Novelist As a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Books by writers about how they work almost always turn into advice. I understand that: the audience for work about how novels get written is mostly people who desperately want to write novels themselves.

I'm not one of them, though - I sort-of was, thirty-some years ago, but working in the bookmines has a tendency to clear that condition right up. As my boss used to say, why spend a year writing a novel when buying one only costs a few bucks?

Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of linked essays - the first few appeared as a series in the Japanese magazine Monkey Business; then he finished up the set so this book could be published in Japan in 2015; the English-language edition, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, took another seven years to emerge - all about his life and work as a novelist, pitched explicitly to an audience of people who also want to write novels.

Murakami is refreshingly down-to-earth about his work: he sees writing as a long hard process, made up of many days all mostly the same, but he enjoys doing it and enjoys the end product. (Many writers hate one or the other or both.) He also focuses on the physical aspect of writing more than most writers-about-writing do; he's a marathoner, and clearly sees the processes of training for and running a marathon and of writing a long novel as roughly parallel. (See What I Talk About When I Talk About Running for the other side of the same coin, about a decade before.) So there's a lot about being healthy and strong - he doesn't say "mens sana in corpore sano" but he's very much in that tradition.

Murakami is Japanese, of course, so his references are the literary and publishing culture of that nation, which are (as far as I can tell) pretty different from what I'm used to in the US. The clubbiness and fitting-into-little-boxes aspects of Japanese culture and business are clearly dominant in that publishing milieu, and several of the essays see Murakami comment on or complain (mildly; he's had a good successful career and doesn't seem to be the type to rant anyway) on aspects of that world, particularly the literary prizes that affected his early career.

But, generally, this is the book to answer the questions "How does Haruki Murakami write his novels?" and "How does he think about his work, and what's in his mind about writing?" It is somewhat more pitched as advice-to-newcomers than I personally would prefer, but that's the subgenre and I should have expected it. It's all in quite Murakamian prose, in his non-fiction mode, pleasant and conversational and slightly quirky.