This may make some people angry, but although literary editors in Japan are specialists, in the end they are company employees who can be reassigned at any time. Of course there are exceptions, but by and large they are appointed by upper management to “look after” you, which means there is no telling how long the relationship may last. For better or for worse, however, my wife is unlikely to be reassigned. She is thus the “fixed point” in my editing process, the one who knows best how I write. We have been together for a long time, so that for the most part I understand the nuances of her thoughts and opinions and where they are coming from. （I have to say “for the most part”—understanding one’s wife completely is fundamentally impossible.）
This doesn’t mean that I accept her comments easily. After all, I have just finished a novel that took a long time to write, and though the settling process may enable me to look at it more coolly, I am still emotionally wrapped up in the project, so it is very hard for me if someone says anything at all critical about it. I can become quite passionate. Harsh words are sometimes exchanged. I could never be so direct and honest with an editor—that’s the advantage, I guess, of getting feedback from someone close to you. I’m a pretty even-tempered guy most of the time, but at this stage in the process I can’t help flaring up. I guess it’s a necessary outlet, a way for me to release all those pent-up feelings.
There are times when I come to accept her criticisms. “Yeah, she was right about that,” I may think, or “Maybe she had something there.” It can take a few days to reach that point, though. At other times I find myself disagreeing with her. “No way,” I’ll decide, after giving it some thought. “This is right as it is.” There is a rule that I follow, though, once another person has entered the scene. Whether I agree or disagree with their comments, I rewrite every scene they have found fault with. From start to finish. In those cases where I find myself rejecting their comments, I may take the scene in an entirely different direction.
Whichever course I have followed, once I have sat down and rewritten a given section I almost always find it much improved. It seems that when a reader has a problem, there is usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions. In short, the flow of their reading has been blocked. It is my job, then, to eliminate that blockage, to unclog the pipe, as it were. How to do that is up to me, the author. Even if I feel “That section was perfectly written—there’s no need to change anything,” I still head back to my desk and work it out. After all, the idea that anything can be “perfectly written” is a clear fallacy.
This time I don’t have to go through the manuscript from beginning to end. All I have to do is rewrite those problematic sections. After that, I ask my reader to revisit those parts, we discuss them, and if need be, I work on them some more. Then I show them again to my reader, and if she is still dissatisfied we repeat the whole process. Once we have sorted things out to the best of our capability, I undertake another full rewrite to check and adjust the flow of the work. If fiddling around with small sections has disrupted the tone of the whole, I fix that. Then and only then do I formally present my manuscript to my editor. By this stage of the game my overheated brain has cooled enough to allow me to cope with his comments in an appropriately dispassionate way.
* * *
—
This brings up an interesting story about the creation of the novel Dance Dance Dance, which I wrote in the late 1980s. It was the first time I had used a word processor （a Fujitsu laptop） to write. I composed most of the novel in our apartment in Rome, and then finished it off in London, England. When we moved from Rome to London, I stored what I had written on floppy disks, but when I checked after our arrival I discovered one entire chapter was missing. I was a greenhorn when it came to word processors, so it was likely my oversight. Not an uncommon story. Of course it hit me hard. I grew quite depressed. It was a long chapter, and I flattered myself that it had been beautifully written. Not the sort of loss I could dismiss with a wave of my hand.
Still, I couldn’t go on sighing and shaking my head forever. So I pulled myself together and tried to resurrect passages that I had sweated over several weeks before. “Did I do it this way?” I wondered. “Or perhaps it was like this.” In the end, the resurrection was completed, and the novel was published with the rewritten section. Some time later, however, the part that had gone missing popped up out of nowhere. Somehow it had found its way into a completely different folder. Again, not an uncommon occurrence. What should I do, I worried, if the original turned out to be better than its replacement? When I read it over, however, I was relieved to see that in fact the rewrite was far superior.