Murakami Decided to Write at a Baseball Game
Quick answer: Haruki Murakami decided to write his first novel at a 1978 baseball game, then wrote it at the kitchen table each night after closing his Tokyo jazz bar.
April 1978, Jingu Stadium, Tokyo. A twenty nine year old jazz bar owner is lying on the grass slope of the outfield with a beer, watching the Yakult Swallows play the Hiroshima Carp. An American player named Dave Hilton comes to the plate and hits a clean double into left field. And in the moment the bat meets the ball, by Haruki Murakami's own often-told account, a thought arrives from nowhere, complete and calm: I think I can write a novel.
He had never seriously tried. He had no training, no literary circle, no manuscript in a drawer. What he had was a small club called Peter Cat, a mountain of debt from opening it, a wife who worked alongside him, and now this sentence lodged in his head. On the way home he bought paper and a fountain pen. What followed is one of the most instructive origin stories in modern letters, precisely because so little about it is romantic.
The Kitchen Table After Closing
Murakami's circumstances were the opposite of a writing retreat. He and his wife Yoko had married young, skipped the corporate track entirely, and borrowed heavily to open a jazz bar, first in Kokubunji and later in central Tokyo. Running it meant physical, repetitive work: making sandwiches and cocktails, washing glasses, keeping books, staying open late. For years their life was work and debt repayment, with music as the reward.
So the first novel was written in stolen hours. After the bar closed each night, Murakami sat at the kitchen table and wrote for whatever stretch he could manage before sleep, often an hour or two. He has described the fragmented, short-chaptered shape of that first book as a direct product of those conditions: a man writing in small night windows produces small units of prose. The lesson hides in plain sight. The book was not written despite the constraint; it was formed by it.
A Style Found in a Second Language
Partway through the draft, Murakami hit the problem every beginner hits: his Japanese came out stiff, loaded with borrowed literary manners. His solution has become famous among writers. He began writing passages in English, a language he knew well but not natively, and then translated them back into Japanese. The limited vocabulary forced short sentences, plain words and clean rhythm, and the translation back carried that plainness into his Japanese.
Out of that odd procedure came the cool, transparent, faintly foreign voice that readers now recognise instantly as his. The general principle deserves to be stated, because poets can use it directly: when your natural fluency produces clutter, impose a constraint that makes clutter impossible. Write the stanza in your second language, or in words of one syllable, or in sentences of six words, then translate it back into your full voice. Style is often what survives a deliberate impoverishment.
One Prize, One Submission
When the novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was finished in the autumn of 1978, Murakami did exactly one thing with it. He sent it to the new writers' prize run by the literary magazine Gunzo, reportedly the only competition that would accept a manuscript of its modest length. Then he went back to running the bar and, by his account, more or less forgot about it, to the point that he had kept no complete copy for himself.
In the spring of 1979 the magazine telephoned: he was on the shortlist. He won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the book was published, and a thirty year old bar owner was suddenly a novelist. He has said that if the book had not won, he might well never have written another. Take from that what is actually there: not destiny, but the enormous leverage of a single submission. One contest entry, sent once, to one address, was the entire difference between Murakami existing as a writer and not. It is the strongest argument imaginable for actually entering, and it is why a monthly contest like Writory's, which reads and scores every poem sent between the 1st and the 25th, exists at all: somewhere in the pile is somebody's Gunzo moment.
Selling the Bar, Building the Routine
For two more years Murakami wrote as a moonlighter, producing a second novel in the same night time fragments. Then in 1981 he made the decision that separates his story from most: he sold the bar and staked everything on writing full time, against sensible advice, while the income from books was still modest. The first full time novel, A Wild Sheep Chase in 1982, written at last in long uninterrupted days, was where he later said he truly found his storytelling.
With full time writing came the regime he is now almost as famous for as the books. He began running in 1982, and settled into the routine he has described in interviews and in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: up before dawn, five to six hours of writing while the mind is freshest, a ten kilometre run or a swim, music, an early night, repeated without variation for the months a novel takes. He calls the repetition itself a form of mesmerism. Novelists, he argues, need physical endurance as much as sensitivity, because a long work is carried by the body.
Norwegian Wood and the Cost of Arrival
Success arrived in stages, then all at once. Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, sold in the millions in Japan and turned a respected novelist into a national phenomenon, complete with the media pursuit that follows. Murakami's response is telling: he found the fame suffocating and left, living abroad in Europe and the United States for long stretches while the books kept coming.
The pattern across the whole story is consistency of temperament. The man who calmly decided at a ball game, wrote calmly at a kitchen table, and submitted calmly to one prize, also handled celebrity by calmly removing himself from it. The writing life he built is deliberately boring on the outside so that the strangeness can happen on the page. Many writers arrange this exactly backwards.
What a Working Writer Can Take from It
First, permission can arrive absurdly late and from nowhere, and it still counts. Nothing in Murakami's first twenty nine years announced a novelist. If you are waiting to feel like a writer before you write, note that he started from a beer on an outfield slope, with no credentials whatsoever, and the feeling arrived in the middle of ordinary life. Yours is allowed to do the same.
Second, respect the small nightly window. An hour after work, taken seriously and taken daily, produced a prize winning novel and launched one of the most read authors alive. The kitchen table is not the apprenticeship you endure before the real writing life begins. Very often, it is the real writing life.
What poets can take from this
- Claim a fixed daily window, however small, and let the work take the shape the window allows.
- If your style feels stiff, draft in a constrained register and translate back into your own voice.
- Enter the contest; one submission can be the entire hinge of a career.
- Build physical stamina alongside craft, because long projects are carried by the body.
- Make the routine boring so the writing does not have to be.
- When your moment of permission arrives, buy the pen and paper the same day.
Try it yourself
Write a poem that captures the exact instant a decision arrives unbidden, anchored in an ordinary public setting such as a match, a bus stop or a queue, and let the surroundings keep playing on, indifferent.
Questions
Did Murakami really decide to become a writer at a baseball game?
Yes, by his own repeated account. In April 1978, watching the Yakult Swallows at Jingu Stadium, he saw the American player Dave Hilton hit a double, and in that instant had the sudden, calm conviction that he could write a novel. He bought writing materials soon after and began Hear the Wind Sing that night-work season.
What did Murakami do before becoming a novelist?
He and his wife Yoko ran a Tokyo jazz bar called Peter Cat, which they opened with borrowed money in the mid 1970s. He wrote his first two novels at the kitchen table late at night after closing the bar, and only sold the business to write full time in 1981.
What is Haruki Murakami's writing routine?
When working on a novel he wakes before dawn and writes for five to six hours, then runs about ten kilometres or swims, reads and listens to music, and sleeps early. He has said he repeats this without variation for months, treating the routine itself as a way of reaching a deeper concentration.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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