Novelist as a Vocation

Haruki Murakami

Nice Work If You Can Get It – In these 11 essays, Haruki Murakami reflects upon the path he travelled in becoming one of our time’s great writers. Throughout the book, Murakami’s advice is concrete and practical, and occasionally humorous. Again and again, he underscores the role luck plays in achieving artistic success, emphasizes ways to counter the physical toll a writer’s sedentary life often claims, and celebrates jazz music as a source of inspiration for his writing. He shares opinions and anecdotes about other writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Isak Dinesen, Natsume Sōseki, and Raymond Carver. (In fact, Murakami was the main translator of Carver’s writing into Japanese. And, by now, Murakami’s own writing has been translated into more than 50 languages. “Novelist as a Vocation” was translated from Japanese into English by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen.)