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![]() Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. ![]() If I was going to do something unorthodox, why not go all the way? Writing in a foreign language taught me to express thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature”. To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was ditch my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. While it was easy to talk about setting down one’s impressions freely, though, actually doing it wasn’t that simple. “Why not forget all those prescriptive ideas about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?” “Give up trying to create something sophisticated,” I told myself. Maybe it had been a mistake to try to write something “novelistic” in the first place. It was a big mistake to assume that a guy like me who had never written anything in his life could spin out something brilliant right off the bat. In retrospect, it was only natural that I was unable to produce a good novel. “Good grief,” I moaned, “this is hopeless.” What I had written seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, yet it was rather boring and, as a whole, left me cold. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in Japanese.įor several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it, but when I read through the result I was far from impressed. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff – my favourites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks – I had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. But the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. I ran a jazz cafe, and I spent my 20s labouring from morning to night to pay off debts. ![]() Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. M y first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979, is fewer than 200 pages long.
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