Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen (2022, Knopf) There’s something wonderfully freeing about turning a constraint into a boon-similarly, Murakami pushes back against the trope of “the suffering writer.” This is a good one to read if you need a reminder that the act of writing can, and maybe even should, be pleasurable. As an experiment, he pulled out an Olivetti and rewrote the opening of the novel (which he’d written in Japanese), in English, and was surprised to find that the limits of writing in a foreign language revealed a distinctive, unique rhythm when he translated the pages back into Japanese, he had figured out his tone.
One of my favorite sections is on how he developed his distinctive, pared-down style: after months of working on his first novel, Hear The Wind Sing, Murakami looked back on his draft and experienced the kind of disappointment so many have felt before and since-what he’d written didn’t meet his expectations, and instead felt boring and cold. The dispositions of novelists, Haruki Murakami writes in his new collection of essays, “tend to be idiosyncratic and their lifestyles and general behavior frankly odd.” In Novelist As A Vocation Murakami writes about how he came to inhabit this odd and idiosyncratic existence. As one might say but should never write: variety is the spice of life.
There’s also one on the art of creative nonfiction, and one that tackles everything that comes after the actual writing of the manuscript. (I have yet to find something more consistently inspiring than reading books so good they make me jealous.) Most are books to which I referred during the long, solitary slog of writing my own first novel, or ones I wish I’d had. They use published work as examples-Russian classics, contemporary poetry, slick crime thrillers-to nudge one into better reading and writing. But even the theoretically straight craft books here do much more than serve up packaged plot structures they’re as pleasurable to peruse as they are useful.
Most are memoirs and essay collections that sneak craft advice in through the back door: there’s literary criticism and personal narrative and close reading, and along the way theories of tone and narrative sink in as though by osmosis. The ones on this list are none of those things. There’s a book (or ten thousand) for that.
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