The first step in my novel-writing process is, metaphorically, to clean off my desk. My stance is that I will work on nothing but the novel until it is completed, so I need to prepare. If I happen to be writing a series of essays, for example, I have to break it off, at least for the time being. Unless something really extraordinary comes along, all new projects are turned down. I’m the sort of person who when I throw myself into one thing, can’t do anything else. It’s true that I often work on translations while writing a novel, but those are done at my own pace and without any deadline, and I use them to give me a break from my writing. Translation is a technical process, so it uses a different part of the brain than creative writing. Rather than hindering the progress of a novel, therefore, working simultaneously on a translation can actually aid in the process by helping me keep my mental balance, a bit like stretching before exercising.
“This all sounds very fine and dandy,” a fellow writer may counter, “but the fact is, we have to take on other sorts of projects to survive. How can we write our novel the way you suggest and still get by financially?” Believe me, I know the problem—what I’m describing here is just the system I myself have developed. It would be great if an author could receive an advance on his work to meet expenses, but Japanese publishers rarely offer advances. I established this system in the early days when my novels weren’t selling that well. For some time I held a regular job （manual labor, more or less） to get by. That allowed me to hold on to my basic principle of accepting no commissions while a novel was in process. There were a few exceptions at the very beginning—when my writing style was still a work in progress, and I was proceeding by trial and error—but otherwise I stuck to my guns.
At a certain point in my career, I began to do a good deal of my writing abroad, the reason being that there were just too many trivial distractions in Japan. In a foreign country, I could focus on my work. It seems that for me, living elsewhere is especially helpful in the crucial early stages of a novel, when I am setting up my daily routine, establishing the kind of schedule I need to write. The first time I did this, in the late 1980s, I wasn’t at all sure I was making the right choice. Could I really survive under those conditions? I am a pretty nervy kind of guy, but all the same I felt as if I were heading off to fight a decisive battle, burning bridges behind me as I went. After all, my plan was to live on our savings, and those would eventually give out, even though I had been able to wangle a small advance from my publisher by promising to write a book about my trip （A Distant Drum, as it turned out）。
In any case, my big decision to explore the possibilities abroad and leave Japan behind turned out to be the right one. Not only did the novel I wrote on this first trip, Norwegian Wood, happen to sell well （far better than I expected）， providing me with financial security, it also allowed me to establish a system of writing that I have been able to continue ever since. In a sense, I was lucky. But it was more than just luck. At the risk of sounding arrogant, things turned out the way they did because I was so determined, and also prepared to take the consequences.
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When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages （the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words） every day. This works out to about two and a half pages on my computer, but I base my calculations on the old system out of habit. On days where I want to write more, I still stop after ten pages; when I don’t feel like writing, I force myself to somehow fulfill my quota. Why do I do it this way? Because it is especially important to maintain a steady pace when tackling a big project. That can’t work if you write a lot one day and nothing at all the next. So I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I’m working on a time card.
That’s not how an artist should go about his art, some may say. It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur—that’s not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist? Who made that rule? No one, right? So why not write in whatever way is most natural to you? Moreover, refusing to think of oneself as an artist removes a lot of pressure. More than being artists, novelists should think of themselves as “free”—“free” meaning that we are able to do what we like, when we like, in a way we like without worrying about how the world sees us. This is far better than wearing the stiff and formal robes of the artist.
Isak Dinesen once said, “I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.” I write my ten pages the same way. Cool and detached. “Without hope and without despair” says it perfectly. I wake early each morning, brew a fresh pot of coffee, and work for four or five hours straight. Ten pages a day means three hundred pages a month. That works out to eighteen hundred pages in six months. To give you a concrete sense of how much that is, the first draft of Kafka on the Shore was eighteen hundred manuscript pages long. I wrote most of that novel on the North Shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Not only was nothing there to distract me, it rained almost all the time, so the work progressed at a rapid pace. I started the draft in April and wrapped it up in October. I remember the dates particularly well because they coincided perfectly with the baseball season: I began when it did and finished when the Japan Series was just underway. That was the year that the Yakult Swallows, led by their manager Katsuya Nomura, won the Series. As a longtime Swallows fan, I recall how good it felt to tick off those two events together. Swallows’ championship done! Novel draft done! My only regret was that, since I was holed up in Kauai writing, I hadn’t been able to visit Jingu Stadium to see many of their regular season games in person.