by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel

When someone like Haruki Murakami, a 30-year veteran novelist whose novels are surrounded by more praise than well, than any other contemporary Japanese writer anyway, announces that his next book will be a personal sports memoir, it can cause quite a stir. Murakami’s writing has become the arena of our imaginations, the voice of collective trauma, a red herring all too visible in a night sky cluttered with schlock and waste. Needless to say, I was as skeptical as anyone else, first of Murakami being able to return to his very personal writing roots, and also at how well he would pull off such a tactile, narrative-less topic.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a memoir packed with the Eastern punch you’ve come to expect from Murakami. Taking its name from the Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Murakami’s memoir pays the same sort of latently conscious lip service to the act of running that Carver pulled off about love. He delves straight to the heart of the feat, the motivation, the success and failure of such a normal human action. Murakami himself is sixty years old and still stepping strong.

After running in over twenty-five marathons, Murakami’s writing carries an immense authority. He takes the reader on a journey through one year of training with a collection of essays that not only highlight the types of workouts he’s doing, but are interjected by anecdotes that bring to a much more focused light the mindset behind a person crazy enough to run 26.2 miles in one stretch. A significant portion of it is set up to compare his own philosophy on running to his philosophy on writing. He’s also careful to cite that these actions and the way he “needs” to do them can apply to all sorts of responsibilities and goals in life. Here he simplifies muscle theory into layman’s terms and a applicable theory for training for anything in life:

“Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger. It doesn’t happen overnight, of course. But as long as you take your time and do it in stages, they won’t complain – aside from the occasional long face… Our muscles are very conscientious. As long as we observe the correct procedure, they won’t complain.”

The author takes the reader from one race to the next, one life challenge to the next—opening and closing your own bar, running from Athens to Marathon, even the mundane maintenance of an extremely busy and fluctuating work schedule—in an autobiographical style that is all Murakami’s own: the ebb and flow of time not being nearly as important as the individual actions that are occurring in those single moments.Perhaps the most endearing portions of the book come at those moments when Murakami slips out of his first-person expository mode and into his stylistic meditations on larger issues at hand. These passages are, also in his typical form, some of the shortest and hardest hitting:

“…sometimes I remember these other runners. I’ll round a corner and feel like I should see them coming toward me, silently running, their breath white in the morning. Air. And I always think this: They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?”

Throughout the book, Murakami takes the reader on many journeys. While each chapter takes us closer to finishing another type of race, another life goal, Murakami’s distinctly Eastern viewpoint focuses more on the process and the completion than on winning. Such an attitude is not only refreshing, but one that any person, runner or not, would do well to adopt. Murakami laughs, aches, accomplishes, and loses as he pulls the reader through a truly wonderful journey, all the while doing what he does best— systematically making all the most complex ideas at once both mystical and accessible.

Reviewed by Mark Steffen

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel
Knopf Publishing Group, 2008.
Cloth, 179 pgs, $21.00
ISBN-10 : 0307269191