What I talk about when I talk about running A memoir

Review by New York Times Review

I SEEM to have developed a fondness for approaching great writers via the road less traveled. I read John Cheever's "Journals" before his stories and novels. I got around to Joseph Brodsky's poems, in "A Part of Speech," only after reading "Watermark," his short book on Venice. Martin Amis? I started off with the bits of journalism in "The Moronic Inferno" and then moved on to "Money." And now I commence my reading of Haruki Murakami, not with "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or "Norwegian Wood" but with this little book about running. I'm guessing that the potential readership for "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" is 70 percent Murakami nuts, 10 percent running enthusiasts and an overlapping 20 percent who will be on the brink of orgasm before they've even sprinted to the cash register. And then there's me, the zero-percenter: a non-running Murakami virgin. Oh well. The supreme test of nonfiction is that it be interesting irrespective of the reader's indifference to the subject under discussion, and a great writer's work is obviously beflecked with greatness whatever the occasion. So the terms of the test are clear. Murakami began running seriously when he was 33, in 1982. In recent years he has covered an average of six miles a day, six days a week and has competed in more than 20 marathons. In 1996 he completed an ultramarathon of 62 miles. Lately he's developed a fondness for triathlons, and although he's fighting a losing battle these days against his own previous (that is, younger) race times, he has no intention of quitting. To give up running would be like giving up writing, which would be like giving up living. When he crosses the ultimate finish line his gravestone will, he hopes, read: Haruki Murakami 1949-20** Writer (and Runner) At Least He Never Walked The book is part training diary, part reruns of escapades undertaken at the behest of magazines (including an excellent account of a solo assault on the original route from Athens to Marathon in the full scorch of summer) and part memoir. Narrative incentive is provided by the looming prospect of the 2005 New York City Marathon. Some of the nicest touches derive from stuff he notices out of the corner of his eye, on the hoof, as it were. As a quick chill descended on Boston in the fall, "even the faces of the squirrels looked different as they scurried around collecting food." Or there are moments when he views himself and his fellow triathletes as they might appear to an outsider, as "a bunch of pitiful dolphins washed up on the shore, waiting for the tide to come in." "What I Talk About" is the latest installment in a pleasant mini-tradition of writers bunking off from their day jobs to take their sporting hobbyhorses out for a trot: Robert Hughes on fishing, John Updike on golf, Joyce Carol Oates on boxing. Sometimes this interest is entirely that of a spectator (Oates), sometimes it is that of a keen if limited practitioner (Updike); always it engenders quasi-philosophical musings. Murakami exaggerates when he describes his own thoughts on "the fleeting nature of existence" as "very philosophical," but running certainly has closer kinship with the labor of writing than any other sport. For Murakami, longhaul running is not just a metaphor for the loneliness of the long-distance novelist; it's pretty well synonymous with it. In the style of Albert Camus - who claimed that much of what he knew about morality and duty he learned from soccer Murakami believes that "most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day." Specifically, he believes that writing requires, in order of priority, talent, focus and endurance all of which find their complements in the habit of running. Writing, he thinks, is "an unhealthy type of work" because it brings the author face to face with the "toxin that lies deep down in all humanity" and without which "no creative activity in the real sense can take place." Even if you don't buy into this - and I don't see how you can, unless you throw in the dully dampening qualifier that it depends on the kind of creativity involved - the more modest claim, that running is a useful antidote to sitting on your bum and writing, is easy to accept. The discipline needed to keep running when you don't feel like it, the constant instruction to your body to cover the requisite number of miles, offer immediate parallels with the grind of meeting your target of however many words a day. Murakami is not dogmatic. He knows that for writers, as a Tobias Wolff character put it, "there is no such thing as an exemplary life," but an unyielding regime of running and early nights is what's enabled him to keep churning out critically acclaimed best sellers. Murakami may be addicted to running, but hey, it seems a lot healthier than Mishima's bodybuilding trip - and nothing about the book under review suggests that Murakami will disembowel himself and get a Mend to cut off his head. Even so, aspects of his training involve such extremes of self-torture that even the most tolerant reader will find them questionable, for the unpalatable truth is that Murakami listens to Eric Clapton while running. Is there any connection between the music Murakami listens to and his own prose? In races he is conscious of his fellow competitors' running styles in the same way "two writers perceive each other's diction and style." Jogging alongside him we get ample opportunity to check out his literary style, at least as given to us in this translation from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. To characterize it as briefly as possible: easy on ear and mind alike, it's the type of prose I would call sort of pretty poor. Running is "sort of a vague theme" (i.e., not just vague but vaguely vague), and the book is "a kind of memoir." Murakami sort of likes this kind of thing, not just as an indistinct modifier but as a form of category-definition. He's the "type of person," "kind of person" - I lost track of the number of times this came up - who likes "sort of laid-back" music and is "sort of a brazen person" who sometimes has "a sort of arrogant attitude." I have not made a comparative study, but I suspect that the most tedious fourword combo in any language is "As I said earlier." Murakami wastes no time demonstrating his mastery of all the variants of this heart-sinking turn of phrase. It first pops up on Page 12 - difficult to see how it could have come any earlier - and its cousin "As I mentioned before" appears five pages later. On Page 25 he tells us that the "kind of" jazz club he used to run was "pretty rare" and served "pretty decent food" and that he was "pretty naïve." Moving on, we learn that he was "pretty surprised" when his first novel was "fairly well received," that his Cambridge apartment was "pretty noisy," that his new running shoes have been "pretty well" broken in, that he is "pretty easygoing" and had "a pretty good feeling for the pace" he would need to maintain in the New York marathon. In an afterword Murakami explains that part of the motive for writing the book was "to sort out what kind of life I've led." If he'd written "sort of sort out" I would have forgiven him everything, but instead, he goes in for further self-incrimination. Apparently, it took quite some time to "carefully polish and rework" the book, and he "needed to revisit the manuscript many times over a period of time." So it's a straight choice: either he's the kind of writer who's a pretty poor editor of his own stuff or this kind of lazy repetition is deliberate. But if it is deliberate, what conceivable purpose is being served? Thomas Bernhard uses incessant repetition to screw his prose into an excruciating ball of angst, and occasionally, Murakami's short-order tics bunch up so close that they almost run away with themselves: "As I've said, I'm not a very competitive type of person." The sloppiness reaches an anticlimax of sorts when, in the midst of a "pretty disorderly" swimming race, he becomes "kind of confused." The rest of the time this accumulating cloud of imprecision, this lack of linguistic focus (one of his trinity of crucial qualities, remember), seems "kind of lethargic" and succeeds in making us identify closely with "the type of person who, once he gets sleepy, can fall sound asleep anywhere." Now, I don't know how representative this book is of Murakami's novelistic style, but I wonder: Is this low-maintenance, attention-deficit prose part of Murakami's attraction, especially among the young? Do people enjoy reading him for the same reason they persist in listening to music as blandly familiar as Clapton's? If Martin Amis is engaged in a "war against cliché" - a phrase in danger of becoming a cliché itself - then Murakami, on the evidence of this book, is a serial appeaser. How much does his thigh hurt? "Like crazy." How do we know the weather is nice? Because - as he tells us (twice) - there's "not a cloud in the sky." It's not all bad, of course. There are flashes of quality, as when his muscles feel "as hard as week-old cafeteria bread," but most of the time his prose, unlike those muscles, is so laid back that it can barely stand up (to even moderate scrutiny). As he imagines an editor saying about a memory evoked by another musical favorite, the Lovin' Spoonful: "It's not bad, but it's sort of ordinary and doesn't amount to much." Murakami declares, 'Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day.' Geoff Dyer's new novel, "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi," will be published next spring.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

Aspects of Murakami's sensibility, such as his love of music, can be discerned in his highly imaginative novels and short stories, yet it is startling to meet the author of such reality-warping works as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) face-to-face in this beguiling and generous memoir centered on the act of running. Murakami began running soon after he sold his Tokyo jazz club to write full time. Now, more than a dozen books and 20 marathons later, he considers the ways running engenders focus and endurance, qualities essential for writing. The propelling story line is Murakami's account of his rigorous training for the 2005 New York marathon. But he drops back often to recount such adventures as his exhausting run in Greece between Athens and Marathon and the unexpected repercussions of an ultramarathon (62 miles). He also ponders the frustrations and revelations of age and shares his love for American literature, including Raymond Carver's What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981), which inspired the title of this meditative book of life lessons, artistic revelations, and humble self-analysis. Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day, writes Murakami, a splendidly creative and compassionate writer who lives a disciplined life in order to infuse his fiction with wildness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Murakami's latest is a nonfiction work mostly concerned with his thoughts on the long-distance running he has engaged in for much of his adult life. Through a mix of adapted diary entries, old essays, reminiscences and life advice, Murakami crafts a charming little volume notable for its good-natured and intimate tone. While the subject matter is radically different from the fabulous and surreal fiction that Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) most often produces, longtime readers will recognize the source of the isolated, journeying protagonists of the author's novels in the formative running experiences recounted. Murakami's insistence on focusing almost exclusively on running can grow somewhat tedious over the course of the book, but discrete, absorbing episodes, such as a will-breaking 62-mile "ultramarathon" and a solo re-creation of the historic first marathon in Greece serve as dynamic and well-rendered highlights. Murakami offers precious little insight into much of his life as a writer, but what he does provide should be of value to those trying to understand the author's long and fruitful career. An early section recounting Murakami's transition from nightclub owner to novelist offers a particularly vivid picture of an artist soaring into flight for the first time. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Murakami is neither a conventional novelist nor a conventional memoirist. In this work whose title was inspired by Raymond Carver's short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, he explores how running has shaped his life. The best memoirs inform readers and enlighten them; this memoir contains practical philosophy from a man whose insight into his own character, and how running both suits and shapes that character, is revelatory and can provide tools for readers to examine and improve their own lives. Murakami wrote most of it between 2005 and 2006, but a key chapter from 1996 reinforces his later examination of his own development and the cadence of his life. This book will be appreciated by runners (as well as Murakami's usual readership) because it is ostensibly about running, but anyone interested in the processes of writing and self-examination will also be well served by it. Highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/08.]--Audrey Snowden, Cleveland P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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AUGUST 5, 2005 . KAUAI, HAWAII Who's Going to Laugh at Mick Jagger? I'm on Kauai, in Hawaii, today, Friday, August 5, 2005. It's unbelievably clear and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. As if the concept clouds doesn't even exist. I came here at the end of July and, as always, we rented a condo. During the mornings, when it's cool, I sit at my desk, writing all sorts of things. Like now: I'm writing this, a piece on running that I can pretty much compose as I wish. It's summer, so naturally it's hot. Hawaii's been called the island of eternal summer, but since it's in the Northern Hemisphere there are, arguably, four seasons of a sort. Summer is somewhat hotter than winter. I spend a lot of time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and compared to Cambridge--so muggy and hot with all its bricks and concrete it's like a form of torture--summer in Hawaii is a veritable paradise. No need for an air conditioner here--just leave the window open, and a refreshing breeze blows in. People in Cambridge are always surprised when they hear I'm spending August in Hawaii. "Why would you want to spend summer in a hot place like that?" they invariably ask. But they don't know what it's like. How the constant trade winds from the northeast make summers cool. How happy life is here, where we can enjoy lounging around, reading a book in the shade of trees, or, if the notion strikes us, go down, just as we are, for a dip in the inlet. Since I arrived in Hawaii I've run about an hour every day, six days a week. It's two and a half months now since I resumed my old lifestyle in which, unless it's totally unavoidable, I run every single day. Today I ran for an hour and ten minutes, listening on my Walkman to two albums by the Lovin' Spoonful-- Daydream and Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful --which I'd recorded on an MD disc. Right now I'm aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that's all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed--and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage. It rained for a short time while I was running, but it was a cooling rain that felt good. A thick cloud blew in from the ocean right over me, and a gentle rain fell for a while, but then, as if it had remembered, "Oh, I've got to do some errands!," it whisked itself away without so much as a glance back. And then the merciless sun was back, scorching the ground. It's a very easy-to-understand weather pattern. Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphor or the symbolic. On the way I passed a few other joggers, about an equal number of men and women. The energetic ones were zipping down the road, slicing through the air like they had robbers at their heels. Others, overweight, huffed and puffed, their eyes half closed, their shoulders slumped like this was the last thing in the world they wanted to be doing. They looked like maybe a week ago their doctors had told them they have diabetes and warned them they had to start exercising. I'm somewhere in the middle. I love listening to the Lovin' Spoonful. Their music is sort of laid-back and never pretentious. Listening to this soothing music brings back a lot of memories of the 1960s. Nothing really special, though. If they were to make a movie about my life (just the thought of which scares me), these would be the scenes they'd leave on the cutting-room floor. "We can leave this episode out," the editor would explain. "It's not bad, but it's sort of ordinary and doesn't amount to much." Those kinds of memories--unpretentious, commonplace. But for me, they're all meaningful and valuable. As each of these memories flits across my mind, I'm sure I unconsciously smile, or give a slight frown. Commonplace they might be, but the accumulation of these memories has led to one result: me. Me here and now, on the north shore of Kauai. Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore. As I run, the trade winds blowing in from the direction of the lighthouse rustle the leaves of the eucalyptus over my head. I began living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the end of May of this year, and running has once again been the mainstay of my daily routine ever since. I'm seriously running now. By seriously I mean thirty-six miles a week. In other words, six miles a day, six days a week. It would be better if I ran seven days, but I have to factor in rainy days, and days when work keeps me too busy. There are some days, too, when frankly I just feel too tired to run. Taking all this into account, I leave one day a week as a day off. So, at thirty-six miles per week, I cover 156 miles every month, which for me is my standard for serious running. In June I followed this plan exactly, running 156 miles on the nose. In July I increased the distance and covered 186 miles. I averaged six miles every day, without taking a single day off. I don't mean I covered precisely six miles every day. If I ran nine miles one day, the next day I'd do only three. (At a jogging pace I generally can cover six miles in an hour.) For me this is most definitely running at a serious level. And since I came to Hawaii I've kept up this pace. It had been far too long since I'd been able to run these distances and keep up this kind of fixed schedule. There are several reasons why, at a certain point in my life, I stopped running seriously. First of all, my life has been getting busier, and free time is increasingly at a premium. When I was younger it wasn't as if I had as much free time as I wanted, but at least I didn't have as many miscellaneous chores as I do now. I don't know why, but the older you get, the busier you become. Another reason is that I've gotten more interested in triathlons, rather than marathons. Triathlons, of course, involve swimming and cycling in addition to running. The running part isn't a problem for me, but in order to master the other two legs of the event I had to devote a great deal of time to training in swimming and biking. I had to start over from scratch with swimming, relearning the correct form, learning the right biking techniques, and training the necessary muscles. All of this took time and effort, and as a result I had less time to devote to running. Probably the main reason, though, was that at a certain point I'd simply grown tired of it. I started running in the fall of 1982 and have been running since then for nearly twenty-three years. Over this period I've jogged almost every day, run in at least one marathon every year--twenty-three up till now--and participated in more long-distance races all around the world than I care to count. Long-distance running suits my personality, though, and of all the habits I've acquired over my lifetime I'd have to say this one has been the most helpful, the most meaningful. Running without a break for more than two decades has also made me stronger, both physically and emotionally. The thing is, I'm not much for team sports. That's just the way I am. Whenever I play soccer or baseball--actually, since becoming an adult this is almost never--I never feel comfortable. Maybe it's because I don't have any brothers, but I could never get into the kind of games you play with others. I'm also not very good at-one-on-one sports like tennis. I enjoy squash, but generally when it comes to a game against someone, the competitive aspect makes me uncomfortable. And when it comes to martial arts, too, you can count me out. Don't misunderstand me--I'm not totally uncompetitive. It's just that for some reason I never cared all that much whether I beat others or lost to them. This sentiment remained pretty much unchanged after I grew up. It doesn't matter what field you're talking about--beating somebody else just doesn't do it for me. I'm much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself, so in this sense long-distance running is the perfect fit for a mindset like mine. Marathon runners will understand what I mean. We don't really care whether we beat any other particular runner. World-class runners, of course, want to outdo their closest rivals, but for your average, everyday runner, individual rivalry isn't a major issue. I'm sure there are garden-variety runners whose desire to beat a particular rival spurs them on to train harder. But what happens if their rival, for whatever reason, drops out of the competition? Their motivation for running would disappear or at least diminish, and it'd be hard for them to remain runners for long. Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat. As long as he can beat that time, a runner will feel he's accomplished what he set out to do, and if he can't, then he'll feel he hasn't. Even if he doesn't break the time he'd hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best--and, possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process--then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can carry over to the next race. The same can be said about my profession. In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn't seek validation in the outwardly visible. For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that's why I've put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I'm no great runner, by any means. I'm at an ordinary--or perhaps more like mediocre--level. But that's not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be. Since my forties, though, this system of self-assessment has gradually changed. Simply put, I am no longer able to improve my time. I guess it's inevitable, considering my age. At a certain age everybody reaches their physical peak. There are individual differences, but for the most part swimmers hit that watershed in their early twenties, boxers in their late twenties, and baseball players in their mid-thirties. It's something everyone has to go through. Once I asked an ophthalmologist if anyone's ever avoided getting farsighted when they got older. He laughed and said, "I've never met one yet." It's the same thing. (Fortunately, the peak for artists varies considerably. Dostoyevsky, for instance, wrote two of his most profound novels, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov , in the last few years of his life before his death at age sixty. Domenico Scarlatti wrote 555 piano sonatas during his lifetime, most of them when he was between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two.) My peak as a runner came in my late forties. Before then I'd aimed at running a full marathon in three and a half hours, a pace of exactly one kilometer in five minutes, or one mile in eight. Sometimes I broke three and a half hours, sometimes not (more often not). Either way, I was able to steadily run a marathon in more or less that amount of time. Even when I thought I'd totally blown it, I'd still be in under three hours and forty minutes. Even if I hadn't trained so much or wasn't in the best of shape, exceeding four hours was inconceivable. Things continued at that stable plateau for a while, but before long they started to change. I'd train as much as before but found it increasingly hard to break three hours and forty minutes. It was taking me five and a half minutes to run one kilometer, and I was inching closer to the four-hour mark to finish a marathon. Frankly, this was a bit of a shock. What was going on here? I didn't think it was because I was aging. In everyday life I never felt like I was getting physically weaker. But no matter how much I might deny it or try to ignore it, the numbers were retreating, step by step. Besides, as I said earlier, I'd become more interested in other sports such as triathlons and squash. Just running all the time couldn't be good for me, I'd figured, deciding it would be better to add variety to my routine and develop a more all-around physical regimen. I hired a private swimming coach who started me off with the basics, and I learned how to swim faster and more smoothly than before. My muscles reacted to the new environment, and my physique began noticeably changing. Meanwhile, like the tide going out, my marathon times slowly but surely continued to slow. And I found I didn't enjoy running as much as I used to. A steady fatigue opened up between me and the very notion of running. Excerpted from What I Talk about When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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