Almost everyone I knew was against this decision, claiming I shouldn’t rush into things. My café was doing good business at the time, with a steady income, and they felt it was a waste to give that up. “Can’t you let someone else run the shop while you write novels?” they asked. Most of them probably didn’t expect I’d be able to earn a living just writing novels. But I had no doubts. I’ve always been the type who, when he does something, plunges in headfirst. My personality just wouldn’t allow me to let someone else run the shop. This was a crucial moment in my life. I needed to make a firm decision and stick by it. Even if it was just one time, I wanted to use everything I had to focus on writing a novel. If it didn’t work out, then so be it. I could start all over again. Those were my thoughts then. I sold the café and gave up my apartment in Tokyo in order to concentrate on writing. I left the city, started going to bed early and getting up early, and began running every day to stay in shape. In other words, I did a complete makeover of my lifestyle.
Maybe at this point I should have had a clear sense of my readers in mind.
But I didn’t really consider who my readers might be. There was no need to. I was in my early thirties then, and it was obvious my readers were the same age as me or perhaps younger. Young men and women, in other words. At the time I was considered a “rising young writer” （I’m a little embarrassed to use the term）， and the people who supported my work were clearly the younger generation of readers. And what kind of people they were, and what they thought about, was not something I had to ponder much. My readers and myself as a writer were, as a matter of course, one. It was a sort of honeymoon period, I suppose, between me and my readers.
As I recall, for a number of reasons A Wild Sheep Chase got a cool reception from the editorial staff at the magazine Gunzo, which first published it, but fortunately many readers enjoyed it, reviews were positive, and it sold more than expected. In short, it was a smooth start for me as a professional, full-time writer. And I got the strong sense that I was moving in the right direction. In that way, A Wild Sheep Chase was my real starting point as a novelist.
* * *
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Time has passed. I am now far removed from being a rising young writer. I didn’t plan it, but as time passes you naturally age （not much you can do about it）。 And as time has passed, of course the kind of readers who read my books has also changed. But if I were asked what kind of people read my books now I’d have to say I have no idea. I really don’t.
I get a lot of letters from readers, and have the opportunities sometimes to actually meet some of them. But there’s nothing connecting their ages, sex, and places they live, so I really have no mental picture of the main type of people who read my books. I get the feeling the sales departments at the publishers don’t have a good grasp of it, either. My readers are about evenly split between men and women, and apart from the fact that many of my women readers are quite beautiful—this is no lie—there’s no characteristic that they all share. In the past it seemed one trend was that I sold well in urban areas but not so much outside, but now there doesn’t seem to be any clear regional difference.
I can imagine people might ask, “Are you saying you write your novels with no idea who your readers are?” Well, come to think of it, that’s absolutely right. I have no clear mental image of my readership.
As far as I know, most writers age along with their readers. What I mean is that a writer’s readers generally age in tandem with him. So in many cases the writer’s age and the readers’ ages overlap. Easy enough to understand. If that’s the case, then you write novels assuming that your readers are the same age as you. But for me that doesn’t seem to be true.
There are genres, of course, that target a predetermined age group or audience. Young-adult fiction, for instance, targets teenage boys and girls, romance fiction is written for women in their twenties and thirties, while historical novels and period fiction mainly targets middle-aged and older men. Again, easy to understand. But the novels I write seem a bit different.
Which takes us all the way around, back to where I began. Since I have no idea what kind of people read my novels, all I can do is write them so I myself enjoy them. Back to the starting point, you might say, which is kind of strange.
Since I became a writer, though, and started regularly publishing books, there is one lesson I’ve learned. Which is that no matter what or how I write, somebody’s going to say something bad about it. Say I write a really long novel, someone is bound to say, “It’s too long. Too verbose. Half that length would be fine.” If I write a short novel, some complain that it’s too “shallow,” too “hollow,” that I’m “just phoning it in.” If I write a novel similar to an earlier one, they say, “He’s just repeating himself. He’s stuck in a groove and it’s boring.” And others will say, “His earlier work was better. This new approach is just going round and round and getting nowhere.” Come to think of it, for the last twenty-five years there have been people who say, “Murakami’s out of step with the times. He’s finished.” It’s easy to criticize—all you have to do is say what you’re thinking, and you don’t have to take any responsibility for anything. For the person who’s being criticized, though, if he takes each and every criticism seriously he’ll never survive. So I’ve concluded, “Whatever. If people are going to say terrible things, then I’m just going to write what I want to write, in the way I want to write it.”