Derek Hartfield is an imaginary American writer who appears in Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing. (Chapters 1, 32 and 40, Afterword) So he isn’t a real person. And he doesn’t exist in reality.
The character model of him might be Kurt Vonnegut or Robert E. Howard.
Derek Hartfield was born in 1909, a small town, Ohio. After graduated a high school, he had been working at the post office in his hometown for a while, then he became a writer.
He was an unfortunate writer. He sold his fifth short novel to Weird Tales for twenty dollars in 1930. The next year, he wrote and wrote 70,000 words per month, in the following year, it gained 100,000 words, it was 150,000 words in the year before he passed away. There’s the legend that he might change and buy again a Remington typewriter every six months.
His writing career is only eight years and two months. Most of his works are adventure stories or horror stories. His biggest hit series is Waldo, boy adventure of a mixture of both of them. Other his works are What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? (1936), the semi-autobiographical novel One and a Half Times Around the Rainbow (1937) a sci-fi short story The Martian Wells and so on.
A man of the same age as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and He was few writers which can use words as a weapon equal to them. Yet his his text is difficult to read, the story is random and the theme is immature. But he could never grasp exactly what it was he was fighting against, so his life and career were barren and miserable.
On a clear Sunday morning, in June 1938, the year his mother had passed away, he jumped from the Empire State Building holding a portrait of Hitler and put up an umbrella.
When the summer vacation of the third grade of junior high, the narrator was given a book of Derek Hartfield by his uncle. And the narrator bought some paperbacks by Hartfield which a foreign crewman sold, each of them was priced 50 Japanese yen, at a second-hand book store in Kobe, when he was a high school student.
Descriptions about Hartfield represented Murakami’s philosophy of writing and policy of life. On Novelist as a Profession, Murakami said that when he wrote Hear the Wind Sing, he thought “I must write from I have nothing to write”. (p. 134)
A work of Hartfield was titled What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, which means Murakami’s antipathy to the Japanese artistic and authoritarian literary scene. He thought was “It’s fine it’s only feeling fun to write for me.” (p. 270)
Hartfield’s writing is the ideal model which deconstructs the grand narrative and significance of the Japanese pure literature. The narrator learned by the style of. Hartfield, as writing is the act of verifying distances among things, we need a measuring stick, not sensitivity.
Only in the Japanese edition, there’s the afterword, “Hartfield, again… (as an afterword)” as a fake episode. The content is the narrator or Murakami himself visited a small and shabby graveyard of Derek Hartfield. Including the effect of the afterword, Japanese readers had been believed Hartfield was a real person. When the novel was published, the librarians were confused by inquiries from the readers who believed he really existed.
Many novelists have no harmonious personality and appropriate view.
I think a novel as such, anyone who wants to write it can write it. Who can write text, has a ball pointed-pen and a note and own certain ability makes a story, can write a novel anyway without a specialist training. Novel is a form of expression that has a broad entrance. But to continue to write good novels and to be a novelist is difficult.
To write a novel is not suitable for smart persons. To tell a story does at a slow pace. It is not smart work and is a succession of paraphrases as “for example” to express a personal theme. I think there’s the truth of the novel in this roundabout process.
I respect novelists who continue to write novels, they own core, will, endurance and requirement as a professional novelist.
2. When I Became A Novelist
Before I became a novelist, I ran a jazz café (The Japanese unique style café, plays jazz records.) from I was a university student. It was hard and tough work and life, but I spent the time happily. At end of my twenties, through this hard life, my mind reached a "settled and open space".
A clear spring afternoon, the 1978 opening day of the Central League, at the Meiji Jingu Stadium, I lay down on the outfield lawn bleachers and watched the game. When the first batter of the Yakult Swallows, Dave Hilton hit a fine double, at the moment, an epiphany fell into me, then he realized “That’s it, maybe, I can write a novel !”.
Anyway, I wrote the first manuscript of my debut novel Hear the Wind Sing as I like, but I didn’t satisfy it. So, I translated it to English and I translated the English translation to Japanese again. Then I got a neutral and flexible style that has my own natural voice.
The manuscript was adopted and was awarded a prize, so I became a novelist unexpectedly.
3. On Literature Prizes
I've kept a distance from the Japanese literary circles. Because I was an ordinary man, so I don’t know much about the circles and literature prizes. I think true writers treasure a response of which they create meaningful things and exist of readers understand the means. And I have no qualification to be a member of a literature prize committee, because I’m a too egocentric person, and to continue to write novels I must be egocentric.
4. On Originality
I think conditions that we can mention a creator is original are below. 1. A creator owns his original style apparently different from others. 2. And the creator can do version up the style by own energy. 3. The style must become a standard and it will be taken in people criterion of judgment.
"To reduce anything from yourself" is necessary work to be original. We get and have lots of content and information in the process of life. So we throw away wasteful things and simplify a brain, then we can act freely. I think the most important question to be original is “are you happy to do it like that ?”. If my originality maybe exists, it’s caused by my free and natural sense. I’ve written novels by my own voluntary natural and free will of I want to only write a novel.
5. Well, What Should I Write?
Young people who want to be a writer should read many novels first. And they should watch people, scenes and things. Then stock them as “materials” in their brain.
I had been felt I have no things to write, because I was a usual boy who didn't experience particular experiences, all the same, the fact becomes a weapon, means I can write freely anything by the magic of combination like the “E. T. system“ when I start to write a novel once.
6. Taking Side with Time: To Write Long a Novel
I think I'm a long novel writer basically. To a long novel as "a total story owns a possibility may reform myself“, I need a vast “space” I can use freely and unlimitedly. When I write a long novel I make rules and a routine, such as I do the work of long novel only and I write 4000 characters every day without fail like a factory.
After I finish writing the first draft anyway, I rest for a week, and I rewrite and boldly edit it for a month to two months. And I redo the same process. After the rest of a week, I rewrite the second draft, it is an accumulation of detailed edits, additions and adjustments of the consistency of the story, descriptions of sceneries and tones of talkings. Then I put the manuscript in my drawer for half a year to one year, and I rewrite and finish it.
To rewrite a novel or the attitude is important for novelists, I think. I like very much to rewrite a manuscript many times. I can say I prefer to rewrite rather than write the first draft.
7. An Extremely Personal and Physical Activity
To write a long novel is extremely lonely and personal work. I shut myself up in my studio and write for five or six hours every day, this daily routine goes on one to three years. To keep it up, I need physical strength and a sturdy body, then they gain agility of thinking and flexibility of spirit. Spirit or brain is a part of the physical body equally.
To write a novel or to tell a grand story is to go down the bottom of one's darkness of mind by oneself, bring back and face with it. The act is dangerous, I need a certain physical strength. People want a novelist to the “antisocial characteristic”, but I think a novelist shouldn’t express his chaos in his private life. I spend a usual and healthy life for I write a novel.
8. About School
I didn't like schools and their education. The study of schools was a bore, and I thought to read many novels, to intently listen to music and to go with a girl are important person studies.
Since I was a high school student, I've red many English paperbacks, so I can read English books through anyway. But my results of English tests are not well, also students who got high marks in English should have no ability to read an English book through. So I understand the English education in Japanese high schools don’t do for students to learn living actual English, it does for to gain the score of university entrance exams exclusively.
The aim of the Japanese education system is to make obedient people. It influences the whole Japanese social system such as companies and government officials. Its rigidness of numerical system, and efficiency and utilitarianism like mechanical memorizing, cause serious losses in various fields.
I think imagination is very important in any period. The thing that is on the opposite side of imagination is efficiency. I only wish for schools to “don’t suppress the imagination of a child already own his imagination”.
9. What Characters That I Should Present?
I hardly use a real person as a model of a character. Characters are automatically created during I write a novel. To describe characters, you must watch the appearances and sayings of people and keep them in mind.
I think I can become anyone by writing a novel, also a novelist is partly created and modified by his novel.
10 Who is I Write for?
(…)
11 Going Abroad: The New Frontier
(…)
12 The Place a Story Is in: Memories of Dr. Hayao Kawai
(…)
Afterword
5 or 6 years ago I thought of that I have to write down a text about writing a novel. The manuscripts of this book are written on the assumption for a lecture meeting. (But I didn’t speak the content of this book.) This book would be regarded as an “autobiographical essay”, yet I only wish to write down as concretely and actually as possible how I worked and spent as a novelist. This book may be an egocentric text, though I appreciate it if it’s useful to readers.
Product Details
Novelist as a Profession (Hardcover) Haruki Murakami Switch Publishing, Tokyo, 10 September 2015 313 pages, JPY 1944 ISBN 9784884184438 Contents:
Novelist as a Profession (Mass Market Paperback) Haruki Murakami Shinchosha, Tokyo, 28 September 2016 352 pages, JPY 737 ISBN 9784101001692
Are Novelists Tolerant Persons?
When I Became a Novelist
On Literature Awards
On Originality
Well, What Should I Write?
Taking Side with Time: To Write Long Novels
Extremely Individual and Physical Activity
On Schools
What Characters That I Should Present?
Who is I Write for?
Going Abroad: The New Frontier
The Place a Story Is in: Memories of Dr. Hayao Kawai
Novelist as a Profession by Haruki Murakami is an auto-biographical essay (on the afterword, mentioned by Murakami). This essay treats themes of novelist, novel, literature, writing, art, school education and life. On this essay Murakami told how he lived, spent his life, wrote novels, think about literature and novel. Anyway, as a result, for readers, this essay Murakami told readers how to write novel and induced them to write a novel. But it is not a usual “how to” book or a guide book at all.
On this essay, Murakami wrote honestly his experience, way of life, thought and policy. He didn’t want to be a novelist seriously. At first, he had no enthusiasm to write novel. He ran a jazz cafe or bar, and earned a sufficient amount of money. Some epiphanies, chances and lucks made him a novelist. Also he continued to write novels of his own will.
Murakami is an ordinary and modest person, also is uncategorized and unconventional individual. He was a usual student, spent a daily life as an ordinary and normal citizen. Also he isn’t a stereotyped great writer or artist.
Murakami’s policy is such as a policy of non-policy or non-rule. He live and write by spontaneousness, freedom and nature. He doesn’t depend on any authorities, academism and large systems. He live his life the way he like. He doesn’t interest in any prizes and the Japanese literature scene. So he migrated to foreign countries, and made a distance to the Japanese literature scene.
His policy links to his way of writing and the content of his works. He writes his novels the way he like. He writes a novel by rhythm and free improvisation like jazz. He doesn’t set a heavy and proper theme, a strict plan and fixed personalities of characters. His policy and way of writing made the “voice” echoes with the hearts of readers.
Murakami wrote his novels for himself, “writing for enjoy myself as my basic stance” (p. 269). So the title of a novel by an imaginary writer Derek Heartfield in Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing is “What’s Wrong About Feeling Good ?” (p. 270), it expressed the sense of incongruity to the Japanese literature scene.
Murakami has been enjoyed writing and wrote by his spontaneousness from his debut until now. And he has no desire to become a novelist or to succeed in a novel, and there’s any limitations. He alway wrote a novel by a plentiful and spontaneous pleasure. So he can own “a natural feeling that I’m free” and “free and natural feeling” (p. 111), and he thinks his originality caused by freedom.
On the other hand, Murakami has will and durability to write story, and his original way of work. He had been built his own style of writing and his original grand narrative by trial and error. When he write a long novel 5 hours in early morning everyday. And he trains the body and keeps his physical strength without fail. He founded healthy life for writing. He thinks to complete a long novel it’s necessary of concentration and durability.
Murakami is only a novelist and a creator. He isn’t good at analyse and criticize things like a scholar, also he want not his works analysed and criticized by scholars and critics. He won’t be a councillor or a literature prize, also he isn’t interested in any prizes. Over almost 40 years, he only wrote novels and texts. He only want to enjoy writing a novel. Murakami thinks he is only an ordinary person has a certain measure of capacity to write a novel, but by some chances and accidents made him a novelist, and by his will and durability he continued to write novels. I think Murakami told that “everyone can write a novel and become a novelist”. As a matter of fact, by this book, you should want to write a novel or create something.
A spring clear afternoon, Murakami visited the 1978 opening game of the Central League at an outfield stand of the Jingu Stadium, Tokyo. When the first batter of Yakult Swallows, Dave Hilton hit a fine double, an epiphany fell into Murakami, then he realized “That’s it, maybe, I can write a novel !” at the moment. (pp. 46 – 47) This essay makes you want to write a novel or want to do a creation. Like Murakami realized “That’s it, maybe, I can write a novel !”, to read this essay, you may realize “That’s it, maybe, I can write a novel !”.
Product Details
Novelist as a Profession
Haruki Murakami
Switch Publishing, Tokyo, 10 September 2015
313 pages, JPY 1944
ISBN 9784884184438
Content