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I actively set out to develop a market in the US like this because all sorts of unpleasant things had happened back in Japan, and I felt that I couldn’t just sit around idly in Japan, content with the status quo. This was during Japan’s so-called bubble economy, and back then making a living as a writer wasn’t all that difficult. First of all, there’s a pretty large readership base （the population is over one hundred million, nearly all of whom read Japanese）。 On top of this the Japanese economy was booming globally, and business in the publishing industry was brisk. The stock market was booming, land prices were soaring, and there was a glut of money, and new magazines appeared one after the other and were able to get as much advertising as they wanted to. Writers had no trouble getting requests for work. At the time, I got any number of tempting offers. “Travel wherever you want in the world,” I was told once, “all expenses paid, and write any kind of travel essay you wish.” Once a person I didn’t even know made a tantalizing offer: “I just bought a chateau in France, so why don’t you live there for a year and enjoy writing a novel there?” （I politely declined both offers.） It’s hard to believe now that such a time ever existed. For novelists, even if their staple work, novels, didn’t sell that well, they could make a good living on all these “side dishes.”
But for me, on the cusp of forty （a critical time for a writer）， this wasn’t a welcome situation. There’s an expression, “The hearts of the people are chaotic,” and that was exactly the situation then. Society as a whole was uncertain, with people basically just concerned about money. It wasn’t the type of atmosphere where I could concentrate and take the time to work on a lengthy novel. I got the strong sense that before I knew it, I’d get completely spoiled. I wanted to put myself in an edgier environment and carve out a new frontier. And try out new possibilities for myself. That’s how I was thinking, and why, in the late 1980s, I left Japan and lived mainly abroad. This was after I had published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
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One other thing is that in Japan, my books—and often me personally—were sometimes severely criticized. My basic attitude is that I’m an imperfect person writing imperfect works, so it doesn’t matter what people say, and I haven’t worried much about others’ opinions; but at the time I was still young, and when I heard these criticisms they often struck me as totally unfair. Criticism even ventured into my private life, my family, with things written that were totally untrue, and some personal attacks as well. “Why do people have to say those kinds of things?” I wondered, finding it all more puzzling than unpleasant.
Looking back on it now, I get the feeling this was the Japanese literary world （writers, critics, editors, etc.） at the time venting its frustration. The result of the discontent and gloominess inside the literary industry toward the rapid decline in the presence and influence of the so-called mainstream （pure literature）。 In other words, a gradual paradigm shift was taking place. People in publishing, though, found this cultural meltdown lamentable and they couldn’t stand it. Many of them thought of my works, and my very existence, as “one of the causes that has hurt and destroyed the way things should be” and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, tried to drive me out. That’s the feeling I got. For my part, I felt that if the likes of me could damage them, then the problem lay more with them than with me.
“Haruki Murakami’s works are merely a rehash of foreign literature,” I often hear. “The only place they’ll be read is in Japan.” I never ever thought of what I write as “a rehash of foreign literature”; rather, it was an attempt to use the tools of Japanese to actively seek and search for new possibilities—so to tell the truth I saw these remarks as a challenge, that whether my works were read and appreciated abroad would be a kind of test. I’m not really the type of personality who hates to lose, but when I’m not convinced by something I do tend to pursue it until I am.
Also, if my work is centered more on foreign countries, then there will be less of a need to deal with the troublesome domestic literary industry. Then they can say what they want and I can just ignore it. This possibility was another reason I decided to focus on doing my best abroad. If you think about it, since criticism within Japan was the opportunity for me to start up activities abroad, you might conversely say I was lucky to be disparaged in that way. It’s the same in every world, but nothing’s more scary than a backhanded compliment.