Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist

A Wild Sheep Chase

It took me close to three years to finish it. I would get distracted, put it down, and pick it up again much later, months later. The surrealness of the story reminds me a lot of other Japanese media that I never really fully understand. I chalked it up to the usual "the Japanese are truly mad" maxim, but after finishing the book, I suppose my opinion changed a little.

The book is almost exclusively inspired by Western stories, music, and tropes. It has shades of Alice in Wonderland, cyberpunk, casual sexual themes, jazz and rock and roll. What makes the book look so foreign to me is that those stories are getting retold all mish-mashed together in a dream-like state with a dash of Japanese tropes.

In the end I enjoyed it, but I don't think I really understood it, and I don't think I can explain why I enjoyed it. Can anyone explain it to me?

I haven't read all of Ryu's novels so I cannot comment on all of his work. I have tried to read several of Murakami's novels and stopped half way because I found it way too boring. I guess it's just not for me. I can't fathom why he is so popular, honestly.

While not as completely out-of-the-blue, I also had a similarly sudden realization that I wanted to become a computer scientist.

I was in my third year of living in Japan at the time, teaching English in a small, conservative town in which I felt isolated and out of place (despite having become mostly fluent with the language).

My best friend there had left, ironically inspired by me (or so he had claimed) to leave his country and pursue his dreams abroad, in Australia. I had very little left to offer me in Japan, but I had no idea what else to do; my undergrad in physics had left me with an impressive degree but no marketable skills, certainly none that I still possessed 5 years later.

I was in a grocery store in Hamamatsu, listening to one of my favorite podcasts called Skeptically Speaking (now called Science for the People). The episode[0] had a guest named Mark Stevenson, who had written a book exploring the future of various areas of science. At one point he talked about the work of Hod Lipson at Cornell, who had written a program that could investigate data and guess physical equations, and who had also created a robot that taught itself how to walk. I remember him saying that in AI, it's the hard things that are easy, and the easy hard. I remember being so fascinated by this research that I thought, how cool would it be to be involved in this kind of thing? And it was in that moment I decided quite suddenly to become a computer scientist.

I went to a dollar store and bought a notebook, went home and immediately went to MIT's opencourseware site and started the watching the lectures of their introductory CS course. Seven months later, I was back in America at grad school, and a year after that I was a full time software developer.

I still wonder what might have happened if I hadn't happened to listen to that podcast.

[0]: http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/an-optimists-tour...

These are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign language as a way of discovering his own voice is fascinating, but it also must have been very difficult.

So a better title might be: "How I was motivated to be dedicated enough to become a novelist." And this is actually a more interesting story, at least for other artists, because the thing everyone faces at the outset is failure and lack of belief in our own work. We have to have something to keep us going. He had that single moment at a baseball game. Others have other things, but having a weird little talisman like that can be very useful in solving the ongoing problem of motivation.

In my own life, at the age of 13 I ate at a Chinese restaurant for the first time (on a school trip to the 'big city' a couple of hours distant from the town I grew up in) and got a fortune cookie that read, in its entirety, "An ambition far beyond your reach".

I've achieved a good deal in the forty years since then, and at times when the going has been particularly tough I've thought back to that and told myself, "Yeah, well, you were told what to expect and went ahead anyway. So don't complain, just get back to work."

Would I have accomplished as much without being able to do that? Maybe, maybe not. But being able to do it made the journey easier at times. It's a silly thing--I don't believe in fate or fortunes--but sometimes silly things can be made to work for us.

So I could say that was "the moment I became X", where X is any major achievement since, but "One weird trick to stay motivated and focused on your goals" would be at least as accurate.