Fabled Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami wrote his first novel at thirty years old while running a failing jazz bar in western Tokyo.

One afternoon, Murakami was out for a weekend stroll when on a whim, he decided to catch a baseball game.

He was sipping an ice cold beer in the stands and licking his wounds from the tough week of labor at the bar, when the satisfying crack of a baseball bat rang out across the field, rattling his subconscious.

Suddenly, a thought entered Murakami’s mind: I think I can write a novel.

Murakami then left the baseball game, took a trip to Kinokuniya bookstore and picked up a Sailor fountain pen and some writing paper.

In the months that followed, Murakami would return home from his shift at the bar and hole up at his kitchen table in the wee hours of the morning and write.

In Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami confesses that the first draft of his first novel was junk that read like wannabe literature. So, he ditched his manuscript, pulled out his Olivetti typewriter and started rewriting the novel in his second language: English.

“

I could only write in short, simple sentences. Which mean that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around in my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.

”

Today, the 34 novels that Murakami has written are lauded for their simple use of language, a style the novelist attributes to this very moment where he attempted to say what he was trying to say in, at what the time was, broken English.

While Murakami writes all of his novels in Japanese, his Japanese readers have said that his novels are so simple to read that they almost feel translated.

By Cole Schafer.

P.S. If this newsletter left you feeling inspired, do me a huge favor and tell one person to subscribe.