Additionally, I’d experienced many things in my life. At age thirty I became a professional writer, with a public presence, and like it or not had to face a lot of pressure. I don’t naturally gravitate to the spotlight, but there were times when, reluctantly, I was forced to put myself there. Sometimes I had to do things that I didn’t want to do, or was very disappointed when a person I was close to spoke out against me. Some people would praise me with words they didn’t really feel, while others—pointlessly, as far as I can see it—heaped ridicule on me. And others spoke half-truths about me. Additionally, I went through other experiences I can only characterize as strange and out of the ordinary.
Every time I went through these negative experiences, I tried to observe in detail the way the people involved looked and how they spoke and acted. If I’m going to have to go through all this, I figured, I should at least get something useful out of it （to get back what I put into it, you could say）。 Naturally these experiences hurt me, even made me depressed sometimes, but now I feel they provided a lot of nourishment for me as a novelist. Of course, I had plenty of wonderful, enjoyable experiences as well, but for whatever reason the ones I recall now are the negative ones. It’s the unpleasant memories that remain, the ones I don’t want to remember. Perhaps there’s more to learn from them.
When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters. The one that leaps to mind is Dostoevsky’s Demons. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean; there are plenty of oddball minor characters throughout the novel. It’s a long novel but holds my interest to the end. One colorful, weird character after another appears, the kind that makes you wonder, “Why this kind of person?” Dostoevsky must have been someone with a huge mental cabinet to work with.
In Japanese literature the novels of Natsume Sōseki contain all kinds of appealing, colorful characters. Even the ones who only appear briefly are vividly portrayed and unique. A line they might utter, or an expression or action of theirs, will strangely linger in the mind. What impresses me about Sōseki’s novels is that there’s hardly ever any makeshift character, one that is there because the author decided he needed that sort of person to appear at that point. These are novels not created by the mind but rather through sensations and experience. Sōseki paid his dues in each and every line, and you feel a sort of peace of mind as you read them.
One of the things I most enjoy about writing novels is the sense that I can become anybody I want to be.
I started off by writing novels in the first person, using the first-person male pronoun boku, and continued in the same vein for some twenty years. Occasionally I’d write short stories in third person, but my novels were consistently in first person. Naturally this “I” didn’t equal me, Haruki Murakami （just like Philip Marlowe isn’t Raymond Chandler）， and in each novel the image of the first-person male protagonist changes, but as I continued writing in first person, the line between the real-life me and the protagonist of the novels to a certain extent inevitably blurred, both for the writer and for the reader.
This wasn’t a problem at first, since creating and expanding a novelistic world by using a fictionalized version of “I” was my original aim, but over time I gradually got the sense that I needed more. Especially as my novels got longer, using only the first-person narrative felt confining and stifling. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World I used two versions of “I” （using the pronouns boku and watakushi in alternating chapters）， which I think was an attempt to break through the functional limits of a first-person narrative.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle （1994–95） was the last novel I wrote solely in first person.[*] But when a novel is as long as that book, you can’t make do just with the viewpoint of one first-person “I”; so throughout the novel I incorporated a number of other novelistic devices, such as other people’s stories, long letters, etc. I introduced all kinds of narrative techniques in order to break through the structural limitations of first-person narration. Even with all that, though, I felt I couldn’t take it any further—so with my next novel, Kafka on the Shore （2002）， I changed to writing half of it in third person. The chapters about the boy Kafka were written in the usual first-person “I” narrative, but the remaining chapters were in third person. Sort of a compromise, you might say, but even just introducing the third-person voice in half the novel opened up my novelistic world considerably. At least as I wrote this novel I felt, on a technical level, much freer than when I wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.