Haruki Murakami started his adult life running a jazz bar in Tokyo. One day in April 1978, aged 29, he suddenly decided to write a novel. It turned out better than he had expected, he kept writing, and three years later sold the bar and started writing full time.
Twenty-seven years on he has produced 12 novels and several collections of short stories, and his work has been translated into 42 languages. He travels widely, teaching and giving talks to dedicated readers in Japan, the US and many other countries. Among other awards he won the Franz Kafka Prize for creative literature in 2006.
A Writer’s Lifestyle
Soon after Murakami started full time writing he made some fundamental changes to his lifestyle. He started running every day, and quit his sixty-a-day smoking habit. At first his running was simply a way to keep physically fit, but the point of this book is that it gradually became much more than that.
“Running every day is a kind of lifeline,” he tells us. There’s no surprise there, other creative people benefit from strict exercise programs. Mick Jagger is one, who Murakami mentions in a different context.
But Murakami goes further. “Most of what I know about writing fiction I learned by running every day,” he says, and “if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different.” He does not explain and probably does not know how it would be different, only that his daily running somehow affects his creativity. Would the Stones sound different if Mick worked out less?
First Marathon
The title of the book is borrowed and adapted from a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver, What we talk about when we talk about love. Murakami struggled for ten years to arrange his thoughts on ideas that are clearly fundamental for him. In the end he has produced a series of nine extended diary entries over a period of a year or so, leading up to his run in the 2005 New York marathon, with flashbacks to some of his memorable running experiences.
He describes the pain of his first attempt at the standard 26-mile marathon distance, running alone from Athens to Marathon in the heat of the Greek summer in 1983. More demanding and far more painful was a 62-mile marathon in Japan, where the physical stress numbed his mind almost to the point of the “out of body” sensation not uncommon among ultra-long distance runners.
Daily Running Routine
In between his once-a-year marathon races he recounts in meticulous detail a daily routine of putting on his running shoes early each morning and settling into the rhythm of his own movement along city streets and country roads, passing familiar strangers, listening to jazz on his mini-disk player, silently rehearsing speeches, looking at the scenery or imagining flowing rivers or drifting clouds.
The aging process is a recurring theme, affecting both physical and mental performance. He says although no writer can succeed without talent, a heightened ability to focus and the endurance that running helps develop can to some extent compensate for it.
The book reflects the existential nature of running, and the ambivalence that runners often feel towards others of their kind. Murakami describes the loneliness of running as one of its attractions, yet admits to a competitive instinct and says “the essence of running is exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits.”
A Runner’s Epitaph
He would never persuade anyone to take up running and is indifferent to those who overtake him, either earnest students beside the Charles River in Boston or, on one occasion, a seventy-year-old woman who paused to cheer him on. And yet he says the many people he has met through running have been one of its real pleasures, and he dedicates the book to them: “without all of you I would never have kept on running.”
Perhaps the real measure of the place of running in Murakami’s life is the epitaph he proposes for his gravestone. This internationally respected, prize-winning author considers his most noteworthy achievement has been to keep running, though sometimes jogging, through every marathon he has entered, and under his name he wants: “At least he never walked.”
This book is a gem, strongly recommended and an ideal gift for all writers, runners and 29-year-old bar owners looking for a better way of life.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2008, 180 pp, ISBN 9 7818 4655 2205
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