Mimura Nobuo started his career as a writer when he received a literary award for new writers offered by a literary magazine. He received it at the first attempt, and his awarded work was published in a paperback, which sold tens of thousands of copies. Therefore, we can say his career as a writer got off to a good start, but his second and third books performed badly, so that he began to feel that he needed a breakthrough, and people around him such as his editor began telling him so too.

  Mimura respected Mishima Yukio and aimed to write a great literary work like “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.” He admired Mishima’s beautiful writing style, well-devised plots, and the depiction of the conflicts in characters’ mind which fluctuated between normal and abnormal, and wished to write as great works as Mishima did. That was how he began to aim to be a writer.

  However, after he completed some works, he came to realize that he wasn’t so talented as Mishima: when he reviewed his own works objectively a while after completing them, he couldn’t help feeling that his works were relatively well-written but lack impacts to be best-sellers.

  Before long, he began to run out of inspiration for novels and fell into a slump. Mimura started to drink a lot to vent his frustration caused by the slump. And one day, after he drank quite a lot and got hammered, he felt like getting an inspiration, and let the pen run on lined paper, acting on impulse. He wrote more than 20,000 characters (as long as 10,000 English words) that night alone.

  The next day, Mimura was taken aback when he reviewed the manuscript. For better or for worse, he couldn’t help thinking “what on earth is this?” The stiffness observed in his earlier works had disappeared, and there were some descriptions which embodied his abnormal sexual thoughts he secretly had. In the story, the main character, a young man who lived an urban life, got to know several women with peculiar sexual preferences and had sex with them one after another. As he had written it under the influence of alcohol, he found some of its parts rough. However, it actually made it easier to read than his earlier works, so that he himself, none other than the person who had written it, felt like being drawn in the story.

  Since he’d already written as long as 20,000 characters, Mimura thought it was wasteful not to complete the work anyway. Thus, he drank like a fish and let the pen run insanely for a week and completed a long novel with more than 100,000 characters in the blink of an eye. When he showed it to an editor, the editor looked impressed and praised him without reserve, saying,

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  “Mr. Mimura, well done. You’ve succeeded in moving up to the next level.”

  The work turning out to be a bestseller which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, Mimura’s fame got well known in literary circles in Japan. Mimura, who suddenly rose to a bestseller writer in an unexpected way, made it a habit to rely on alcohol when he wrote novels after that. With this writing method, which he himself named “scribbling,” he was to produce plenty of bestsellers.

  While writing various works, through trial and error, he gradually found out how roughly he should write to make his works the most popular among readers. That is, even though he became a bestseller writer through having scribbled his work, his works couldn’t receive a good reputation when their plots were too rough, but at the same time, when he tried to create detailed and rigorous literary works as he had been doing early in his career, they weren’t well-received by readers either. His new style was aiming at something exquisite between “roughness” and “rigor.”

  Mimura, who had been establishing his status as a best-seller writer, began to have indescribably ambivalent feelings while being praised as “a genius” and “the best Japanese author.”

  Though it was an honor to receive such praise, he himself was well aware that he hadn’t reached the level of great writers in the past including Mishima, and he just had been pandering to the public through scribbling rough works rather than had been writing his best works in an artistic sense. Gradually, he grew scornful of Japanese literary circles, thinking “Japanese literary circles, in which even I, who don’t possess so excellent talent and just have been scribbling rough works, can gain such high acclaim, are really low-level.”

  Around when 20 years had passed since he started his career as a writer, his works had been translated into various languages and began to be highly rated overseas too. However, even Mimura, who had been enjoying success as a best-seller writer domestically, couldn’t receive any major awards overseas (though he sometimes received nominations for them).

  Each time the result of a literary prize is announced, and it became clear that Mimura missed out on the prize, people around him stamped their feet in frustration. However, Mimura himself breathed a sigh of relief in his heart on each of such occasions.

  “If such damn works I wrote while drinking alcohol garnered high acclaim globally, it would mean that literary circles around the world suck.”