This month has brought the long-awaited release of Haruki Murakami’s latest book, Novelist as a Vocation, first published in his native Japan seven years ago. It is a collection of essays written between 2010 and 2015 that blur the line between career advice and autobiography, not unlike Stephen King’s now-classic On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. However, unlike King’s book, Murakami’s is frustratingly evasive. One of the hallmarks of his writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, is that it appears to be frank when in fact it is revealing very little. In that respect (and others), Murakami is rather like Bob Dylan, who rarely gives an interviewer a straight answer and whose work and personality remain opaque enough to have resulted in the creation of “Dylanology.”
