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Fabled Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami wrote his first novel at the age of 32, while running a failing Jazz bar in Tokyo.
According to Murakami he was sipping an ice beer in the stands and licking his wounds from the tough week of labour 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 novel was junk that read like wannabe literature. So he ditched is manuscript, pulled out his Olivette typewriter and started rewriting the novel in his second language English.
Murakami said " I could only write in short, simple sentence. Which means that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around in my head, I couldn't not 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 in that fashion, however, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape".
Today the 34 novels that Murakami has writtien 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 write all his novels in japanese, his japanese readers have said that his novels are so simple to read and they almost feel translated, drawing readers into his unique literary world.
The lesson or morals is on every paragraph of the story.
