Before Haruki Murakami became the author of Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84, he and his wife were running a small jazz bar in Tokyo.
It was not the kind of life people imagine when they think of a world-famous novelist.
The bar stayed open late.
Customers came and went.
There was cleaning to do, money to worry about, the next day to prepare for.
It was a working life, full of practical things.
Then one day, during a baseball game, a thought came to him.
Maybe I can write a novel.
Nothing around him changed when that thought arrived.
The bar was still there.
The long days were still there.
The tiredness was still there.
That may be what makes the story stay with people.
He did not begin writing in a life that had already made room for it.
He had to make room himself.
So he started getting up early.
Later, when writing became the center of his life, he kept a routine so strict it almost sounds plain when you first hear it. He would wake up around four in the morning, sit down to write for five or six hours, eat simply, run or swim, go to bed early, and do the same thing again the next day.
It is such an unexciting description.
An alarm.
A desk.
Pages.
A run.
An early night.
Then morning again.
And yet the books came out of that life.
The strange, lonely worlds.
The quiet tension.
The dreamlike turns.
The feeling that his novels were coming from somewhere steady and deep.
Readers would later find Norwegian Wood in one country, Kafka on the Shore in another, 1Q84 somewhere else. His books would be translated into many languages and carried far from the mornings in which they were written.
But those mornings came first.
That is the part that is easy to miss now, when the books are already on shelves all over the world.
Before the readers, there was the routine.
Before the reputation, there were the hours.
Before the finished novels, there were days that probably looked almost identical from the outside.
He got up.
He wrote.
He ran.
He slept.
And then he did it again long enough for those quiet days to turn into books people would carry for years.
Not overnight.
But over time.
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