I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.
I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.
I used to run a full marathon in three hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Not any more.
I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.
I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.
In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.
I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.
For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.
I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.
In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I’m a successful writer.
When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
Everything just blows me away.
Lots of different ways to live and lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn’t make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.
Of what value is a civilization that can’t toast a piece of bread as ordered?