One of a Kind

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami.  Knopf.  224 pp.  $22.99.  ***

Haruki Murakami is a novelist of indescribable genius.  I mean that literally: I’ve read five of his novels, including the famous 1Q84, and can’t say what any of them was about (I don’t even know how to verbalize that title).  His novels are like going down a rabbit hole; you enter a whole world, which somehow has its own logic, and is entirely mesmerizing, but when you come out you don’t know where you were or how to talk about it.  The only thing you can say to another reader is, you gotta read this book.  You can’t say why.

He seems to have the same problem explaining himself as I have explaining him.  He has now written a book about being a novelist, and as the expression goes, it’s been much anticipated.  Was he actually going to tell us how he does this thing?  How could he?  He even has a chapter on originality—this, from one of the most original writes I’ve ever read—and doesn’t have much to say.  It’s like trying to describe your own smell.  You don’t really smell it.

The story of how he became a novelist is famous.  He had a small jazz club—he’s an enthusiast for music—and was actually making a success of it; I believe it had been going for ten years.  One day he went to see a ballgame at the local ballpark, grabbed a beer, and was sitting in the stands when some guy came up and hit a double.  At the crack of the bat, Murakami—who had apparently never given a literary career a thought—realized that he could write a novel.  The book wasn’t about baseball, and had nothing to do with that guy getting a hit.  But he went back to his place, got some paper, and started writing.  That book won a major prize.  Eighteen books later (plus four books of nonfiction) he’s still at it.

I honestly can’t recommend this book for young writers, unless they just want to dream about success.  There are lots of books telling you how to be a writer (mostly by people who are not writers themselves.  They tell other people how to be writers), and some of them are good.  Annie Lamott’s is, and Stephen King’s is great, with lots of fascinating tips and opinions.  But this book, by a far greater writer, is rather dull.  Murakami talks mostly about how he has continued through the years, and how he has succeeded.  He seems as surprised as anyone.

One thing that bothered me slightly—though this may be just personal—is how he talks about writing as a way to make a living.  It is that for only a very few people, the aforementioned Stephen King, James Patterson, people like that.  The fact that a completely serious and literary novelist like Murakami has made a living is marvelous, but he’s one in a million.  Most writers I know found another way to make a living.  Being a novelist is a vocation for them in a deeper sense, more like a spiritual calling.  That may be true for Murakami too.  But he keeps referring to it as a way to make a buck.

At some point he gave up his jazz club and began living solely as a writer.  When he did that, he created a lifestyle that is almost monastic, and completely devoted to his work: I thought his chapter on that was the most interesting in the book.  He works for five or six hours in the morning.  When he has spare time he relaxes and reads for pleasure, maybe also listens to music.  But he also, every day, to balance out the sedentary time, exercises for an hour.  He’s a serious runner, and has run marathons; he’s even written a book on the subject (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir), which, alas, I found similarly dull to this one.  I didn’t even finish it (maybe I should take another look).  But his emphasis on writing as a physical process, which requires some kind of physical training, seems right on to me.  Years ago I realized that if I didn’t have a way to decompress from a day of writing, I’d do what writers from my father’s generation did (Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hammett; the list goes on and on).  They hit the bottle at the end of the day.  Sometimes they didn’t wait for the day to end.  Murakami’s way is much healthier.  But it takes into account the fact that writing is a physical occupation.  It is your feelings, not your thoughts, that are most important in writing.  And they’re in your body, not your mind.

I make it sound as if I didn’t enjoy this book, and that isn’t quite true.  It had all the thrill of a good magazine article, and I gave it about that much attention.  My opinion may be influenced by envy, because I would love to have had the career this man has had.  But this is nothing like the captivating experience of reading one of his novels.  They take you another level.  This book is down here with us mortals.