The thing that made me happiest when I published my books abroad was how many people （both readers and critics） said my books were really “original,” unlike anything by any other novelists. Whether they praised the works or not, the basic consensus was that “this writer’s style is totally unlike any other’s.” This assessment was quite different from that in Japan, and it made me very happy. To say that I was original, that I had my own special style—for me nothing could be higher praise.
But when my books started to sell abroad—or I should say when they found out my books were selling abroad—now people in Japan started saying, “Murakami’s books sell abroad because they’re written in easy-to-translate language, about things foreigners can easily understand.” When I heard this I was a bit disgusted. “Isn’t this the exact opposite of what you were saying before?” But I figured there was nothing I could do about it. All I could conclude was that there are a certain number of people in the world who check which way the wind’s blowing and make casual, completely unfounded remarks.
Novels well up naturally from within you, not something you can casually, strategically change. You can’t do market research or something and then intentionally rework the content based on the results. If you did, a work born from such a shallow base won’t find many readers. Such a work might find a readership for a time, but the work and the author won’t last long and will soon be forgotten. Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” can apply to novels, too. There are a lot of things in this world that are demonstrated over time that can only be demonstrated over time.
* * *
—
Let me get back on topic.
Knopf published hardcover editions of my novels, and its paperback imprint, Vintage Books, published the paperback editions; and over time, as a series of my books appeared, sales in the US gradually but steadily increased. When a new novel was published, it would land near the top of bestseller lists in newspapers in cities like Boston and San Francisco. A readership base developed in the US, just as it had in Japan—people who were sure to buy my new books whenever they appeared.
And after about 2000, my books, such as Kafka on the Shore （published in the US in 2005）， started to appear, though near the bottom, as national bestsellers on The New York Times bestseller list. Which meant that around the country, my novelistic style was becoming appreciated. 1Q84 （published in 2011） made number 2 on the bestseller list, while Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage （2014） debuted at number 1. But getting to this point took a long time. I wasn’t an overnight sensation. Instead, it felt like I finally established a foothold as one book steadily followed another. As this happened, sales of the paperback editions of my earlier books picked up, too. Which was definitely a favorable trend.
* * *
—
In the early stages, though, what stood out was less what was happening in the US than the increase in the number of copies of my books printed in Europe. Making New York the hub for overseas publishing seemed to have an influence on sales in Europe, a development I hadn’t foreseen. Truthfully, up till then I hadn’t realized that it was that important to have a hub based in New York. I’d simply made the US my temporary home, figuring that if the books are in English people will read them, and because I happened to live in the US.
Aside from Asia, the first place my books really took off was in Russia and Eastern Europe, and my impression is that this then spread into Western Europe. This was the middle of the 1990s. I was really surprised when I heard that about half of the top ten bestselling books in Russia at one time were mine.
This is just my personal impression, and I’d be hard pressed to give any proof or examples to back it up, but I get the feeling that if you compare sales of my books with a historical timeline there’s a tendency worldwide for my books to start being read widely after there is a major shake-up （or transformation） in the social foundations of a country. My books started selling rapidly in Russia and Eastern Europe after the seismic shift when communism collapsed. The heretofore seemingly solid, unshakable communist system collapsed overnight to be followed by a steadily surging soft chaos, a mix of hope and anxiety. In the midst of that shift in values, the stories I presented suddenly seemed tinged with a new, natural reality.
The wall separating East and West Berlin dramatically came down, and from around the time of German reunification, it seems like my books gradually started to be read more in Germany. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But it seems to me that a huge transformation in the foundations and structure of a society has a profound influence on people’s everyday sense of reality, and the desire for transformation is only to be expected. The reality of actual society and the reality of stories are inevitably connected at a fundamental level in people’s souls （or in their unconscious）。 In any age, when something major occurs and there’s a shift in social reality, there’s a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well.