Small Niches in Which to Live

Haruki Murakami explains that the conventional path for “a young guy” in Japan is to graduate from college, find a job, and “when things have leveled off,” get married.

And then, presumably, the longer term plan is to continue working into old age and/or death, much as it is in the West.

Murakami didn’t do it that way. He got married first (“it’s a very long story so I won’t go into details”) and then he got creative.

hating the prospect of working for a company (those details would also take a long time to explain so I’ll omit them too), I decided that I wanted to open a jazz café. […] I was totally absorbed by jazz back then, […] so I was drawn to the idea of listening to the music I loved from morning to night.

Ah, that’s the stuff! Murakami and his wife took temporary jobs, saved their money, and opened their jazz café. Murakami fans will know it was called Peter Cat. They ran it together for three years, working hard at changing beer barrels and spinning records and making conversation with every customer. Towards the end of this time, he wrote his first novel. It won a prize and then he decided to sell the jazz café to work full-time on his novels.

There are two things I want to say about this. Well, it’s three things really if you want to count yet another example of how doing things unconventionally, even backwards in this case, can work out well in the end.

The first is that his motivation to listen to jazz all day long is an admirably pure one. We should all be motivated by such humble desires (being careful, of course, not to confuse a love of cake for a desire to run a bakery).

The second is that, as you can see, Murakami and his wife worked very hard. Isn’t hard work anathema to Escapologists? Wouldn’t it have been easier to become a salaryman? Well, yes and no. Remember when we talked about Tove Jansson last month? We reflected that certain kinds of work, even when all-consuming, is no bad thing. Employment might be bad with its dreary lack of adventure and its grinding obedience in service of someone else’s potentially malignant ambitions. But effort in support of passion is another thing altogether.

As you might be able to tell from the repeat of this motif, it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve been working quite hard on my books and on the pending return of New Escapologist as a print publication. I enjoy every last moment of this effort but I sometimes catch my reflection, metaphorically speaking, and think “some idler, huh?!”

It was this very thought, perhaps, that brought me to read the Murakami book from which these quotes are taken: Novelist as a Vocation. It’s no bad book and is the first time Murakami has written at length about his life and his art, something he has always been reluctant to do. Unfortunately, it’s something of a Day the Clown Cried, a bit of an anticlimax. He really is an average sort of guy after all, which is what he always said. Still, the way he talks about his novel-writing process was confidence-building for me (in that I was surprised by how much we have in common and that maybe I won’t be such a screw-up as a writer after all) and the book really does contain the occasional gem.

Though he says at first that he won’t go into details about not wanting to work for a corporation, he soon writes:

Many of us detested corporations and the idea of selling out to “the system,” which meant that enterprises like [our jazz café] were opening right and left: coffee shops, restaurants, variety stores, bookstores. A number were close by, all run by people about our age. There were also young radicals, wannabe members of the student movement, hanging around the neighborhood. All over the world, there were small niches in which to live. If you could find one you could fit into, you could get by somehow. Things could get wild at times, but it was still an interesting era.

He’s speaking as if this is all in the past and he might be correct. Things are getting worse and worse in terms of Escapological opportunity. But there is still hope. Move away from the capital cities. Move, perhaps to the countryside if you believe you can make a life of it there. Move to another country if necessary or desirable. Let adventure and resourcefulness be your watchwords. I maintain that, for all of the difficulties the world is currently facing, escape is still possible.

And by the way, I love that sticking it to the man might involve something as charming as opening a bookshop or a jazz café! I often feel this way about myself: some of my friends see me either as a wastrel or rebel. But it’s not like I dropped out of working life to becomes a Hell’s Angel. I want to listen to jazz and to write books like Murakami did. Really, I’m a real goody-two-shoes. But go against the grain and see what happens; the nay-sayers will appear, with your best interests apparently at heart, and then you have to work hard, hard, hard to show ’em how its done. 💪 Hey, it’s no bad life.

People tell me I must have a strong will [but] it’s much more physically trying for ordinary company employees who ride in crowded commuter trains every day.

*

Don’t want to sell out to the system? Try my books, I’m Out and The Good Life for Wage Slaves. Thanks.