If the world may be divided into the aesthetes and the hearties, then it might seem a fair bet that authors rise almost entirely from the ranks of the former. Not quite so: plenty of writers have also been dead keen on their sports. Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard are both passionate about cricket, as was Samuel Beckett, still the only Nobel laureate to be mentioned in Wisden. David Storey played rugby. Albert Camus was a footballer, and once said that the footy pitch was his major school of philosophy. John Irving wrestles, John Updike loves golf. Virginia Woolf was a fearless bungee-jumper. (One of these examples is a lie.) And Haruki Murakami, the current supernova of Japanese fiction, runs marathons.

A notable difference between Murakami and the other athlete-writers or writer-athletes, though, is that, for the Japanese novelist, pounding the pavement is more than something he does to fill the hours when he’s not busy pounding the keyboard. He considers it essential to his writing career, partly because it has given him the health and endurance to complete novel after novel, but in more subtle and far-reaching ways as well. Murakami fans (who number in their millions) will already be well aware of this connection between writing and running. He has written plenty of articles about it over the last two decades, and has been profiled in glossy magazines for runners, who seem to be tickled by the idea that such a celebrated author should share their world of cramps and aching knees.

Running, Murakami explains, was a vocation that came to him not very long after his relatively late start as a writer. The version given in this memoir corroborates a well-known account published in the critical study Murakami and the Music of Words, by Jay Rubin. In his twenties, Murakami was entirely innocent of literary ambition, and spent long, enjoyable hours managing a jazz club with his wife, Yoko. Then, one day — April 1, 1978, to be exact — while watching a baseball game, it suddenly struck him that he could write a novel. He duly bought a cheap fountain pen and a stack of paper, wrote one, and sent it off as an entry in a literary competition. It won, and was promptly published, as was his second novel. Quite unexpectedly, he was faced with a choice between the sociable world of his bar, which was finally showing some decent profits, and the loneliness of the long-distance novelist.

In opting for the solitary path, Murakami made other changes. He moved to a more rural district, and abandoned his late nights; he gave up smoking and adopted a Spartan diet; and, worried that his newly sedentary life would make him plump, he began to jog. “Thirty-three — that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill.” (The reference to Fitzgerald is worth a pause. Murakami reveres him, and has translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese. It’s likely that Murakami nurses the wistful fantasy that Fitzgerald might have traded in martinis for marathons, stayed alive, and written on for three or four decades.) Huffing and sweating, he could last for only 20 minutes or so to start with. By 1983, he was ready to take part in a road race, and from that point his twin fate as runner and writer was sealed.

Murakami insists that this isn’t a book in search of converts, though he admits that it would “be a beautiful thing” for him if some people read it and decided to take up the sport. He seems sincere, especially since he dwells more on the agonies of long runs than on the ecstasy of endorphin rushes. There is a gruelling account of the time he went to Athens so as to run the actual course of the original marathon, albeit in reverse. “The naked sun is blazing hot . . . I feel like I’m in an oven. The salt makes my eyes sting, and for a while I can’t see a thing. I wipe away the sweat with my hand, but my hand and face are salty, too.”

Much of the book is written in this fairly plain, chatty style: there’s little “fine writing” on show, which may disappoint his aesthete readers but will no doubt be a relief to the hearties. Its most memorable passages, though, describe the wonderful refreshment that he seeks at the end of each marathon. When I closed the book, I found myself fantasising not about athletic feats, but that more readily available satisfaction that Murakami evokes so tellingly: the stinging joy of a very, very cold beer.

WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING by Haruki Murakami Harvill Secker £9.99 pp181.Buy the book from Books First £9.49 including free delivery

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