Novelist As a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Over the past 35 years, Murakami’s unadorned style has underpinned what are often wildly inventive stories. The dynamic has transformed him from a cult novelist to a literary phenomenon in Japan, where he is a reluctant superstar, and internationally.

 For a relatively late starter – he was 30 when his first book was published – he has been incredibly productive, with 15 novels and several nonfiction collections under his belt thus far. Often, as in novels such as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), he draws on elements of fantasy, science fiction and traditional Japanese mythology, while also creating characters that appear as ordinary and unassuming as himself apart for their eccentricities and neuroses and the odd parallel worlds they find themselves suddenly inhabiting. The results have offended purists in his native Japan and abroad, and Murakami has been called, frequently negatively, a writer of magic realism. 

 Novelist As a Vocation is in many ways a very matter-of-fact delineation of the novelist’s calling. 

In it, Murakami lays bare his disciplined approach and personal rituals.