Ever since I was a child, I decided that I would become a writer.
Not just someone who writes, but a professional writer.
Decades have passed since that childhood vow.
Yes, in form, I eventually became “a writer,”
but if someone were to ask whether I’m a bona fide professional,
I can only tilt my head and hesitate.
In truth, I am nearly unknown—
what used to be called a “penny novelist,”
a term that has all but vanished from the world.
I’m no Shohei Ohtani, of course,
but I’ve worked hard in my own way.
Writing practice was a given,
and at every turning point in life—
education, part-time jobs, even the side work I do now—
I made my choices based solely on one question:
“Will this enrich my writing?”
In that sense alone, I suppose I shared something with Ohtani:
a willingness to shape my entire life around a single pursuit.
People often asked,
“Why would you choose that?”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
But for me, it was simple.
I only ever chose what felt like the best path for literature.
I wanted experiences—
the kind one would miss if they simply drifted along
with the currents of ordinary life.
I wanted to see the underside of the world,
how its mechanisms worked,
to feel it with my whole body while I was still young enough to endure it.
In short, I wanted to understand how society truly operates.
Some people carry a backpack and wander the world.
I, on the other hand, chose to immerse myself
in the mud of everyday life right around me.
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When I was young, I worked in nightlife:
bartending in clubs, even jobs not far from being a host.
Thanks to that, I experienced some terrible things,
even dangerous ones—
but I also gained a personal view of society
that I could never have acquired otherwise.
In other words, I gathered material for my fiction.
It is said that Haruki Murakami,
after running his jazz bar relentlessly through his twenties,
woke up one day in his thirties and suddenly thought,
“I should try writing a novel.”
Murakami studied film and screenwriting in university,
so perhaps the desire to express something
had always been dormant inside him.
One day, the seed he had carried finally sprouted.
“It’s time,” the seed seemed to say.
I, too, wrote only literary fiction at first.
Winning a major newcomer award from a big publisher—
that was everything to me.
I desperately wanted the Akutagawa Prize,
so much so that each announcement left me devastated with envy
and self-loathing at the gulf between myself and the winners.
Looking back, I simply didn’t have the seeds
necessary to write adult literary fiction.
My own perspective, my own aesthetic—
those elements were still incomplete.
After turning thirty, I began writing children’s literature.
Some might say it’s the same “literature,”
but writing for children requires a different kind of seed.
For me, that seed sprouted first.
As I wrote more and more children’s stories,
I became fascinated by the genre.
The brilliance of world masterpieces—
The Little Prince, Night on the Galactic Railroad,
Momo, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—
showed me that children’s literature can surpass “literary fiction.”
I felt deeply that someday I wanted to write something on that level.
No—something beyond it.
I submitted my manuscripts to several awards,
including the major children’s literature prizes.
None brought success.
Yet the feeling was different from the years
when my literary manuscripts failed without a trace.
This time I knew—
“If the right person reads this, they’ll find it wonderful.”
Among the prizes I entered most often
was Kodansha’s Children’s Literature New Writer Award,
but as I read each year’s winners, I gradually felt,
“This isn’t quite what I want to write.”
As a child, I would have wanted something that shimmered—
a story that glows like the great classics of the world.
Eventually I lost sight of where to submit my work,
and manuscripts simply piled up.
Decades passed.
I realized I couldn’t bear to let them disappear unseen,
so I decided to publish them through
a small, nearly unknown publisher.
Whether they sold or not barely mattered.
Once I published one,
I naturally began wanting more people to read them.
That was when I discovered Note and other social platforms.
To be honest,
writing essays or blogs—even for the sake of selling books—
felt uncomfortable at first.
But as an unknown writer,
I convinced myself that self-promotion was essential
and forced myself to keep going.
A strange thing happened.
As I continued, I grew to enjoy the act of promoting my own work.
This from someone who had once been
a painfully unsuitable salesman at a private company.
People say a salesperson must be in love with what they sell.
Once I gained confidence in my writing,
I naturally fell in love with my own books—
and thus became my own best salesman.
It surprised even me.
Three years have passed since I started Note.
Now I believe from the bottom of my heart:
Writing, promoting, reaching readers—
all of it together is the life of a writer.
Not just crafting the work,
but the entire ecosystem of living and working around literature.
And I realized something else:
This is the life I always wanted.
Even if the world doesn’t recognize me,
even if people laugh at me,
I can finally say from the depths of my heart:
I am a writer.
And I’m living as one.
For me, that is something immeasurably big.
It feels, in a quiet way, like I’ve been rewarded.
I wanted to become a writer my whole life.
And now, through stubborn, muddy, grassroots effort,
my books occasionally sell.
Sometimes a reader reaches out with warm praise.
And in those moments I think:
“If this is all I leave behind, it’s still enough.”
Yes—
at least once in my life,
I wanted to live like this,
as a writer.
“Surviving the summer,
enduring the winter,
and learning the spring.”
