out, of course, but I also knew what he meant. “The guy may not be entirely off the mark,” I thought. “Perhaps anybody could turn out something as good.” All I had done was sit down and riff on whatever came into my head. There were no complicated words, no elaborate phrases, no elegant style. I had just thrown it together as I went along. If that classmate of mine did go home and write a novel, however, I never heard about it. Maybe he figured there was no need for him to write in a world where novels as half-baked as mine could pass muster. If so, it probably showed good judgment on his part.
Looking back, however, it strikes me that for an aspiring writer, writing “something that simple” may not be so simple. It’s easy enough to think and talk about ridding your mind of unnecessary things through a process of subtraction and simplification, but actually doing it is hard. I think that I was able to pull it off without too much fuss because I had never been obsessed by the idea of being a writer, so I was not hindered by that ambition.
In any event, that was how I began. I started with a simple style, light and breezy, and then took time fleshing it out bit by bit in later works. The structure of my novels, too, was skeletal at first, but I built it up in stages, making it more three-dimensional and multilayered until it was strong enough to handle the heightened complexity of long narratives. In this fashion, my works grew in scale. As I said before, I began with an internal image of what I eventually wanted to write, but the process of getting there happened naturally. No detailed planning was involved—only after I had arrived did it hit me, “So that’s how I got here!”
If there is indeed something original about my novels, I think it springs from the principle of freedom. I had just turned twenty-nine when, for no particular reason, I thought, “I feel like writing a novel!” so I sat down and started. I had never planned to be a writer and had never given serious thought to what sort of novel I should be writing, which meant that I was under no particular constraints. I hadn’t the slightest idea what was taking place in the literary world in Japan, and （for better or for worse） I had no older author to look up to as a role model. I just wanted to write something that reflected what I was feeling at the time—nothing more. It was that simple, straightforward impulse that drove me to start scribbling, without a thought to what might lie ahead. There was no need to feel self-conscious. In fact, writing was fun—it let me feel free and natural.
I think （or hope） that free and natural sensibility lies at the heart of my novels. That is what has spurred me to write. My engine, as it were. It is my belief that a rich, spontaneous joy lies at the root of all creative expression. What is originality, after all, but the shape that results from the natural impulse to communicate to others that feeling of freedom, that unconstrained joy?
Perhaps pure impulse brings with it its own form and style in a natural, involuntary way. Form and style are, in that sense, far from artificial. A brilliant person may use every ounce of his intelligence to develop form and style, may diagram every step, but if he lacks that natural impulse he is likely to fail or, if not fail, produce something that will not last. It will be like a plant whose roots are not firmly set in the earth: if there is too little rain it will lose its vitality and wither, while if it rains too hard it will be swept away with the topsoil.
* * *
—
This is purely my opinion, but if you want to express yourself as freely as you can, it’s probably best not to start out by asking “What am I seeking?” Rather, it’s better to ask “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?” and then try to visualize that aspect of yourself. Asking “What am I seeking?” invariably leads you to ponder heavy issues. The heavier that discussion gets, the farther freedom retreats, and the slower your footwork becomes. The slower your footwork, the less lively your prose. When that happens, your writing won’t charm anyone—possibly even you.