Who: Minae Mizumura

Where to Find Her: on her website and on Amazon

Claim to Fame: Minae is a Tokyo-based author. Three of her books have been translated into English including Inheritance from Mother, A True Novel, and The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Inheritance from Mother won the Osaragi Jiro Award in 2012, commemorating the most accomplished book in prose in Japan, including both fiction and non-fiction. 

Let’s start with the basics: What time of day do you start writing? Is it easier for you to write early in the morning? Late at night?

I start around nine in the morning. I used to work nonstop from the moment I got up to the moment I collapsed in my bed but I became ill years ago while serializing A True Novel, an inordinately long work, in a monthly journal. Now I only have enough energy to write in the morning and early afternoon.

What’s your preferred tool for writing—a word processor like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, etc.? A pen and paper?

I keep notebooks where I handwrite notes and make charts. I do the real writing with a word processor but edit what I write with a pen or a pencil. I then type in those changes, print the new version, and edit it again. The process goes on forever and seems endless.

In conjunction with Microsoft Word, I use an input method editor called Atok. It efficiently converts Roman alphabets into not only Japanese hiragana and katakana but also a wide range of Chinese characters, from the most common to the spectacularly intricate, allowing me to play with three kinds of scripts that make written Japanese a unique and visually dynamic language.

Do you listen to music when you write, or do you prefer silence, or something else in the background?

Nothing in the background. The quieter the better.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits?

I do some in-bed core exercises for my spine, brush my teeth, wash my face, and eat breakfast my husband prepares for both of us—a bowl of yogurt with mixed nuts and defrosted blueberries—before heading to my desk with a mug of latte. I just realized how totally devoid of local color my morning habits in Tokyo are now that I’ve put them down in writing. I do start my day with a warm cup of green tea if my husband is still asleep.

When you first sit down to write, how do you start?

I turn on my desktop computer, then open my manuscript file stored in my Dropbox. The 28 inch 4K monitor hung on a built-in bookcase shows exactly where I left off the day before.

When did your aspirations to become a writer begin, and at what age did you start writing in hopes of living off of it/making a life out of it?

Perhaps after reading The Brothers Karamazov in a Japanese translation when I was a freshman at an art college in Boston. Dostoevsky has long ceased to be my favorite writer but, looking back, I suppose I was struck by what a work of fiction can do to you. You literally stop living your own life and start living the lives of other people. I began harboring a vague aspiration to become a novelist, but as a typical Japanese girl of my generation, it seemed more essential that I marry someone nice and suitable than try to fulfill what seemed like a childish dream. Hence my late start. I only began writing in my late thirties, though, like many writers, I somehow always knew that I could write.    

Finding a great idea for a book can be one of the most challenging aspects of an author’s life. How do you find your book ideas? How do you know what is worth pursuing and what needs to be cut?

The ideas for my books come easily to me. And, being a slow writer, I always have plenty of them in stock. The problem for me always is about writing and not ideas. For example, I’ve been working on a same novel for the past few years and, for the first time in my life, I have serious doubts as to whether the project is worth pursuing. The ideas are there, but what I’ve written so far seems neither genuine nor interesting. No matter how great an idea, it doesn’t lead up to a work of literature unless each detail has a ring of truth and interconnects to create an organic whole, making the work have a life of its own. I plan to keep struggling for another year or so in the hope that, one day, things will start falling into the right places.

You’ve spoken about how technology is making writing eternal, as well as about the tradition of serializing novels in Japanese publications. Have these things affected how you structure and/or write your novels?

Cautiously optimistic is how I would describe my attitude toward the current technology’s impact on literature. Theoretically, the current technology allows anyone in the future to have an easy access to any writing and I’m quite happy with that knowledge. Whether there will indeed be those who would be willing to access my writing is a question I decided not to concern myself with. More troubling is the fate of literature written in languages other than English, given that English is fast becoming the singularly omnipotent universal language—a process that’s accelerated even further by the current technology and that could eventually lead to the fall of other written languages.    

The Japanese tradition of serializing novels, I believe, is an excellent way to keep writers afloat. Moreover, the tradition can have educational value for them. For example, serializing in a literary journal that has a circulation of ten thousand and serializing in a national newspaper that has a circulation of nearly ten million are two different things. I feel fortunate in having been given the latter opportunity as well with my latest novel, Inheritance from Mother. You mature as a writer when you are paid to write strategically to please as many readers as possible. You also find out what kind of a writer you are. All writers, I believe, would rather have a wide audience than a limited one, but many writers, including myself, have other priorities.  

How do you think about the audience you’re writing for? Is there one in your head, or are you basically writing for yourself?

I don’t write for myself. I wish I could say that I write for anyone on this earth willing to pick up my books but I’m afraid the reality is not that simple. Because I write in Japanese, I write first and foremost for those who read fluently in Japanese. If my work happens to be translated into other languages, I would of course be honored and happy, but I would not write with that as my goal. As a writer, I want to explore and expand the potentials that are particular to the language I am writing in. I also try to write for someone who’s better than me, both morally and intellectually, so that my writing becomes better than who I am. The process is a difficult one since it requires endless rewriting.