On an April afternoon in 1978, Haruki Murakami was sitting in the stands of Jingu Stadium in Tokyo watching a baseball game when he underwent a life-changing epiphany. It happened just as a player for his local team struck a ball into left field, to the delight of the home crowd. “In that instant,” he writes, “and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.”
Within six months, Murakami had written his first book, a short novel called Hear the Wind Sing. He sent the only manuscript copy to Gunzo, a Japanese literary journal, and promptly forgot about it. On receiving the news that he had been shortlisted for Gunzo’s prestigious Prize for New Writers, he went for a walk with his wife and experienced another unlikely epiphany. It happened just after he had rescued an injured pigeon he had found on a back street and was cradling the frightened bird in his arms. “That’s when it hit me,” he recalls in Novelist As a Vocation, a collection of essays on writing, inspiration and creativity, “I was going to win the prize. And I was going to go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success.”
