One April afternoon in 1978, Haruki Murakami was sitting in the stands of Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game, when he experienced a sudden epiphany that completely transformed his life. It happened when a player from his local team hit the ball into left field, and the crowd erupted in cheers. "In that moment," Murakami recounts—"without any preamble whatsoever—a thought suddenly struck me: *I think I can write a novel!*"... This book serves as a guide to novel writing from a deeply personal perspective—one infused with elements of opinion and autobiography—and features a number of strange, revealing vignettes in which his lived experiences seem to resemble passages from his own novels more than they do reality. Moreover, he recounts these events with an air of effortless naturalness, reminding us of his signature style—a style that appears outwardly simple and colloquial, yet frequently shifts between the mundane details of daily life and the enigmatic realms of the mysterious, all without any perceptible change in tone.