Run Murakami Run

The first surprise about Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Harvill Secker, 9.99 pounds) is that it turns out to be, as promised, about running. No use of the metaphor to make larger existential points, just the rigour and benefits of long-distance running. The second is not, at least to long-time readers of Murakami’s fiction, exactly a surprise, but it is still striking: for a slim offering from a writer of substantial following, it weighs in extremely well.

For Murakami, now in his late 50s, his running bears deep connections to his fiction, for the reason he began it and for the way the rhythms of the two dovetail into each other.

He writes: “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 am concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing.”

But he explains why it is he came to running: to keep thin and fit. He has just wound up his jazz cafe to become a full-time writer and the sudden sedentary life has piled up the extra pounds. These, however, are the bare bones of the story. The book is, ultimately, about the allure of long-distance running, about Murakami’s articulation of something runners know but often can’t express and something the rest of us can only wonder about.

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