What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Murakami’s expressive, descriptive, and naturalistic writing style takes the stage in this memoir about his amateur career as a distance runner. For another amateur runner like myself, this book applies his unique style to the truths which many people (including myself) have experienced. This peek behind the curtain into Murakami’s life is an eye-opening one, which gives new perspective to his other writings.

"All I can see is the ground three yards ahead, nothing beyond. My whole world consistes of the ground three yards ahead. No need to think beyond that....this was my tiny reason for living."

Haruki Murakami, best know for his `stream of consciousness and brutally honest writing style, goes introspective on the weird random thoughts he has when he runs. In a memoir (of sorts) he draws from his life as a hugely successful novelist, seasoned bar owner, and, on most frigid New England afternoons, long distance runner, to bring us his views of the world, writing and running.

I read this book for Murakamis thoughts on writing first and foremost. Ive known of his quirky writing style for some time, and thought I might get a little insight into that groovy brain of his. Little did I suspect this book would be so spiritual. As it turns out, the writing `advice or `tips are pretty scarce: Haruki describes it mostly as painful, grinding manual labor. In fact, for a guy that runs as much as he does, it turns out he almost never gets any new ideas for novels while running. I found this somewhat disappointing. Of all the time he spends running, and he doesnt get any inspiration at all? But then I realized, that his job is writing and selling books, why would he want to think about work, in what is meant to be an escape from the office.

As boring as it sounds, Murakami seems to get all his great ideas from....pushing himself to keep writing, in much the same way he pushes himself to run. It looks glamourous and "fun" from afar, but it really is work. If you want to be good, there is no secret, you just have to work. Ive heard of writers that force themselves to write in volume, either 10 pages a day, or a notepad per week, whatever-they force themselves to get it all out on the page, and then the real fun comes later: editing (sometimes tossing 80-90% of their original draft).

The beauty of Murakamis writing is that hes able to revisit a past moment, and relive it so vividly, that he can recapture the stream of consciousness, the wild ramblings of his inner mind, that seems the most impossible thing to recall, the hardest thing to fake. Hes either brilliant at making this up, or has an amazing memory. Either way, we get to tag along (not just in this, but his other novels as well).

When it comes to running, Murakami goes the distance. Sprinting for 40 metres is wild, electric and explosive, whereas long distance running is something else entirely: its almost pointless in its repetitiveness and slow plodding pace; it can be dull, it can be lonely, it can be brutally painful and intimidating-what can we possibly learn from running? In many ways, Murakami reflects in Spiritual, almost ascetic tones on the breakthroughs hes had while running marathons: its only when hes been pushed to the physical breaking point, that his perceptions of pain and thirst, and ego, and struggle, truly shattered into a million pieces, like when he describes his 62-mile ultra marathon run. The last 30 minutes, he recounts, as a blissful breezy union with nature, where the plants and the birds, and all the clouds seemed to cheer him on, and he passed about 30 other runners. He seemed to break free from his own body, for just a brief period, but as they say, a mind once learned, will never see the world the same way again.

And all those races, whats it all for? Ego? Fame? Publicity? Not at all. Running is one of the few sports where, youre racing against yourself, so you cant lie. You have to be brutally honest, because no one else cares. There is no publicity and the awards are few and far between. You can walk. You can quit. No one will ever push you to run (and most will even talk you out of it, because youre ultrafit lifestyle is incredibly annoying). But you dont run because its easy, you do it, because you want to push yourself, and be as strong at 52 as you were at 25. Murakami, again, in brutal honesty, recounts with some regret that he may never be as strong as agile as he once was. Its nature. Its reality.Its not just a race, its a struggle with mortality. Ultimately, the rewards come as glimpses of some great awakening-glimpses that we dont get if we walk the last 2 miles of the marathon. The great battle against our tired racked bodies (and what they may or may not be capable of) can only be won out there, on the lonely road, at the crack of dawn, with our bleary eyes focused on the next 3 yards, and nothing more.

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I have placed this book atop my listmania group of literary running books. Haruki Murakamis marvelously entertaining WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING is about his running, yes, but it also touches on other interesting ideas, including the authors affinities for music, literature, and baseball, Japanese and American:

"As if to lament the defeat of the Boston Red Sox in the playoffs (they lost every game in a Sox vs. Sox series with Chicago), for ten days afterward a cold rain fell on New England. A long autumn rain. Sometimes it rained hard, sometimes softly; sometimes, it would let up for a time like an afterthought, but not once did it clear up."

"From beginning to end the sky was completely covered with the thick gray clouds particular to this region. Like a dawdling person, the rain lingered for a long time, then finally made up its mind to turn into a downpour. Towns from New Hampshire to Massachusetts suffered damage from the rain, and the main highway was cut off in places."

Murakami says he took the title of his book from the title of the Raymond Carver short story collection, WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT LOVE, and thanks Carvers widow for giving him permission. Murakami has translated many of Carvers works into Japanese, as well as other American fiction. He says:

"One other project Im involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgeralds THE GREAT GATSBY, and things are going well. Ive finished the first draft and am revising the second. Im taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and Im better able to render Fitzgeralds prose into more natural Japanese."

"Its a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but GATSBY really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. Its the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do Im struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-one at the time, could grasp--so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly--the realities of life. How was this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is."

Music, baseball, literature, and running. My kind of writer. Runners looking for a similar read might want to try Don Kardongs THIRTY PHONE BOOTHS TO BOSTON. Readers new to Murakami who enjoyed this one might be inspired to try one of the authors many novels, and I highly recommend THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE.

Goodness gracious. Haruki Murakami writes about running in "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." Running is supposed to be an inroad into other big life issues, and sometimes Murakami is able to make the connections and sometimes he isnt. Minimally this much comes across: Murakamis long career as a runner mirrors his long career as a writer, and its only achieved by a persistence and passion to achieve his longterm goals--to really get to the end of that marathon or to finish a story or novel.

Of Murakamis fiction, I believe Ive only ever read one short story. Im interested in reading some of his works of fiction, although my girlfriend advises against it because she says he "writes weird." I think I understand what she means. Supposedly in his fiction the worldview is slightly off kilter. Thats not clearly stating it either. Another stab. My coworker said that Murakamis "got a way of making you look at normal things in a strange new way," much as I imagine the director David Lynch is able to bring the viewer into the world lurking just beneath the surface of our normal one, a world of dreamscapes and oddities.

What comes across in this work of nonfiction, however, is that Murakami cares a lot about both writing and running and that he has a pretty relaxed attitude toward his life and toward the concept of failure. Its strange, like a sort of passive optimism or a positive indifference. Its like he knows that he needs a lot of time and patience and training to accomplish his goals, and he does the best he can in these respects, but then if he still doesnt attain his goals, he shrugs his shoulders and then has another go at it. Thats what comes across, then, his resilience, this deep inability to give up.

This book was a bit thin, more like a book in search of a unifying concept. The unifying concept is supposed to be running but for me what was usually most exciting were the topics at the periphery, what would come in passing, and when the peripheral topics are compared against the books conduit, running, the idea of running becomes unimpressive. And on top of that, the book didnt really inspire me to run, so--

Because I love Haruki Murakami’s novels, and because in the last year I became very interested in running (which increased my interest in the books about running) I was very happy to finally be able to read what many people consider a cult running book – Murakami’s “What I talk about when I talk about running”.

Murakami has been a runner for years (his results are on athlinks.com). I have actually seen him running along Charles river in Cambridge, as his stay there overlapped with mine. In his very personal account of the running experience, he describes how he began running seriously. I really love how he writes about his successes and failures, his feelings while running training runs and races, and his evolving attitude to running.

Because Murakami is a writer, his book is different that other runners’ accounts or advice on running. He simply writes better. He is able to make the reader feel his pain, elation, frustration, tiredness and pride associated with the training process and participation in races. I loved his first marathon choice – he ran the original route in reverse, from Athens to Marathon, alone, and wrote an article about his experience. Also, his account of an ultramarathon in Japan (100 km race) is breathtaking, and his notes on the transition into triathlons are very honest.

Sometimes he sounds a little too proud of himself – like when he comments on the female Harvard students passing him during his training runs in Cambridge – but this just makes the descriptions of his thoughts more believable and. He seems to be completely genuine, no matter what he writes, and this is also why I liked even his opinions on particular brands of running gear – they did not sound like a product placement at all, just a frank opinion on what he personally thinks is best for him. Particularly interesting are the thoughts on the impact of running on the rest of the author’s endeavors as a writer, pub owner and lecturer. Strikingly, he writes very little on his marriage and I would like to hear more on how he and his wife incorporate his running into their daily life as a couple, but I understand it might be a private matter.

I will return to this book for sure, I understand why it is a cult book among runners, and I wish Mr. Murakami many more years of satisfying running and triathlons!

WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING

Me running together with Murakami

This is a very special kind of book. I wonder whether anybody having nothing to do with running would be interested in reading this book. On one hand the subject matter of the book calls for personal engagement with running, but on the other, the author is a big master of formulating his ideas so that.... He could make an interesting story out of a block of wood, why then not of his personal experiences of looking around while using the simplest means of transportation in a most effective way.

Murakami really runs his eyes open and observing. Having done that already a quarter of a century as a means to writing books and distributing them in millions of copies in tens of languages all over the world is utmost impressive. What a fantastic simplicity in combination! Just running, seeing and writing!

While reading this book I felt myself his co-runner, already for the reason that I started my running only a few years before Murakami, in 1977 at the age of forty years. But sadly enough, especially looking at it now, in the light of this story, finished my career only seven years later, physically, but not spiritually. Twelve marathons, half an hour faster than Murakami - proud to say. Once runner, always runner, that is the main thing and the motivation to read this book.

The second chapter of the book is a good rough description of my own career. The same steps, same transformation of every day habits in eating, resting, body hurting and enjoying a new way of life. Murakami started his career as writer about parallel to his running. I also wrote books, text books in economics, but was at that time already finishing my career after tens of thousand books and going over to computer programming, still continuing it today. And differently from Murakami, never have I been able to see any direct connection between my motioning and writing.

Murakamis devotion and stamina are impressive. At several occasions he is telling, how important it is to make running an everyday habit. I found it shocking, when he tells about leaving his smoking. Perhaps, instead of pills, running should be advised as a means of getting rid of smoking! Running and smoking - a completely impossible combination, it really seems to me. My big thing was getting rid of 20 kg overweight. Another big was that I first time found myself a long distance runner after having been a sprinter in my young days, up to 20 years of age.

Starting this running book I was already familiar with Murakamis grass root level writing style from his later book about the lone rider Tsukuru in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Now having finished this running book I only remember, how I was somewhat disappointed with some overly detailed description of certain technicalities after the takeoff of the flight in running and even more interesting in the parallel start of his authors career. There are two more very big causes of disappointment in this otherwise so excellent and under the skin going story. One is his, or the editors, or the translators, or the publishers harring to miles as the measure of distance. Is it only the English translation that requires miles, or is this true also in Japan in general? Another disappointment was that he never gives his exact running times in plain numbers. I would have preferred that way in stead of roughly putting it in words like three hours forty five minutes etc.

There is still another very personal disappointment to me. I expected that I would find in this book the solution of the main riddle after the other book mentioned above. How on Earth does Murakami give my country Finland a special treatment in that other book? Perhaps something to do with running? With the Finnish great champion, his exact coeval Lasse Virén, double gold medal winner of long distance running in two olympic games, that is: one man, four gold medals! No answer to this question. Not in the other book, not in this, not even in Wikipedia. So perhaps I must continue reading Murakami. Not an unpleasant undertaking for the future! Do I dare to give only four stars - mainly because of the continuous nuisance of miles in stead of kilometers?

20150204

I have this theory that goes like this: sometimes we find books, and sometimes books find us.

Oftentimes Ill pick up a book, read a few lines, and quickly close the covers. Ill instinctively know that no matter how much I want to read it that that books message was meant for a later time. And sure enough, years later, Ill spot the book on the corner of my shelf and be moved to pick it up, only to find exactly what I needed to hear. Its funny how life, and reading, works that way.

Other times Ill find a book in the most random way - through a footnote or a random citation in an obscure periodical, for instance - and that books message will be exactly what I needed to hear at that moment in my life. That was certainly the case with Japanese novelist Karuki Murakamis wonderful little book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

While training for the New York City Marathon Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami decided to write about it as well. What materialized was a unique memoir that discusses his twin passions of writing and running, and the interesting way they nurture and inform each other.

Ive been struggling as of late staying focused on the hard work of writing, so when I opened the book and read the following lines I knew that a message that I needed to hear had found me:

"One runner told of a mantra his older brother, also a runner, had taught him which hes pondered ever since he began running. Here it is: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say youre running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I cant take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running."

If you feel called to creative work, and are struggling with finding the discipline necessary to create a body of work, youll find this playful, oftentimes philosophical memoir food for your soul.

I must state that having heard so much about Murakami and of the immense popularity of "1Q84", I wanted to see what it was all about. Being a triathlete, I decided that this was the book to pick up first.

A fast read, it is a memoir of how he first became a runner and his perception on life. Hes a bare-bones sort of guy, wants no embellishment and doesnt glamorize anything. He is practical on his outlook on life but has that part that all athletes can relate to: the training. I was intrigued by the fifth and sixth chapters because it became more introspective (the image of the young college students running past him, their strides reflecting their attitude that no one can beat them was especially poignant).

As an intro into his world and writing, I found the book a pleasant and welcome addition to my library as well as an inspiration. In the first chapter, the quote "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional" is something any endurance athlete can relate to. He asks for no pity when he doesnt do as well as he planned and hoped (which was more or less all of the competitions he wrote about) but being Japanese, for as much as he has wandered away from a Japanese style of writing, he is very much of a Japanese heart and therefore, writes in that mindset.

I do get the feeling that his other work is a bit different in style because here he adheres to the truth of how his competitions played out, how he felt and how hard he worked to reach that unattained goal. Perhaps I err but I felt that he felt more free because it was that much easier to write; I mean, he was there.

All in all, I would read another book of his. He is an honest writer and doesnt care what people think of this memoir. He just wanted to do it for himself and that gets high marks in my book.

Im not much of a reader and I had never heard of this author before reading this book. Apparently I live under a rock. A few chapters in I was getting turned off by some of the snobbiness of his living and traveling all over the world. Cambridge this, Hawaii that. Some of us dont have those means. I was about to call this book a loss when I decided to Google the guy and learn who he was. With some additional context there, but still not overly impressed, I decided to stick it out and finish the book anyway. Im glad I did. There are some good moments in here that runners of all levels may find a connection with. His Athens to Marathon trek was engaging, and his 24hr knee injury fear was something many of us can relate to. Gotta love it when the potential onset of an injury, and he fear that comes with it, clears up after a day. While Ive read better running memoirs, I can confidentally give this one 4 stars. Ill go back to living under my rock now.

This book is as much about Murakami as it is about running. He discusses his personal relationship with running as well as the lifestyle changes and habits that he adopted around running. He talks about various memories of running as well as what he thinks about when he runs. Its a fairly short read and contains some sections that could be considered thoughtful or poetic or even inspirational. Its NOT a manual on how to become a skilled runner, nor is it just pro-running propaganda. While I would not consider this to be essential reading for the casual Murakami enthusiast, theres definitely a market for this book out there.