Rule of Alternating Short-Story and Novel Writing

The Rule of Alternating Short-Story and Novel Writing is the author’s deliberate practice of keeping the two forms separate and moving between them only after completing a project. It turned a difference in creative impulse into a career-long rhythm: novels and stories became complementary ways of working, but never simultaneous ones.

The Rule and Its Rationale

The author describes novel writing as a challenge and short-story writing as a joy, comparing the two forms to planting a forest and planting a garden. The images suggest distinct but complementary labors, together making a landscape he values. In practice, finishing a novel makes him want to write stories; completing a group of stories turns his attention back to a novel. He does not write short stories while working on a novel, or a novel while working on short stories. He speculates that the forms engage different parts of the brain and says switching tracks takes time.

Formation of the Practice

The pattern emerged after the author began with two short novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. From 1980 to 1981, he began writing short stories, starting with “A Slow Boat to China,” “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” and “New York Mining Disaster.” He was inexperienced in the form and found the work rough going, yet it expanded the possibilities of his fictional world and made the experience memorable. This first period of story writing also established the alternation that would become his working system.

A Decade of Novels

From the beginning of 1990 to the beginning of 2000, the author wrote very few short stories, not because he had lost interest but because a succession of novels left him little time to change tracks. He focused on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart, and Kafka on the Shore, alongside the nonfiction works collected in the English version of Underground. He describes novel writing as his main battleground during that period. The collection after the quake appeared between those novels as an intermezzo, but he distinguishes it from a conventional story collection: its six tales about the 1995 Kobe earthquake were conceived to form a unified image, more like a concept album.

The Return to Short Fiction

In 2005, after a long interval, a strong desire to write a series of stories took hold. The author wrote about one story a week and completed five in little more than a month, concentrating on them almost without stopping. Published in Japan in Tokyo Kitanshu (Strange Tales from Tokyo), the five stories were gathered at the end of the English-language collection. They share the quality of strange tales but can each be read independently, rather than forming the tightly unified whole he had sought in after the quake. The renewed burst of work demonstrates the rule in motion: a shift in creative focus could be sudden and intense, even though the author understood changing forms to require time.

Significance and Limits

The rule is a method of managing attention, not a claim that the forms are unrelated. The forest-and-garden comparison presents them as parts of a larger creative landscape, while the strict separation of projects protects each form’s distinct demands. The practice also allows stories and novels to remain in conversation: the author notes that stories sometimes continued to grow in his imagination after publication and eventually became novels. Alternation therefore describes his ordinary working rhythm, not an absolute boundary around what a story might later become.