The short-story collection Tokyo Kitanshu and the medium-length novel After Dark, which I wrote after this, were from start to finish in purely third person. It was like I was making sure that in these formats—short stories and a medium-length novel—I could do a solid job of employing third-person narrative. Like taking a new sports car you just bought out for a spin on a mountain road to see what it can do. By following these steps in the process, it took some twenty years since I first debuted to say farewell to the first person and begin to write solely in third person. Quite a long stretch of time.
Why did it take so long to change the voice I wrote in? Even I don’t know the exact reason. I can say that my body and psyche had grown completely used to the process of writing novels with an “I” first person, so it took some time to make the switch. For me it was not simply a change from first-person narrative but close to a fundamental transformation in my standpoint as a writer.
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I’m the type of person who needs time to change the way I do things. For instance, for a long time I couldn’t give names to my characters. Nicknames like “Rat” or “J” were fine, because I just couldn’t give them actual names. Why not? I don’t know the answer. All I can say is that I felt embarrassed about assigning people names. I felt that somebody like me endowing others （even if they’re fictional characters I made up） with names seemed kind of phony. Maybe in the beginning I felt embarrassed, too, about the whole act itself of writing novels. It was like laying my naked heart out for everyone to see.
I was finally able to give the main characters names starting with the novel Norwegian Wood （1987）。 Until then, for the eight years prior, I basically used characters without names, and wrote in first person. If you think about it, I imposed a pretty restricted, roundabout system on myself, but at the time it didn’t bother me much. I just thought, “That’s how it is.”
But as my novels became longer and more complex, I started to feel it was inconvenient not to have names for the characters. If you have a lot of characters and they don’t have names, it can cause all kinds of real confusion. So I resigned myself to it and made the decision, as I was writing Norwegian Wood, that I would name the characters. It wasn’t easy, but I closed my eyes, steeled myself, and after that it wasn’t all that hard to give my characters names. Nowadays I’m able to easily come up with names. With Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage there’s even a character’s name in the title. With 1Q84 it was at the point that I came up with the name “Aomame” for the female protagonist that the story really started to take off. In that sense names have become an important element in my novels.
In this way, every time I write a new novel I tell myself, “Okay, this time, here is what I’m going to try to accomplish,” one by one setting up concrete goals for myself—for the most part visible, technical types of goals. I enjoy writing like that. As I clear a new hurdle and accomplish something new or different, I get a real sense that I’ve grown, even if it’s a little, as a writer. It’s like climbing, step by step, up a ladder. The wonderful thing about being a novelist is that even in your fifties and sixties, that kind of growth and innovation is possible. There’s no age limit. The same wouldn’t hold true for an athlete.
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By using third person, increasing the number of characters, and giving them names, the possibilities for my novels expanded. In other words, I could include all types and shades of people with all sorts of opinions and worldviews, and depict the diverse intertwining among them. And what’s most wonderful of all is that I can become almost anyone I want. Even when I was writing in first person, I had that feeling, but with third person the choices are far greater.
When I write in first person, in most cases I roughly take the protagonist （or narrator） as myself in a broad sense. This isn’t the real me, as I’ve said, but change the situation and circumstances and it might be. By branching out, I am able to divide myself. And by dividing myself like that and throwing myself into the narrative, I am able to verify who I am, and pinpoint the point of contact between myself and others, or between myself and the world. In the beginning that way of writing really suited me. And most of the novels I loved were also written in first person.
For instance, The Great Gatsby is in first person. The hero of the novel is Jay Gatsby, but the narrator is always the young man Nick Carraway. Through the subtle interplay between the first-person narrator （Nick） and Gatsby, and through dramatic developments in the story, Fitzgerald is actually narrating the truth about himself. That viewpoint lends depth to the story.