What happens more often is that people claim that the characters I haven’t based on anyone, the imaginary ones I totally made up, are modeled after real people. In some cases there are even people who swear that a certain character is based on them. Somerset Maugham was actually sued by a person he’d never met and never even heard of, who claimed that one of Maugham’s novels was based on him. In the novel Maugham depicted each of the characters in a very vivid, real way, in some cases quite nastily （or, to put a better spin on it, satirically）， which made the person’s reaction even more intense. When he read Maugham’s skillful depictions of the characters, this person must have felt he was being personally criticized and belittled.
In most cases, the characters who appear in my novels naturally emerge from the flow of the story. Except for a few rare cases, I never decide ahead of time that I’ll present a certain type of character. As I write, a kind of axis emerges that makes it possible for the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and add one detail after another as I see fit, like iron scraps attach to a magnet. And in this way an overall picture of a person emerges. Afterwards I often think that certain details bear a resemblance of sorts to a real person, but I never start out thinking I’ll use an aspect of a real person to create a character. Most of the process happens automatically. In other words, as I create the character, I think it’s more that I almost unconsciously pull out information and various fragments from the cabinets in my brain and then weave them together.
I have my own name for this automatic process: the Automatic Dwarves. I’ve almost always driven stick-shift cars, and the first time I drove an automatic, I had a feeling like there must be dwarves living inside the gear box, each in charge of operating a separate gear. And I also had a faint anxiety that someday those dwarves would decide they’d had enough of slaving away for someone else, stop work, and go on strike, and my car would suddenly stop working right in the middle of the highway.
I know you’ll laugh to hear me say this, but when it comes to the process of creating characters it’s like those Automatic Dwarves living in my unconscious are, despite a bit of grumbling, somehow managing to work hard. And all I do is diligently copy it all down. Naturally what I write isn’t neatly organized as a ready-to-go novel, so later I rework it a number of times, changing its form. That rewriting process is more conscious and logical. But the creation of the prototype is an unconscious and intuitive process. There’s no choice, really. I have to do it this way or my characters will turn out unnatural and dead. That’s why, in the beginning stage of the process, I leave everything up to these Automatic Dwarves.
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In any case, in the same way that you have to read a lot of books in order to write novels, to write about people you need to know a lot of them.
By “know” I don’t mean you have to comprehend them, or go so far as to really understand them deep down. All you need to do is glance at the person’s appearance, how they talk and act, their special characteristics. Those people you like, ones you’re not so fond of, ones that, frankly, you dislike—it’s important to observe people without, as much as possible, choosing which ones you observe. What I mean is, if the only people you put in your novels are the kind you like, ones you’re interested in or can easily understand, then your novels, ultimately, will lack a certain expansiveness. There are all sorts of different people, doing all sorts of different actions, and it’s through that clash of difference that things get moving and the story is propelled forward. So you shouldn’t just avert your eyes when you decide you can’t stomach somebody, but instead ask yourself “What is it I don’t like about them?” and “Why don’t I like that?” Those are the main points to keep in mind.
A long time ago—I think I was in my mid-thirties—someone told me, “There are never any bad people in your novels.” （Later on I learned that Kurt Vonnegut was told the same thing by his father just before his father passed away.） I could see the point. Ever since then, I’ve consciously tried to include more negative characters in my novels. But things didn’t work out as I’d hoped. Back then, I was more inclined toward the creation of a private world—one that was, if anything, harmonious—than creating large-scale narrative-driven books. I had to build my own neat little world as a shelter from the harsh realities of the larger world around me.
But as time has passed and I’ve matured, you might say （as a person and as a writer）， I’ve ever so gradually been able to include more negative characters in the stories I write, characters that introduce an element of discord. I’ve been able to do this first of all because the novelistic world I’ve created has taken shape more and functions fairly well, so as a next step my project was to make this world broader and deeper, and more dynamic than before. Doing that meant adding more variety to my characters and expanding the scope of their actions. I keenly felt the need to do this.