1. Running and Writing

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running (Harvill Secker, 2008). Trans. Philip Gabriel.

"At a certain point, though, I decided that I should just write honestly about what I think and feel about running, and stick to my own style" (vii)

Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist and translator, can be counted on for a certain number of things in his novels, which he has now been writing for over three decades.  The pleasures of cooking, particularly spaghetti and eggs.  Ironing.  Mysterious girls with beautiful ears.  Stubborn and slightly melancholy loners as central figures.  Beer.  Explicit, tender, and often sad, sex.  Slightly faded, drab hotels, usually named ‘Dolphin Hotel’ that open a door into a slightly off-kilter world.  Mysterious quests, with talismanic figures offering guidance along the way.  Talking cats.  Jazz and 1960s rock.  There is also a certain style that recalls a twist on the gumshoe novels of Chandler, the short stories of Carver, and science fiction that remind you that Murakami has translated many of the American greats into Japanese.

All this adds up to make him one of the most well-known cult authors, read by millions of young readers who, particularly in the novella Norweigan Wood, have picked up on the sparse style, the counter-cultural references, and the slightly hip-outsider status of his fiction.  Now, the term cult doesn’t really cut it as a label for him.  Murakami is one of the world’s best selling ‘literary’ writers, is translated widely – and with the epic ‘Wind Up Bird Chronicles’ is clearly gunning alongside the big men on the world-fiction stage, taking aim at the Nobel prize with his gumshoe-magic-realist reflection on the darkness in modern Japanese society and the horrors of World War II.  Critics are not sure about him now.  Is there something of the Emperor’s New Clothes?  Is he too popular?  An exercise in stylish Orientalism, in the Edward Said sense?

Murakami has also published essays and the non-fiction ‘After the Quake’ and ‘Underground: the Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche’, both of which he said he felt obligated to write as a novelist.  What I Talk about when I Talk about Running falls into this section of his work.  Categorised by the publisher as a ‘sporting memoir’ it takes Murakami’s obsession with running as its central theme.  And by so doing, places him firmly back into another cult category – that of the dedicated runner, the obsessive long-distance biker, committed swimmer and repeat triathlete. 

Murakami has run 26 marathons around the world, one ultramarathon in the north of Japan, several triathlons and jogged solo from Athens to Marathon in the heat of summer.  The book offers ten chapters, not-quite-mini essays, recording his training for the 2005 New York marathon, and reflecting on what he things about when he runs, why he runs, and how this relates to his writing.  The pain of the marathon after the twenty-second mile.  We learn about his training, some of his best and worst runs, his timings, and how he is facing the reality of ageing.  He finds bicycles torture machines, and swimming often causes him problems.  Even though he is a good swimmer, something about the stress of the event freaks him out (water – and wells – are often a symbol of trauma in his novels).  He loses his goggles, smears them in Vaseline instead of saliva, and gets kicked in the head.  Some of his time is spent in Cambridge, Mass – ‘Sam Adams beer!’; ‘Dunkin’ Donuts!’ – and some in Japan and Greece.  We learn how writing is linked to his running.  He ran to keep fit enough to write, but found out that he is a runner.  Putting word after word onto paper are a bit like putting one foot in front of the other.

So what is Murakami up to here?  The final chapter perhaps gives a clue.  He has gone over the chapters, which were written as he went along in his training, when he had the time, and polished until they say exactly what he wants them to say.  They have the air of being quickly written, perhaps as though they are a diary, or being demanded by an editor (we learn that he has promised this book for ten years), but we also gather that he is a very careful craftsman, slowly tightening each screw one by one – to borrow a metaphor he likes to use.  It feels, he admits, that this is the time to write this book.  So, the lightness, the slightness, is a considered ploy.  The philosophy is lightly worn, too.  There is a lot about reality, how things are as they are.  How people are either runners, or they are not.  That being a novelist needs talent.  And work.  This insight is nothing new, but then nor is it flighty, or pretentious, or faux-philosophical essaying.

In this work, Murakami seems to offers two things, as well as a peon to that group of people who are runners, and who will recognize the camaraderie and solitude of those who run, the obsessions, the pleasures, and perhaps that cleanesss of mind that comes from repetitive and exhaustion of the road.

Firstly, it’s a memoir, and given Murakami’s well-known love of privacy (he never, or hardly ever, gives interviews), likely to be the only one we have.   He tells us about his early jazz bar, and some of the places he’s lived.  We learn a little about his wife, what it is like to work and struggle, how he became a writer one day at a baseball match, how he thinks about his readers, and the way he digs down creatively to find what he wants to write about.  He writes carefully about the psychological dangers of writing about the subconscious, digging down into a vein of darkness.  Without saying much, we learn a lot.  What is the Murakami that is revealed? Self-effacing.  Stubborn.  Likeable.  A little shy.  An eye for pretty women.  Obsessed by LPs and music.  A creature of habit, but able to make sudden changes.  A cautious man, but willing to take the risks he wants.

Secondly, it’s an exercise in style.   His words try and get at the thing exactly, in a voice that, in translation, is slightly hip, conversational, polite – despite him claiming he’s not a gentleman on the first page.  What I Talk About... is  a carefully limited world. Writing.  Running. Getting older.  How a runner knows their own body.  Cambridge, Mass.  Greece.  A matter of tone, as much as content, matched by everyday words, but Murakami has the ability here  to do something that gets inside your head, much like his other work.  Murakami, by writing about what and how he has become what he is, makes you wonder some of the same things about yourself.