KEY POINTS:
This is a curious, slender hard-cover book. Curious because it is a work of non-fiction by one of Japan's most highly regarded contemporary novelists (among his many honours is the Franz Kafka Prize), and curious because one cannot imagine anyone finding the subject matter of interest unless they are a runner or a writer or both, which surely greatly reduces the size of your market.
For my part I ran three marathons back in the 1980s with the Auckland YMCA Marathon Club so was greatly intrigued with the idea of Murakami's book, although before reading it I did wonder how anyone could possibly write a whole book on the subject. He began running on a daily basis in 1982, aged 33.
His first novel, Hear The Wind Sing, was written in 1978 but once finished he wasn't sure what to do with it so he entered it in a literary magazine's new writers' prize.
The novel subsequently won the prize and was published the following year. He wrote two more novels and then decided to become a fulltime writer. "A problem arose, though, with my decision to become a professional writer - the question of how to keep physically fit," he writes.
"I tend to gain weight if I don't do anything. Running the bar [his previous job] required hard physical labour every day, and I could keep my weight down, but once I started sitting at my desk all day writing, my energy level gradually declined and I started putting on the pounds. If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to keep fit and maintain a healthy weight." He quickly decided that running had advantages - no one else was needed and no special equipment was required.
So began his running life, short distances at first, 20 or 30 minutes a day, building up to an hour a day six days a week and finally reaching marathons and triathlons. He has now run 25 of them worldwide. And had 12 novels published. Much of the book is taken up with his account of training for the New York City Marathon in 2005, although one must say that a good deal of it is about the author himself rather than the running detail.
He draws parallels between running and his writing: both are long term, both require a focus on the end result, both can be physically demanding, both have motivations and methods not always understood by non-participants, and in both one is always trying for a personal best.
Today, Murakami can't do one without the other. Running is essential to his literary output. Of writing novels, he says, "It is basically a kind of manual labour, the whole process requires far more energy over a long period than most people ever imagine." He believes running is the best training for writing.
Not being a novelist myself it will have to be for someone else to say whether or not he is correct but I can say that even though this volume is slender, it does feel somewhat padded and my respectful advice to Haruki Murakami is, stick to writing fiction, you do it so much better.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
By Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker $36.99)
* Graham Beattie is an Auckland book blogger: www.beatties bookblog.blogspot.com
