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

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Vintage

Haruki Murakami

2007 (Japan)/ 2008 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin
   

Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library

“The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.”

That this was my third non-fiction book in a row is certainly a personal record that might never be broken, with normal service to resume very shortly. Of course, this work of non-fiction is from one Haruki Murakami, who happens to be my favourite author of fiction in the world, and a maverick writing genius whose mind and methods hold a kind of mysterious aura for me (and surely many other readers too), with works of indescribably strange and magical fiction like the two-part 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore thrilling a global audience. With that in mind, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running contained an element of intrigue unique to all of Murakami's work, as it promised to provide insight on the man from the man, in the form of an ethereal memoir focused around the topic of one of Murakami's favourite activities; running marathons.

Weighing in at just 177 pages (Vintage edition), What I Talk... is a very curious book, in that it's kind of hard to pin down the genre. Only Murakami's second non-fiction title (the other Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which I just ordered from Amazon today), this one steers far away from the typically-heavy surrealism of Murakami's fiction, meaning there's a distinct lack of parallel universes or talking cats; instead this reminds me of a book (handily reviewed here) by my second favourite non-dead non-Terry Pratchett author, Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, in that it's kind of a small window into the personal life of an enigmatic author who turns his every day experiences into a range of philosophical musings. In this regards it's actually not too dissimilar to aspects of Murakami's normal work, where the magical realism often relies on his lead characters having the mundane aspects of their lives exist as the basis for the thoughtful madness that engulfs them.

Murakami, not running.

The lead narrative of these chronologically-mixed memoirs revolves around Murakami preparing to run the 2005 New York City Marathon, though it's far from his first. Murakami has been running for the majority of his life, for at least an hour each day, and competing in at least one marathon per year, as well as a more recent triathlon. There's no preaching or moralizing involved, no encouragement for the reader to join in and get healthy, as Murakami doesn't really know why he started running, nor does he need to justify it; for him, and for this book, it's simply another way of looking at the world around him, allowing him to make gentle observations on the world he views as he runs, and on the nature of his own desires in life. He speaks in very little detail about his literary work, which I found disappointing, and not much more about his own personal life.

Fairly ethereal, but not particularly essential, I casually enjoyed this book as an aside to the author's more serious novels; as a kind of extended essay that offers a carefully-constructed glimpse, but no more, at the man behind so many complicated novels. As a Murakami completest, I was thus both a little frustrated at the purposeful lack of insight but contrarily intrigued further by the few details given that further shaped the personality of an enigmatic figure. It's impossible for an author to write books as distinctive and individualistic as Murakami's without casting the shadow of his personality across the narrative, and Murakami's personal narration is very similar to that of Kafka of Kafka on the Shore, or Hajime of South of the Border, West of the Sun, but obviously the tale never drifts down the same dark paths of magic and mystery, which means ultimately means I can never really love this book on the same level of those fictions.