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Writers who do not rely on weighty material but instead reach inside themselves to spin their tales may, by contrast, have an easier time of it. That’s because they can draw on their daily lives—the events routinely taking place around them, the scenes they witness, the people they encounter—and then freely apply their imaginations to that material to construct their own fiction. In short, they use a form of renewable energy. They feel no need to fight on the battlefield or in the bullring, or to shoot lions.
Please do not misunderstand—I am not saying that direct personal involvement in things like war, bullfights, and big-game hunting has no meaning. Of course it can be meaningful. Experiences are crucial for a writer, of whatever kind. All I’m saying is that they needn’t be of the dramatic variety to make a good novel. Even the smallest, most nondramatic encounter can generate an astonishing amount of creative power, if you do it right.
There is a saying in Japanese, “When trees sink and rocks float.” It refers to occurrences that contravene the norm; but in the world of the novel—or perhaps, more broadly, in the realm of art—such reversals take place all the time. Things the world sees as trivial can acquire weight over time, while other things broadly considered to be weighty can, quite suddenly, reveal themselves to be only hollow shells. The unending creative process cannot be perceived by the naked eye, but its power, aided by the passing of time, yields such drastic turnarounds on a regular basis.
So if you lament that you lack the material you need to write, you are giving up way too easily. If you just shift your focus a little bit and slightly alter your way of thinking, you will discover a wealth of material lying about just waiting to be picked up and used. You only have to look. In the field of human endeavor, things that seem mundane at first glance can, if you persevere, give birth to an endless array of insights. All you need to do, as I said before, is retain your healthy writerly ambition. That is the key.
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I have long held that no generation is superior or inferior to another. Although stereotypes about age groups being better or worse are common, I am convinced such criticisms don’t hold water. Generations should never be ranked that way. Of course each has its own tendencies. But there are no differences in the quantity or quality of talent. At least not enough to matter.
To take one concrete example, today’s Japanese youth are often criticized for being poorer at reading and writing kanji than their elders. （I have no idea whether this is true or not.） At the same time, however, there is little doubt that they are far better at understanding and processing computer language. This is exactly my point. Each generation has its own deficiencies as well as its own fields of expertise. It’s that simple. Correspondingly, each generation should stress its respective strengths in its creative activities. Writers should use their own language as a weapon, choosing words that come naturally to them to depict what they see as clearly as they can. There is no need for them to be intimidated by their elders; nor, on the other side of the coin, do they have any justification for feeling superior.
I took a lot of heat when I launched my career. “This can’t be called a novel,” older critics fumed. “This isn’t literature!” I found the constant attacks quite depressing, so I left Japan for a number of years and went to live abroad, where I could write what I wanted in peace, free of the constant static. Never, though, did I entertain serious misgivings about my approach or feel particularly anxious about what I was doing. “I can’t write any other way, so take it or leave it,” was my response to the critics. My writing still isn’t perfect, but I was sure even then that if I kept at it, I could turn out something better. I was convinced that I was following the correct path and that the value of my work would become apparent with the passing of time. I sure had a lot of nerve!
Now, when I look around me, I can’t be sure whether I’ve been proven right or not. How can I possibly tell? I doubt that literary value can ever be fully gauged, however much time passes. Nevertheless, my belief that I am basically headed in the right direction has remained unshaken since 1979, when I published my first novel. In another three or four decades, conditions will have changed yet again and the situation will be clearer, but given my age, I may not be around to see for myself. I hope one of you can keep an eye on things for me.
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In the end, I think each new generation has its own fixed amount of material that it can use to write novels, and that the shape and relative weight of that material retroactively determine the shape and function of the vehicle that must be designed to carry it. It is from the correlation of material and vehicle—from their interface, as it were—that new forms of novelistic reality emerge.