New York Times July 8, 2007
Essay
Jazz Messenger
By HARUKI MURAKAMI （村上春樹）
I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not
until I turned 29. This is absolutely true.
I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply
into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if
I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had
the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like
Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write
anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at
an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would
continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for
a way to make a living.
The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my
money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after
leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We
served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a
few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young
musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven
years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz
from morning to night.
I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey
and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I
got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really
listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The
band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on
trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with
his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest
units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I
was hooked.
A year ago in Boston I had dinner with the Panamanian jazz pianist
Danilo Perez, and when I told him this story, he pulled out his
cellphone and asked me, Would you like to talk to Wayne, Haruki?”
"Of course", I said, practically at a loss for words. He called
Wayne Shorter in Florida and handed me the phone. Basically what I
said to him was that I had never heard such amazing music before or
since. Life is so strange, you never know what's going to happen.
Here I was, 42 years later, writing novels, living in Boston and
talking to Wayne Shorter on a cellphone. I never could have imagined
it.
When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling
that I wanted to write a novel - that I could do it. I couldn't
write anything that measured up to Dostoyevsky or Balzac, of course,
but I told myself it didn't matter. I didn't have to become a
literary giant. Still, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel
or what to write about. I had absolutely no experience, after all,
and no ready-made style at my disposal. I didn't know anyone who
could teach me how to do it, or even friends I could talk with about
literature. My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would
be if I could write like playing an instrument.
I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to
pick out a simple melody, but I didn't have the kind of technique it
takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I
did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling
around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible
for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got
started.
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your
style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't
keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music
and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody - which, in literature,
means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm.
If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’
t ask for anything more. Next is harmony - the internal mental
sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free
improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling
out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.
Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you
experience upon completing a work - upon ending your performance”
and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and
meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of
elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous
culmination that can be achieved in no other way.
Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from
music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so
obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now,
almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing
from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’
s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald's
elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual
self-renewal in Miles Davis's music as a literary model.
One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once,
when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound
out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: It can't
be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are
there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound
different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself,
"It's true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new
meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words." I find
the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still
lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate
them.
Haruki Murakami's most recent book is a novel, After Dark. This
essay was translated by Jay Rubin.
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