Next come Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. They are both quite skilled translators, and both of them were quite interested in my work, too. I’ve known them both for a long time, since I was young. Each one approached me saying he’d like to translate my work or that he had already translated some. I felt very grateful for this. Meeting them, making a personal connection with them, made me feel like I’d made some invaluable allies. I myself am a translator （English into Japanese）， so I well know from personal experience the struggles and joys of being a translator. So I try to keep in close touch with them and am always happy to answer any translation questions that might crop up. I do my best to make things more convenient for them.
If you try it yourself, you’ll discover that translating is painstaking, arduous work. But it shouldn’t be a one-sided undertaking. There’s got to be an element of give-and-take involved. For a writer wanting to be read abroad, a translator is the most important partner of all. It’s critical to find a translator who understands you, because even with an outstanding translator, if he isn’t on the same wavelength as the text or the author, or can’t get used to the distinct qualities of the work, you can’t expect any good results. All you’ll get is both sides stressed out. And if the translator has no affection for the text he’s working on, it’ll just be an irksome “job” he has to slog through.
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There’s one more thing—maybe something I don’t need to actually put into words—but abroad, especially in the West, the individual is paramount. You can’t act the way you do in Japan, and just let somebody else handle things and tell them “Thanks for taking care of everything.” At each step of the way you have to take responsibility and make decisions yourself. This takes time and effort, as well as a certain linguistic ability. Literary agents, of course, will take care of all the basics, but they can be busy with other work, and to tell the truth they can’t get around to doing enough for unknown writers or ones who don’t sell well. So to a certain extent you have to take care of things yourself. I’m pretty well-known in Japan, but abroad at first I was an unknown. Except for people in publishing and a handful of readers, ordinary people in America didn’t know my name, and couldn’t even pronounce it right, often mispronouncing it as “Myurakami.” But that only motivated me all the more. I put everything I had into it, really wanting to see how much I could open up a market starting from a blank slate.
As I said earlier, if I’d stayed in Japan, where times were good, as the bestselling author （if I can put it that way myself） of Norwegian Wood, I would have had one request after another and could have, if I’d wanted to, made a lot of money. But I wanted to leave that environment and, as an （almost） unknown writer, see how far I could go as a newcomer in the market outside Japan. That became my personal goal. And looking back on it now, I think having that goal as a kind of slogan was a great thing. It’s important for those who deal with creativity to always want to push forward into new frontiers. Being content with where you are and staying in one place （“place” in a metaphoric sense） means your creative urge will atrophy and eventually be lost. I may have, at exactly the right time, found a worthy goal and a healthy sense of ambition.
Temperamentally I’m not good at being in front of other people, but abroad I have done interviews, and when I win an award I attend the ceremony and give a speech. I also have accepted a few opportunities to give readings and speeches. Not that many—even abroad I have the reputation of being a writer who doesn’t make many personal appearances—but I do what I can, pushing the limits of my personal boundaries and being more open to the outside. I’m not that good at speaking English, but I try to speak without an interpreter as much as I can and give my opinions in my own words. In Japan, though, with rare exceptions, I don’t do those things. And I get criticized for it, people saying I only provide this kind of service abroad, that I’m following a double standard.
I’m not saying this to justify myself, but the reason I try to appear in front of people more abroad is because I feel I have a duty as a Japanese writer that I need to fully accept. As I mentioned before, when I lived abroad during the bubble-economy period, I found it sad and dreary sometimes that Japanese were seen as “faceless.” And the more I experienced that, I began to think that—for the many Japanese living abroad, and for myself, too—I needed to do my part to change that a little. I’m not a particularly patriotic type （I see myself as having more cosmopolitan tendencies）， but like it or not, living abroad I became more conscious of myself as a Japanese writer. Others around me saw me this way, and I saw myself that way, too. And without knowing it, I developed a sense of fellowship with my countrymen. If you think about it, it’s kind of strange. I escape from the land of Japan, from the rigid framework of its society, and live abroad as an expatriate, only to find myself compelled to return to a relationship with that very land.