Speeching

On December 20, I delivered a “special lecture” at my university. Every year we hold an English speech contest for high school students across the local area, and as part of the festivities, someone delivers a keynote speech. So far it’s always been a Japanese celebrity, but for some reason this year they decided it would be me. I was flattered but also wary: I may be a published writer but no one in the room (not even most of my colleagues) have read my books. Still, I’ve never backed down from an opportunity to talk about myself.

Afterwards, a few people asked to see the text, so I thought I’d put it up here. This is aimed at Japanese high school students, and the text was subtitled in Japanese on the screen behind me. There was also a PowerPoint but as I despise unnecessary PowerPoints, it was mostly just pictures of Taylor Swift (not kidding). Anyway, this was not written for this audience but some of you might be interested, so here is my speech about having to do a speech during a speech contest.

I think it was in February this year when the committee that runs this contest invited me to deliver this special guest lecture and, to be perfectly honest, my first reaction was to assume they were joking.

Last year, this speech was given by Ando Yuko-sensei, a world respected journalist and a celebrity in Japan, someone most, if not all, of you have heard of. I am not going to ask how many of you have heard of me because I know the answer will be small and depressing. How can I take the baton from Ando Yuko-sensei?

That was in February and honestly, I have spent the entire year worrying about it, paralysed with anxiety, totally unsure what to say. Should I talk about my books, which few of you have read? Should I talk about my experiences as a writer, most of which involve sitting by myself in front of a computer trying to put the stories in my head onto paper? Should I try and say something inspiring, talking as I am to a generation of people who are inheriting a country and a planet at a horrible time in history?

Over the year, as this speech got closer, a few things began to coalesce in my mind, and slowly an idea took shape.

One of those happened very recently, this semester in fact. I teach a presentation skills class where we focus on exactly what I am doing here. Public speaking. Standing in front of a room full of people and talking. Scary. Most people—all people really—have some fear of public speaking.

A few weeks ago one of my students freaked out before a presentation. She had done five or six presentations in that class already, and has done some in other classes too, but for some reason this time was extra stressful. She left the class for a few minutes, calmed down, came back and did her presentation. It was great, as always. Afterwards I had a chat with her and she told me she suffered from imposter syndrome.

For those who haven’t come across this, imposter syndrome is the feeling that you are not good enough, that no matter what you do or how hard you try, you just are not good enough. The feeling that everyone around you knows what they are doing while you are lost and confused. It is actually pretty common, just most people call it something else – shyness, embarrassment, fear of failure, anxiety – but a surprising number of people, and a surprising number of highly successful people suffer from it.

I suffered from it for a long time, and I spoke to my student about my experiences. I could tell she did not believe me. Every day I stand in front of classes and talk. I am never nervous, I never panic. I write books and talk about them. I am in a band and I get onstage to play guitar and occasionally sing.

But I never used to be like that. When I was in high school, the thought of standing up and having people listen to me was terrifying. I would skip class to avoid doing it. I would make deals with my groups: I will do all the research and writing if you do the performance. Anything to avoid this: having all these people look at me, waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to make a mistake. Waiting for me to fail.

I could tell she still did not quite believe me, but it is true. If you had told 15-year-old Iain that in 30 years he would be standing in front of all these people on a stage in Japan delivering a special lecture, he simply would not have believed you.

What changed? Nothing really, I was still nervous seconds before I began. The difference is that I have now done this so many times – teaching classes, delivering lectures, reading from my books in bookstores and festivals around the world – that I know I will survive. The worst that can happen is that some of you fall asleep and I think all teachers have experienced that.

About 10 years ago I was asked to deliver the kanpai speech at my Japanese friend’s wedding. A great honour, but it meant I had to do the entire thing in Japanese on the most important day of my friend’s life. I did it. I stumbled on some words, but I did it. What helped was just beforehand, someone told me this: the audience is on your side. Everyone is happy. Everyone is having fun. No one wants you to fail. And it is true. Unless you are a politician, anytime you do something like this, most people listening want you to succeed. So I did my speech. It went well.

The other important thing that happened to me this year is that I met one of my favourite writers. She is an Australian comedian called Alice Fraser and she was running a one-off writing workshop in Tokyo. As we were chatting, I told her about my career so far.

I have published nine books. Novels, novellas, poetry, nonfiction, history, travel. I have published in newspapers, magazines. I have published short stories, I have been invited to read in Britain, Japan, Australia, America, Canada but with every new book I write, I do not know if it will get published: “you’re only as hot as your latest hit,” as Taylor Swift teaches us. Your last book did not do well, so why would you get a next chance?

I am not as successful as I want to be. I told Alice Fraser that.

Alice asked me such a simple question, and it stopped me dead. I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. “What does success look like to you?”

What does success look like to you?

Not, “What is success?” What does it look like, to you?

Is it fame? Money? Taylor Swift is successful, does that mean if you do not have what Taylor has, you are not successful?

Well no, a novelist is never going to be as successful as a pop star. No novelists ever sold out Tokyo Dome.

So is it having what Haruki Murakami has? Bestsellers in languages around the world, no need for a proper job, your books made into films, speculation that one day you will win the Nobel Prize, a library dedicated to you at Waseda? Well, all of that would be nice but that cannot be success because so few writers ever get that.

So, what does success look like to you?

20 years ago, when I was doing a master’s in creative writing and working on my first novel, success was easy to define. Success was getting a book published. I had published poems and short stories, but never a book. To have a book, my book, to walk into a bookstore and see my book on the shelf. That was what success looked like.

In 2014 I got that. My first novel, First Time Solo. A war novel about young men learning to fly. It got good reviews, people bought it. It got shortlisted for a prize. I could – and did – walk into bookshops and look at it on the shelves. It did well enough that I got a second novel—Silma Hill, a horror story—and a third, The Waves Burn Bright, a drama about a family falling apart. I could walk into those bookstores and see three of my books on the shelves. That was what success looked like.

Then, in 2017, my publisher went out of business. Publishing is a difficult business and companies disappear all the time. What happens when a publisher goes out of business is that the writers get the copyright on their books back and they can either buy the printed copies of their own books and try to sell them themselves, or they get pulped. I had no money, mine got pulped. My books were out of print. Through no fault of mine, I could not walk into a shop and see them on the shelf. But I had the copyright so I could get them published again.

No, it does not work like that. No one wants to publish a book that has already been published unless it is a guaranteed bestseller (mine weren’t) or is a classic out of copyright and so does not cost anything (not my books). Eventually, in 2022 The Waves Burn Bright was republished as In the Shadow of Piper Alpha but the other two are still out of print. I cannot walk into a bookstore and see them on the shelf anymore.

So what does success look like?

My career was not over. I got a second chance in 2020 with The Only Gaijin in the Village, a nonfiction book about living in Japan. That was a hit, my best selling book to date, but it came out in March 2020, at the start of Covid. All the events were cancelled and by the time I could go out to promote it, it was two or three years later and no one cared anymore. My publishers wanted me to write a sequel to Only Gaijin but that book was all about my life in Japan. I had used all my stories and because of Covid, I had not done anything interesting for three years.

Instead, I wrote a history book about lighthouses in Japan, about Richard Henry Brunton, the Scottish guy who came to Japan in 1868 to build them. And I wrote a novella about Covid, and a poetry collection about climbing mountains in Japan, and they got published and were well received, but no bestsellers.

As Taylor says, “you’re only as hot as your latest hit.”

So what does success look like to you?

I have friends who win prizes for their books, who have Netflix deals and loads of money. I have friends who have written dozens of great books and never had any of them published. Who have never walked into a bookshop and seen their book on the shelf. So what does success look like to you?

The final thing that fell into the melting pot that makes this speech was a concert I went to in Osaka earlier this year. Two concerts actually. One by the Scottish band Mogwai, the other by English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey. Both were in the same live house in Osaka, one week apart. Mogwai play very heavy, very loud rock music. P.J. Harvey plays slower, softer indie music, though she can also rock. Mogwai are heavy, loud. Harvey is ethereal, beautiful, poetic. Both have been around since the 90s and both are at the tops of their games, selling out tours around the world, still making great albums that people buy. I love them both. But they are so, so different to each other, and the experience of their concerts was so different.

At Mogwai, I was down the front, in the pit, jumping, dancing, sweating, my ears ringing, other people’s sweat in my eyes, my old man’s back and feet aching. A week later I was stood on the balcony with a beer, swaying slowly to the beautiful pop-folk music. And at that moment, Alice Fraser’s question came back to me.

What does success look like to you? Mogwai are successful. P.J. Harvey is successful. Alice Fraser is successful. Taylor Swift, Haruki Murakami, my friend on Netflix, me, who is not: we are all successful in our own way, doing our own thing. PJ Harvey’s success does not look like Mogwai’s success because why would it? She is doing her music, they are doing theirs, and both are happy. P.J. Harvey is not looking at Mogwai’s audience saying “why aren’t my fans jumping around and getting sweaty?” It would be weird if they did.

That’s what was at the heart of Alice’s question. What does success look like to you? I do not write the same books as Haruki Murakami, so how could I have the same success as him. I write my books so I can only have my own success, whatever that is.

So why am I talking about this up here? Well, in part because of the school motto.

私を選ぶのは、わたし。

I was part of the team that worked on the English translation which you can see on the website: I Choose Myself.

Translating this was hard. The machine translation is “I am the one who chooses me” which is correct but in English doesn’t mean anything. It is like those funny t-shirts with bad English on them. I once had a Japanese t-shirt, which my Japanese friend gave me, that said 「私は今までの、私ではない。」

Do not trust machine translation.

I was asked to suggest an English translation and I decided on “I Choose Myself.” This was my reasoning:

I choose myself means I have confidence in myself

I choose by myself means I will choose my own future. I will take advice and input but ultimately the decision is mine. The responsibility it mine.

I will choose for myself. I will not make the choice to please other people or to do what I think I should do. I will do what is right for me.

You all know the famous Japanese saying, “the nail that sticks out get hammered down.” Whenever I hear that, I think of the line Murakami wrote in Norwegian Wood, “If you read the same things as other people, you’ll think the same things as other people.”

What does success look like to you? It looks different to different people. Murakami chose his own path, and his success looks the way it does because of that. Mogwai chose their own path. P.J. Harvey chose her own path, and their success looks the way it does as a result.

The nail that gets hammered down is never successful. Trying to be successful on other people’s terms is not success. Letting other people choose who you are is not being yourself. The hardest thing a human being can do is be themselves. That is why it was written on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi more than 3000 years ago: know thyself.

I started this speech talking about imposter syndrome. One way I got over my imposter syndrome was talking about and discovering how many other people felt the same. Everyone I thought was calm and confident were panicking inside. In English we describe it as being like a duck. On the surface of the water the duck is calmly swimming around. Underneath the surface where you can’t see, its little legs are working like mad to keep it going.

For my student, panicking, it helped her to understand that everyone else in the class was panicking just as much as her. That everyone else in the class thought they were the only one who could not do it, that they were the only one who didn’t belong there. Everyone felt the same but no one spoke about it.

All of the people you look up to. All of the people you admire. All of the people who look successful suffer from imposter syndrome. Emma Watson has spoken about having imposter syndrome. Lady Gaga, Tom Hanks, Emma Stone, Michelle Obama, Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein spoke about having imposter syndrome. If Einstein thought he was not good enough, what hope for the rest of us?

If everyone has imposter syndrome, maybe none of us are imposters. Or maybe the only people who do not have imposter syndrome are the actual imposters.

I started this speech talking about how I was scared to deliver this speech after Ando-sensei had done such an amazing job last year. Then I thought about my student’s imposter syndrome and my own. I thought about the different kinds of success of all those people I admire. Then I thought about the university’s tagline, I choose myself.

What does success look like? It is simply choosing yourself, being yourself, being yourself to the best of your ability and, through that, you will find people who like that, that respond to that, an audience that wants you to do well, that is on your side and when you do that—like Taylor Swift, like Michelle Obama, like Albert Einstein –you can do anything.