But just me enjoying this by myself will not create a literary work. It has to be relativized. In other words, put into a form so readers can share that pleasure. Which is why I included the character Nakata, an “old man” in his sixties. Nakata was also, in a sense, my alter ego, a projection of me. And by having Kafka and Nakata act in parallel and in response to each other, the novel acquired a healthy balance. At least I felt that way as the author—and I feel that way even now.
Maybe someday I will write a novel with a protagonist my own age, but at this point I don’t feel it’s absolutely necessary. What pops up first for me is the idea for a novel. Then the story naturally, spontaneously reaches out from the idea. As I said in the beginning, it’s the story itself that decides what sort of characters will appear. It’s not something I think about and decide on ahead of time. As the writer, I merely follow directions as a faithful scribe.
I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act. That’s all it is. I don’t make the shoes fit my foot size but, rather, make my feet fit the shoes. It’s not something you can do in reality, but if you toil for years as a novelist, you find you’re able to accomplish it. The reason being that it’s all imaginary. And being imaginary, it’s like things that take place in dreams. In dreams—whether ones you have while asleep or dreams you have while awake—you have hardly any choice about it. Basically I just go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.
Every time I’m asked “Why don’t you write novels with characters the same age as yourself?” that’s how I want to reply, but it’s too long an explanation, and I doubt people would easily get it, so I always give some suitably vague reply. I smile and say something like “Good question. Maybe someday I’ll do just that.”
But aside from this—aside from whether or not I’ll put them in a novel—in the ordinary sense it’s an extremely difficult task to observe yourself as you are now, objectively and accurately. To grasp yourself in the present progressive form is not easy. Maybe that’s precisely why I wear all kinds of shoes that aren’t mine. Through that I’m able to discover myself in a more comprehensive way, much like triangulating a location.
At any rate, there still seems so much I need to learn about the characters in my novels. And at the same time there seems to be so much I need to learn from the characters in my novels. In the future, I want my novels to bring to life all kinds of weird, eccentric, and colorful characters. Whenever I begin writing a new novel, I get excited, wondering what kind of people I’m going to meet next.
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* Editor’s Note: Haruki Murakami subsequently published Killing Commendatore in 2017 （with an English-language translation in 2018）， another novel written in the first person.
Who Do I Write For?
Interviewers sometimes ask me, “What sort of readers do you have in mind when you write your novels?” And I’m always sort of stuck for an answer. The reason being that I’ve never had the sense that I’m writing for someone else. And I don’t particularly have that feeling even now.
It’s true in a sense to say that I write for myself. Particularly with my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, one that I wrote late at night at my kitchen table, I had no thought at all that ordinary readers would ever see it, and （truly） all I thought about as I wrote it was that writing made me feel good. Taking some images I had inside me, choosing words that satisfied me, putting those words together into sentences—that’s all I had in my mind at the time. But what sort of people might someday read this novel, whether they would feel drawn to it, what sort of literary message might be contained within it—I didn’t have the time to consider any of that, and there was no need to. It was a simple thing, really, very pristine.
When I was writing this first book there was also a sense of it being therapeutic. All creative activity is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify or fix yourself. In other words, by relativizing yourself, by adapting your soul to a form that’s different from what it is now, you can resolve—or sublimate—the contradictions, rifts, and distortions that inevitably crop up in the process of being alive. And if things go well, this effect can be shared with readers. Though I wasn’t specifically conscious of it at the time, I think I was instinctively seeking that kind of self-cleansing action. Which is why, in a very unselfconscious way, I started wanting to write novels in the first place.