It's been a few years since I started writing fiction. I know it's not an easy game — no one told me it would be — but the gap between where I am and any concrete achievement still feels wide.
Still, learning firsthand how differently fiction thinks compared to the nonfiction writing I'd been doing for years has mattered more than I expected. The sense of stepping into almost completely foreign territory is still vivid. I like to believe that if I keep sharpening my craft, something better will eventually come.
One of the bigger adjustments was switching to vertical text. In Japanese literary tradition, fiction is written in vertical columns — characters running top to bottom, columns moving right to left across the page — an orientation that has defined the look of novels and serious prose for centuries. I'd typed horizontally my entire adult life; the last time I'd written vertically was probably in school. Whether that formatting makes practical sense in a world of digital screens is a fair question, but there was something genuinely satisfying about configuring the right apps and tools for it — a small, deliberate act of keeping a tradition alive.
Then there was the paper. Getting a manuscript onto actual pages turned out to be far more central to fiction writing than I'd anticipated. For decades, I'd created everything digitally and submitted everything online. Having to print my drafts felt like a step backward — and yet, somehow, oddly refreshing. It's commonly said that editing on paper catches things a screen lets you miss, and some literary competitions in Japan still require physical submissions with no email or digital uploads accepted. They mean it. As it turned out, the printed page revealed errors and clumsy passages I'd read past a dozen times on screen. Printing became a non-negotiable step.
The problem is what you're left with: a mountain of pages. Part of me wants to hold on to them as a record of the work — proof that something happened here. But unless one of those manuscripts wins a prize, and I've already admitted that's unlikely, they're just bulk. They take up space. They absorb humidity. More than anything, having closets full of unfinished thinking — fragments that never crossed the finish line — does something quietly corrosive to the mind.
Putting them out with the paper recycling felt wrong. Nothing in those pages would embarrass me, but it didn't seem like the right way to treat something I'd made. My home shredder is too weak for that volume. There's a service in Japan where you pack documents into a box and ship them off to be pulped — efficient, confidential, final — but spending money to dispose of rough drafts struck me as the wrong call.
I decided to burn them.
On a camping trip, I borrowed a _shichirin_ — a small Japanese charcoal brazier, the kind normally used for grilling. I fed in the pages a few at a time, crumpling each handful before dropping it into the fire. First came a brief curl of white smoke as the moisture released. Then the pages caught, fast and total. In the instant before they went, I could make out my own sentences in the flames. From the rhythm of the prose, I could sometimes even tell which manuscript I was looking at — which scene, which chapter. The lines twisted and danced in the heat, turned red, collapsed into ash, and rose.
Faintly, there was the smell of burning ink.
Watching the smoke lift from the _shichirin_, I found myself thinking of something Haruki Murakami once wrote in an essay — that when you hit delete on a word processor, you have to wonder: where does the writing actually go? It's a question without a clean answer. Do the fragments of thought drift on somewhere, formless, in the air? Do they simply cease — meaning dissolved, returned to nothing? Were they ever really there at all? Or maybe, in losing their form, they complete some kind of private journey and quietly find their way back inside the writer.
The answer might be waiting somewhere further on — on the other side of not stopping.
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