Until he was thirty, Haruki Murakami ran a bar. Then he ran a marathon; then he ran another one; and another one . . . . That’s the story, basically. He has now run twenty-four marathons and one ultramarathon (the same, only a lot further), and has competed in six triathlons (swim a long way, cycle a long way, run a long way). He runs almost every day, or at least every day it’s not raining (he seems to be a bit of a wuss about the rain) – he says different things at different times about how often he runs. Runners are like that: you can’t believe a word they say about their running.

Reading anyone’s frank confessions about their running habits, it can be hard to stop the words “obsessive-compulsive disorder” passing through the mind. Murakami presents himself as pretty laid back, as runners go; then he tells us that in preparing for the New York Marathon in 2005 he ran 156 miles in June, 186 miles in July, 217 miles in August, and 186 miles in September. Of course, running is an essentially harmless drug. There is no conclusive evidence that it leads to harder drugs such as triathlon (that may have an independent appeal because it requires more gear). Only hopeless junkies get hooked on ultramarathoning. I’d say Murakami is on his way to becoming a recovering triathlete. He tells us that he’s now not bothered about his times. Yeah, right.

When he needs a break from running, Murakami goes for a long write. He writes every day, even when it’s raining. He has now written eleven novels plus volumes of stories and essays, and has translated a number of works from English. He is a seriously competitive writer: his Personal Best is Norwegian Wood, at 4.1 million (and that’s just in Japanese). The publication of that novel in 1987 transformed Murakami’s life; for a while he effectively went into hiding to escape the unwelcome intrusions of celebrity. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and he recently won the Franz Kafka prize, the exact nature of which is, quite properly, a little mysterious. The title of Murakami’s new book pays homage to the title of a Raymond Carver short-story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As this suggests, Murakami likes to hang out with serious writers. He is the translator of Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others; even this slight memoir of his running draws in quotations from Somerset Maugham and Raymond Chandler. And, serious writer that he is, he has spent a long time on this book, frequently revising it. “I was scrupulous about making sure it was exactly the way I wanted it”, he tells us.

In interviews over the years, Murakami has spoken of his deliberate choice of a simple colloquial register as an escape from the formality of the Japanese literary tradition. His novels have a reputation for sounding cool, modern and disengaged, and clearly this poses special problems for his translators. Jay Rubin, who has translated several of Murakami’s books, has written well about the difficulty of preserving “the American flavour” of the originals, noting that some other translators (including Philip Gabriel, the translator of this book) have tried to cope with this problem by deliberately introducing “a certain exaggerated hipness of expression into the English text”. Perhaps the travails of a middle-aged runner don’t call for much by way of “hipness”, but there is certainly a down-home folksiness to the chosen (American) idiom – “summer warmth is still a ways off”; when we’re young “we can always start over”; he last lived in Cambridge, Mass. “back when Bill Clinton was president”; and so on.

The blurb describes the book as “philosophical” in places. I’m just guessing, but I wonder if the following are some of those places. About not winning: “On the highway of life, you can’t always be in the fast lane”. About warming up: “What I mean is, a person’s mind is controlled by his body, right? Or is it the opposite – the way the mind works influences the structure of the body? Or do the body and mind closely influence each other and act on each other?”. About watching pretty girls overtake him: “One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me”. (Is it better or worse because they’re “pretty”?) About getting older: “Ever since time began (when was that I wonder?) it’s been moving ever forward without a moment’s rest”. It’s always hard with a translation to know quite where the credit lies, but there are some intriguing phrases in this book. For example, observing some older runners, Murakami says: “Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time”. Nicely Tennysonian, perhaps, but physiologically disconcerting. Or, speaking of his discovery of his literary talent: “There were untouched veins dormant within me”. A triple-metaphor bypass might be needed here. And of the cycling leg of one triathlon: “I just let ’er rip”. I suspect that one does sound better in Japanese.

The oddest feature of this book is what I can only describe as the affectless narrating of affect. Many of the episodes the author describes involve extremes of effort and suffering, of joy and disappointment, but they are all retailed in the same flat well-there-you-are tone. Perhaps Murakami’s huge following in the world has something to do with this carefully sustained voice. His prose has an artless, stripped-down, talking-to-myself quality, which every so often breaks out into cracker-barrel wisdom. He doesn’t sound writerly; there’s nothing to frighten the horses.

The advance publicity for this book (Murakami is the sort of writer who attracts a lot of advance publicity) promised that it would reveal “the man” behind the writing, tempting bait for his many fans since this cult author largely shuns the literary celebrity circuit. In the event, not a lot is revealed: the only other character is a shadowy person called “my wife” who mainly seems to spend her time hanging around at finishing lines. Beyond that, what we learn is that Murakami is the usual determined, asocial obsessive with strong thighs. It was also promised that the book would cast light on the connection between the two activities for which Murakami is best known. Every running writer (or writing runner, as you tend to think of yourself when your times are good and your reviews are bad) will recognize the conviction that a healthy but calmed body is the essential precondition for successful long-distance writing. Murakami doesn’t really take us far beyond that. “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.” It’s a beguiling, indeed cheering, declaration, but, as I say, runners mostly lie when talking about their running. “To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort.” Yes, indeed. “In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent.” The book is full of insights like this.

Haruki Murakami is now fifty-nine. His times are getting worse, not that he cares about that, of course. He’s had a little knee trouble recently; but it’s OK because everything is OK in the end, except when it’s not, and even that’s OK in a way. “It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.” For his millions of fans, there is clearly something attractive about this kind of matter-of-fact wisdom.

Haruki Murakami
WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING
Translated by Philip Gabriel
180pp. Harvill Secker. £9.99. 978 1 84655 220 5
US: Knopf. $21. 978 0 307 26919 5

Stefan Collini's Common Reading: Critics, historians, publics was published earlier this year; he has recently completed a one hour and forty minute half-marathon - he says.

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