‘To Be an Adult Is to Live with Self-Deception’

In every issue of Pen, the Naoki Prize-winning author Satoshi Ogawa presents a new essay in his series ‘A Non-Conformist’s Guide to Surviving Society’. In this series, Ogawa reflects on the often eccentric strategies he devises to navigate life’s everyday challenges. Below is the third installment, ‘A Fabricated Life’.

When one of my novels is published, I often receive requests for interviews. When these requests pile up, it becomes a hassle to attend them all separately, so I try to schedule them on the same day. That means from morning till night, I find myself talking about my work to different reporters one after another.

There are plenty of books in the world that truly deserve to be read, yet remain buried in obscurity, never getting the attention they warrant. Keeping that in mind, I can only be grateful that anyone would even want to interview me about one of mine. That’s why I try to accept every interview request I receive. But doing so has led me to an oddly specific dilemma.

In interviews, I’m often asked the same question: ‘What inspired you to write this book?’ Of course, I understand that the journalist means no harm. It’s a legitimate question, especially when the article is for people who don’t know me or my work. Still, if I’m being completely honest, my instinctive reaction is: ‘How would I know?’

First, there’s the issue of timing. By the time a book is published and a reporter who’s read it reaches out for an interview, it’s usually been at least six months since I finished writing. That means a year or more has passed since I actually started. It’s only natural not to remember the details that far back. Imagine being stopped on the street by a stranger who asks, ‘What made you want to learn to ride a bike in the first place?’ Most people would probably be confused. The best they could say might be something like, ‘Because everyone else was doing it,’ or ‘I thought it looked cool.’

Even if you get past the timing issue, there’s another problem: the question itself is tricky. What does ‘inspiration’ even mean? Most people eat ramen simply because they’re hungry. But if you answer that you wrote a book ‘just because you wanted to,’ it doesn’t make for a very compelling story. You have to come up with an explanation—even if you’re not entirely sure yourself—about why it had to be ramen instead of curry or a hamburger.

And then there’s the sheer monotony of having to answer the same question over and over. I start to feel bad for the editor from my publishing house who sits through every interview, having to hear me repeat myself again and again. There was a time when I got so fed up with the repetition that I began making up a new ‘reason for writing’ on the spot each time—which ended up causing all kinds of inconsistencies across different articles.

Because of that, lately I’ve been telling pretty much the same story every time—but that’s a problem in itself. Over time, my explanation of the book’s ‘genesis’ has become more polished and simplified, turning into a neat, easy-to-use ‘origin story’ that’s tailor-made for articles.

I haven’t experienced this myself, but similar things probably happen during job hunting. Someone who actually traveled to Southeast Asia just to party might, after going through multiple interviews, end up saying they went abroad to broaden their horizons. Or a person who joined a tennis club to meet potential partners might start talking about the joys of sports.

The reasons we start something new are always complicated, shaped by a mix of coincidences. The more easily you can answer ‘It’s because of X,’ the more you might want to worry that you’re fabricating your own story. And yet, being able to say it anyway—to summarize the chaos into a neat answer, even when we know it isn’t quite true—maybe that’s what it means to be an adult.

About the author

Satoshi Ogawa was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1986. He made his literary debut in 2015 with This Side of Eutronica (Yūtoronika no Kochiragawa, Hayakawa Books). In 2018, his novel Game Kingdom (Gēmu no Ōkoku, Hayakawa Books) earned both the 38th Japan SF Grand Prize and the 31st Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize. He was awarded the 168th Naoki Prize—one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, recognizing exceptional popular fiction— in January 2023 for The Map and The Fist (Chizu to Ken, Shūeisha). His latest work, Your Quiz (Kimi no Kuizu), was released by Asahi Shimbun Publishing in 2024.