Running marathons is the second most important occupation in Haruki Murakami's life. The bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood discovered the compulsion to run at about the same time as he uncovered the compulsion to write, and so interdependent have the two become that when he writes about running you hear not just the phrasing of his fiction, but some of its themes as well. Young beautiful girls running alongside, whom he is too shy to talk to, will ring a familiar bell.

His wife, who waits for him at the finishing lines in marathons around the globe, is given no character, not even a name. Such details are for him alone to know. Or he's too pure a performer to have a private life to speak of.

Certainly he describes his body as a machine, and what he demands of himself as a runner borders on the obsessive-compulsive. He gets up before 5am and goes to bed before 10pm. Not so long ago he smoked 60 cigarettes a day, which is equally obsessive in the opposite direction. And he remains enamoured by writers who burn out prematurely and abuse their bodies, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver (from whose story: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love he lovingly pinched his title).

You gain many insights into this author's working practices, if not his private life. He comes across as pleasantly modest, keen for us to know that he knows his limitations (“I'm not the brightest person”). More than once it's suggested that his talent would not be enough without the “hard training and meticulous planning” that he applies to his running. He writes and runs not to win but to beat his previous best. Crowding 60 and anxiously aware of the ageing process, he intends to keep writing and running until one or the other finishes him off.

His insights into writing are valuable if you're a fan, but rarely go farther than the generic. I was more interested to learn that he once ran a jazz bar in Tokyo, for instance (he listens to the Stones and Clapton while running because their basic 12-bar blues structure helps to keep the foot-rhythm going).

But to be fair, these dispatches from the road are less about life than running, which he does “in order to acquire a void”, and because “nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness”.
Russell Celyn Jones

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
Vintage, £7.99; 192pp Buy the book

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