This may anger some people. I can hear them squawking, “What the hell do you know about literature?” I’m just trying to tell it like it really is. People can theorize all they want, but when you get right down to it, the novel’s form is extremely broad. Indeed, that very breadth is what helps to generate its amazing, down-to-earth vitality. From where I stand, the statement “Anyone can write a novel” is not slander, but praise.

  In short, the world of the novelist is like a professional wrestling ring that welcomes anyone who feels like taking a crack at it. The gap between the ropes is big enough to pass through, and a step is provided to make your entrance easier. The ring is spacious. No security men block your way, and the referee doesn’t bark at you to leave. The wrestlers who are already there—the established novelists, in other words—are at the very least resigned to your presence: “No worries—come on up and take your best shot” is their attitude. The ring is—how shall I put this?—an airy, easy, accommodating, altogether laid-back environment.

  While entering the ring may be easy, however, remaining there for long is hard. We novelists are of course aware of this. It’s not that difficult to write a novel, maybe even two. But it’s another thing altogether to keep producing, to live off one’s writing, to survive. That’s a Herculean task. It’s fair to say not many are up to it. To accomplish it, one needs, well, a special something. Talent is important, of course, and backbone. Like so many things in life, luck and fate play a big role, too. But there is something else that is needed, a kind of qualification. Some have it and some don’t. Some possess it from birth while others struggle mightily to acquire it.

  Not very much is known about this qualification—indeed, it is seldom addressed in public. The reason, for the most part, is that it is virtually impossible to visualize or put into words. Yet novelists are keenly aware of its importance and of how necessary it is to sustain their craft—they can feel it in their bones.

  I think this is why novelists tend to be so generous to outsiders who step up through the ropes to make their novelistic debuts. “Come on in,” some will say, while others seem to take no notice of the new kid in the ring. When the newcomer is unceremoniously tossed out or steps down voluntarily (most will fall into one of these two categories), the old-timers will say “Too bad, kid,” or “Take care of yourself.” If someone manages to stick it out for the long term, on the other hand, those novelists gain well-earned respect. This respect will be given rightly and properly (or so I would like to believe).

  Another reason novelists can be so magnanimous is that they understand literary business is not a zero-sum game. In other words, the fact that a new writer has appeared in the ring almost never means someone already there will have to step down. On the surface, at least, that kind of thing doesn’t happen. In that sense, the world of writers and the world of professional athletes are diametrically opposed. In pro sports, when a rookie makes the team, an old-timer or another new player who has failed to impress is either given their walking papers or moved to the far end of the bench. No parallel exists in the literary world. In the same vein, when a new novel sells a hundred thousand copies, that total isn’t subtracted from the total sales of other works. To the contrary, a runaway bestseller by a new writer can give the whole publishing industry a boost.

  Nevertheless, if one takes the long view, a fitting kind of natural selection is in operation. The ring may be spacious, but there still appears to be an optimal number of writers inside it. Such, at least, is my impression.

  * * *

  —

  I have been getting by one way or another as a professional novelist for over thirty-five years, as of 2015, when I wrote this. In short, I have been in the ring all that time—“living by the pen,” to use the old term. This, I guess, can be regarded as a real accomplishment in the narrow sense of the word.

  I have seen the debuts of a great many new writers during that time. Many have been praised to the skies for their works. They have been toasted by the critics, awarded various literary prizes, talked about by the public, and have sold lots of books. Bright hopes have been held out for their futures. In other words, they have stepped up into the ring bathed in the spotlights, their theme music rising around them.

  Yet how many of those budding writers who debuted twenty or thirty years ago are active as novelists today? Not many. Only a very few, to be more precise. The rest have quietly slipped from the ring. In many, perhaps the majority of, cases, they have gravitated to other fields, having grown tired of novel writing; or perhaps they simply found it too much trouble. And those first novels that received so much attention? One would probably have a hard time locating them in bookstores today. Although the potential number of novelists may be limitless, the amount of shelf space is most certainly finite!

  The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels. Of course some degree of intelligence and education and overall knowledge is necessary to turn one out. I myself am not entirely lacking in those areas. At least I think so. Probably. But if someone were to ask me point-blank “Do you really think you’re smart enough?” I’d have a hard time sounding confident.

  In my considered opinion, anyone with a quick mind or an inordinately rich store of knowledge is unlikely to become a novelist. That is because the writing of a novel, or the telling of a story, is an activity that takes place at a slow pace—in low gear, so to speak. Faster than walking, let’s say, but slower than riding a bicycle. The basic speed of a person’s mental processes may make it possible to work at that rate, or it may not.

  For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning. That creates a dynamic the novelist can use as a kind of lever in the fashioning of his narrative. This is quite a roundabout way to do things, and it takes a great deal of time.

  Someone whose message is clearly formed has no need to go through the many steps it would take to transpose that message into a story. All he has to do is put it directly into words—it’s much faster and can be easily communicated to an audience. A message or concept that might take six months to turn into a novel can thus be fully developed in a mere three days. Or in ten minutes, if the writer has a microphone and can spit it out as it comes to him. Quick thinkers are capable of that kind of thing. The listener will slap his knee and marvel, “Why didn’t I think of that?!” In the final analysis, that’s what being smart is really all about.

  In the same vein, it is unnecessary for someone with a wealth of knowledge to drag out a fuzzy, dubious container like the novel for his purposes. No need for him to set up an imaginary time and place from scratch. All he has to do is rationally organize and then put into words the information he has on hand to wow his audience.

  It is for these reasons, I think, that so many critics have trouble understanding—or, if they can understand at all, effectively verbalizing or theorizing that understanding—a certain type of novel or story. Such critics are generally smarter than the novelists whose works they analyze, which means their brains move at a more rapid speed. They may not be able to adjust to the slower vehicle that is the novel. As a result, they “translate” the pace of the text into the faster pace that is natural to them and then construct their critique in line with their version. This approach fits certain texts, but not all. It may work well in some cases but fail in others. It is especially problematic when the text under discussion is not just “slow” but operates at multiple levels with significant complexity. In such cases, their so-called translation twists and distorts the original.

  At any rate, I have witnessed a great many intelligent and quick-minded people—many hailing from fields other than literature—head off to new destinations after writing a novel or two. In a great many cases, their novels were brilliant and well written. A few of them have even broken new ground. Yet a scant few of those authors have remained in the ring. In fact, it seems to me that they got a taste of the novelist’s vocation and then made a quick exit.

  Another reason why so few stick it out is that someone with a fair amount of literary talent may have a single novel in them that they can roll out fairly easily, but no more. Or someone who is highly intelligent fails to find the payoff they anticipated. Such writers, after turning out one or two novels, may say, “Okay, now I get it,” shrug their shoulders, and move on to something that will use their time and energy more efficiently.

  I understand these feelings. Novel writing is indeed a most inefficient undertaking, consisting of repeating “for instance” over and over. Say there is a personal theme you wish to develop. So you transpose it into a different context. “For instance, it could be like this,” you say. That transposition or paraphrase, however, is not complete: it has parts that are unclear and fuzzy. So you start a new section that basically says, “Let me give you another ‘for instance.’ ” It can go on and on like that, a chain of paraphrased “for instances” that never ends. It’s like one of those Russian dolls that you open again and again, always to find still another, smaller doll inside. Could there be more circuitous, inefficient work than this? If a theme could be voiced clearly and rationally from the outset, then there would be no need for this incessant round of “for instances.” An extreme way of putting it is that novelists might be defined as a breed who feel the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary.

  Yet the novelist will claim that truth and reality are entrenched in precisely such unnecessary, roundabout places. I know it may sound pretentious, but it is in this belief that the novelist plies his craft. Thus it is natural that we find, on the one hand, people who believe that there is no need for novels and, on the other, those who maintain that novels are absolutely necessary. It all depends on the time span you adopt and the type of framework through which you view things. More precisely, our world is constructed in a multilayered way, so that the realm of the roundabout and the inefficient is in fact the flip side of that which is clever and efficient. If one or the other is missing (or if one is dominated by the other), then the world is distorted as a result.

  * * *

  —

  Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t help thinking that novelists share something in common with those who spend a year or more assembling miniature boats in bottles with long tweezers. I couldn’t possibly do that—my fingertips aren’t that dexterous—but on some essential level what I do and what they do seem quite similar. We spend our time behind closed doors doing the most intricate type of operations, day after day after day. The process is virtually endless. If you aren’t built for that sort of work and can’t shrug off all that it entails, there’s no way you’ll keep it up over the long haul.

  I remember reading a book when I was a boy about two men who travel to learn what there is to know about Mount Fuji. Neither of them has ever seen Fuji before. The smarter of the two men sizes up the mountain from several vantage points at the foot of its slopes. Then he says, “So this is the famous Fuji-san. Now I see what makes it so special,” and heads back home, satisfied. His way is efficient. And fast. The less intelligent man can’t figure it out like that, so he stays behind to climb the mountain all the way to its summit. This takes a lot of time and effort. By the end he has used up all his strength and is completely pooped. “So that’s Mount Fuji, huh?” he thinks. Finally, he has understood it, or perhaps grasped its essence at a less conscious level.

  Novelists (at least most of them) tend to be more like the second man—in other words, the stupider guy. They are the type who has to climb to the top to understand Mount Fuji. Or perhaps it is in their nature to climb the mountain over and over without ever figuring it out; or, again, to find that the more times they climb it, the less they understand. So much for efficiency! Whichever the case, it’s the sort of thing a smart person could never stand doing.

  This is why a novelist is not alarmed when someone from another field writes a critically and publicly acclaimed novel, even if it goes on to become a bestseller. They do not feel threatened. Or (I think) angry. They know that the chances are small that such a writer will go on to a long career. Smart people work at their own special pace, intellectuals at theirs and scholars at theirs. None of these, however, is a pace suited to writing novels over the long term.

  Of course there are smart people among the ranks of established authors. Some others are highly intelligent. That intelligence, however, is more than the normal kind—it is also a novelistic intelligence. Even in such cases, my experience has indicated that there is a limit—in simple terms, a novelist’s best-before date, which, in my estimation, is about ten years—to how far that can take you. After that point, intelligence has to be replaced by some larger, more enduring gift. Put another way, the razor’s edge must give way to the hatchet’s edge, which in turn must be superseded by the axe’s edge. Any novelist who is able to navigate those stages successfully is elevated—in all likelihood becoming a literary figure whose work transcends the times. Those who can’t make these adjustments, however, tend to see their stars fade or disappear altogether. Or they will find a spot to settle down, where they can live a more comfortable and leisurely life in a place amenable to smart people.

  A novelist, however, sees the idea of “a leisurely life” as practically synonymous with “the waning of one’s creativity.” For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die.

  * * *

  —

  This is why I hold all those who persist in writing novels over many years without getting fed up—in other words, my colleagues—in such high esteem. Of course my personal likes and dislikes cause me to prefer some of their works over others. Yet the fact that they have been able to sustain the energy to survive for decades as professional novelists, garnering a solid group of readers along the way, tells me that they must somehow be endowed with a core of steel. An intrinsic, internal drive compelling them to write. A tenacious, persevering temperament that equips them to work long and lonely hours. It is my belief that these are the qualifications required of a professional novelist.

  It’s not difficult to write a single novel. Even a very good novel, depending on who you are. It isn’t easy to pull off, but it’s not impossible. What’s really hard is to keep on writing novels year after year. That’s not something just anyone can do. As I have pointed out, it requires a special set of qualifications. Qualifications that may be based on something quite different than “talent.”

  So how do you discover if you have what it takes to be a novelist? There is only one answer: you have to jump in the water and see if you sink or swim. I know this sounds blunt, but when you get right down to it, I guess that’s the way life is. You can live wisely and well without writing a novel—in fact, it may be easier that way. Those who end up writing a novel do so because they have to. And then they continue. As a fellow novelist, I embrace them with open arms.

  Welcome to the ring!

  When I Became a Novelist

  When I made my literary debut by winning the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, I was thirty years old, with a fair amount of life experience under my belt. The nature of that experience, however, diverged somewhat from the norm. In those days, most guys graduated from college, found work, and then, when things leveled off, got married. That’s what I expected to do as well. Or at least that’s what I figured would happen. It was the way of the world, after all. I had no intention to contravene (for better or for worse) what seemed to be the dictates of common sense. Yet as things turned out, I got married first, found work, and then, after some time passed, finally got around to completing my degree. In other words, I followed the exact opposite of the prescribed order. It was just the way things happened—our futures, it seems, don’t always unfold in the ways that we expect.

  At any rate, having started out by getting married (it’s a very long story, so I won’t go into details), and hating the prospect of working for a company (those reasons would also take a long time to explain, so I’ll omit them, too), I decided that I wanted to open a jazz café, a place that served coffee, drinks, and some food. I was totally absorbed by jazz back then (I still listen to it quite a bit), so I was drawn to the idea of listening to the music I loved from morning to night. Marrying while still in school, however, meant that we had no money. So for the next three years, my wife and I took whatever work we could find to raise enough capital. We also borrowed money from everyone we could think of. In the end, we had a sufficient amount to open a café near the south exit of Kokubunji Station in western Tokyo. The year was 1974.

  Fortunately for us, it was a time when, unlike today, young people could still start small businesses without a huge pile of money. Many of us detested corporations and the idea of selling out to “the system,” which meant that enterprises like ours were opening right and left: coffee shops, restaurants, variety stores, bookstores. A number were close by, all run by people about our age. There were also young radicals, wannabe members of the student movement, hanging around the neighborhood. All over the world, you could still find small niches in which to live. If you could locate one you could fit into, you could get by somehow. Things could get wild at times, but it was an interesting era.