But after that first novel won a newcomers award sponsored by a literary magazine, was published as a book, sold a bit, and was reviewed fairly well, and I was given the label “novelist,” I was, whether I wanted to be or not, compelled to start thinking about readers. My book was now lined up on shelves in bookstores, my name boldly printed on the cover, with the general public now reading it, so a certain tension inevitably began to color my writing. Which doesn’t mean that my basic stance of writing to enjoy myself had changed very much. I figured that as long as I enjoyed what I wrote, there had to be readers somewhere who also enjoyed reading it. Maybe not all that many, but that was fine with me. If I could communicate meaningfully with them, then that was all I needed.
My next novel, Pinball, 1973, and then my short-story collections A Slow Boat to China and A Perfect Day for Kangaroos were all written with that sort of optimistic, easygoing attitude. At the time I had a full-time day job and was able to get by okay on that income. Novels were, so to speak, more a hobby I wrote in my spare time.
One well-known literary critic （who is no longer alive） gave a scathing review of my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, saying, “You’re in big trouble if you think this kind of thing passes for literature.” When I read this, I simply thought, “Okay, I guess some people feel that way.” It didn’t make me upset or want to lash back. That critic and I had a very different way of viewing literature. What kind of ideological content my works had, what social role they played, whether they were avant-garde or reactionary, artistic fiction or not—I’d never given any of this a single thought. I’d started out with the stance that if I enjoy writing it, that’s sufficient; so from the start our ideas didn’t mesh. In Hear the Wind Sing I introduced a fictional writer named Derek Hartfield, one of whose novels is entitled What’s Wrong About Feeling Good? And that was exactly the way I felt about it at the time. What’s wrong about feeling good?
Looking back at it now, it seems a simplistic, slapdash way of thinking, but I was very young then （in my early thirties）， the upheaval of the student movement was still fresh in my mind, and I had maintained a pretty disobedient attitude—an antithetical, defiant, resistant stance toward authority and the establishment. （Perhaps a bit impertinent and childish, granted, though things worked out okay.）
That attitude gradually began to transform around the time I started writing A Wild Sheep Chase （1982）。 I was growing aware that if I just kept up this “What’s wrong about feeling good?” attitude, as a professional writer I’d probably write myself into a corner. Even my readers who enjoyed my writing style, and found it “innovative,” would, though, soon tire of reading the same sort of thing. “What? This again?” they’d think. And of course as the one who writes the books, I’d get fed up with it, too.
And it wasn’t like I was dying to write that style of novel. It’s just that I didn’t have the technical writing skills yet to directly come to grips with a lengthy novel, and could only, at this point, write in that sort of style that stepped lightly. And that airy way of writing just happened to strike some people as fresh and new. For me, though, since I’d made the leap to being a novelist, I wanted to write a novel that was a little deeper, more expansive in scope. But “deep” and “expansive” didn’t mean I wanted to write in a formally literary, or mainstream-fiction, kind of way. I wanted to write a novel that made me feel good writing it, a novel that had the power to break down the front door. I wanted to do more than just take images inside me and express them in words in a fragmentary, instinctive way; I wanted to come to grips with the ideas and awareness inside me and in a more comprehensive, three-dimensional way set them down in writing.
The year before I made this decision, I read Ryū Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies and was really blown away. But this was something only Ryū Murakami could write. I also read some of Kenji Nakagami’s novels and was really impressed, but again only Nakagami could have written them. They were both different from what I wanted to write. I had to carve out my own path, and with the example of these powerful works in mind, I knew I had to write the kind of novel that only I could write.
And so I proceeded to start writing A Wild Sheep Chase as a kind of answer to these propositions. I wanted to make the novel itself as deep and profound as I could without making my style any heavier, or harming the good feelings （or, to put it another way, without incorporating it into the system of pure literature）。 That was my basic idea. And to do that I had to proactively introduce the framework of narrative into the novel. This was very clear to me. Making narrative central would make it, inevitably, a work that took longer to complete. Unlike my previous works, it wasn’t something I could complete in the snatches of free time between my day job. So before I began writing A Wild Sheep Chase I sold the jazz club I’d been running, and became a so-called full-time writer. At the time my income from the jazz club exceeded my income writing, but I took the plunge anyway and gave up the business. I wanted my life to focus on writing novels, and devote all the time I had to writing. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was a step from which there was no turning back, a sort of burning of bridges.