Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running review

MARATHON MAN
Alastair Campbell takes fellow novelist Haruki Murakami's views on life and running in his stride

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel

The Guardian
Saturday 26 July 2008

Whatever respect I had for Haruki Murakami as a writer - which is considerable - it is as nothing to the depth of my bow down before the Japanese novelist on discovering that he has run an ultramarathon.

His description of the physical and mental agonies as he struggled to complete the 62-mile course, followed by the near-religious experience of the last few miles, when he knew he was going to finish, is one of the highlights of what he calls "a kind of memoir". Non-running readers of his novels will probably ask: "Why on earth did he run 62 miles when he knew it would hurt so much?" Runners ask a different question: "Why have I never done that?"

I did have a plan to run 50 miles on my 50th birthday last year but a cycling injury to my calf - like Murakami, I also do triathlon - grounded me. Now, also like him, my running is accompanied by constant worries about ageing, reflected in ever slower times.

He is in a different class to me, as runner and novelist, and throughout he gives the sense that he cannot be one without being the other. He has done 25 marathons and written 11 novels. I have done one marathon and written two novels, neither yet published. My publisher doesn't really want me to talk about them till they're out, and certainly doesn't want me talking about the second one until the first is published (November, since you ask; it's about a psychiatrist and called All in the Mind.)

But it is difficult to review this book without acknowledging the role Murakami played in the second one, which will hopefully be out some time next year. I was reading his Sputnik Sweetheart, the story of a man's love for a woman involved in a lesbian relationship, replete with his usual themes of loneliness and worries about where people fit in their society. As I read, I began to wonder whether I could write a novel with a first-person narrator who becomes more than narrator, a central character too, like "K" in Sputnik Sweetheart. I'm on the third draft.

Non-runners should not be put off by the title of the book, a play on Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, because while the neuroses and obsessions of the runner leap from every page, along the way we learn little things about Murakami the writer and Murakami the man. We learn how and when he works. We get an insight into doubts and insecurities when he first started out as a writer, and what he sees as a novelist's greatest qualities - number one is talent, then focus, then endurance; the read across to running in qualities two and three is obvious enough not to need stating. We learn of his sleeping patterns, including his preference for a post-lunch nap which, lucky man, leaves him feeling totally refreshed. He has a low pulse rate (triathletes are obsessed with their pulse rates) and wears Mizuno running shoes. He used to run a bar. His wife has a sweet tooth and seems to spend much of her life at finishing lines. We learn that he rehearses speeches while running - snap - and that he gets nervous before making them - not snap - and prefers public speaking in his imperfect English to his native Japanese with its (for him) infinite choices of verbal expression.

So, provided admirers of his novels realise they are reading about him, not just about running, they will enjoy this little book - too little for me: I wanted more of the running detail. He describes well the brutality of the "wall" that hits many runners a few miles out from the end of a marathon. The near-insanity of the running mind is captured in his first marathon, which he ran from Athens to Marathon with only a photographer for company. He is good on how a hill can seem nothing on a short training run but loom like a mountain if it comes at the wrong time in a race. And all runners will identify with the devotion to certain musicians who help with the endurance of long training runs, and his rough conversations with muscles that do not want to operate as instructed by the will and the brain: "I have to show my muscles who's boss."

The style is very clipped, many of the sentences short, so you feel the pace of the runner skipping through the text. There are seeming inconsistencies in there, though, about the relationship between running and writing. On the one hand he says: "Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day." Yet he also writes: "Occasionally, hardly ever really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don't think much of anything worth remembering." Presumably it is the focus and endurance he learned through running. Yet it is hard to imagine that his running does not unlock creativity too. I speak as someone for whom a disappointing run is one where I do not have an idea good enough to text to myself while running so that I can follow it up when home, and whose solution to any kind of mental block is to go for a run or a bike ride, BlackBerry in pocket ready to record whatever emerges when the block is gone. Then again, elsewhere Murakami says: "While I was running, some other thoughts on writing novels came to me."

Perhaps these inconsistencies are no more than a reflection of the fact that different runs create different moods and insights. This book is in some ways the story of the workings of Murakami's mind, dressed up as a book about running. Maybe he doesn't want to do a more standard autobiography. He should. He is a fine writer, and an interesting man. As I closed this slim volume, I was left wanting to know more about him, not less. Then I went for a run and tried to imagine what the last half-hour of a 62-mile run would be like. He knows, and I'm jealous.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/sportandleisure