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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a slender memoir in which Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood)addresses exactly what he purports to: running. Specifically, Murakami employs his expertise as a writer to contemplate what running has come to mean in his life.

Murakami's memoir takes the form of a runner's diary that spans Summer 2005 to Fall 2006 in which he intimately explores his running practice, largely as it pertains to his preparation for running marathons.

In fact, more than half of the memoir's 180 pages detail Murakami's regimen in preparing for the 2005 New York Marathon. For an hour a day, six days a week, Murakami laces up his Mizuno running shoes, slaps some Lovin' Spoonful into his Sony MiniDisc player, and sets his body in motion, the meditative rhythm of his footfalls and the passing landscape becoming fodder for the life lessons in this memoir.

The most compelling parts of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running occur when Murakami draws parallels between his running and his writing practices, including how the two began concurrently for him. He recounts the exact moment in the Spring of 1978 when, lying on the grass in Jingu Stadium, sipping a beer and watching a Yakult Swallows baseball game, it occurred to him for the first time that he might try writing a novel. By fall, he had hand written Hear the Wind Sing, a two-hundred page novel which he casually decided to enter in a new writers contest at a literary magazine. Murakami won the contest, and Hear the Wind Sing was published the following summer.

He followed in 1980 with a second novel, Pinball, 1973, which he also wrote during wee morning hours following work at the Tokyo jazz club the author famously owned and operated.

Initial success with these first two novels, which were both nominated for Japan's Akutagawa Prize, prompted Murakami to sell his jazz club, despite the protestations of his friends and family, and devote himself full-time to writing novels, the result of which was the publication of A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which he considers the real starting point for him as a novelist.

Trading the physically demanding job of club ownership for the sedentary routine of a professional novelist, Murakami quickly learned he was going to have to make some life changes. For one thing, he was going to have to quit smoking 60 cigarettes a day. For another, he'd have to start exercising. Exercising for Murakami means running, specifically long-distance running, which he says is his nature, "like scorpions sting, cicadas cling to trees, salmon swim upstream to where they were born, and wild ducks mate for life."

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running derives its name from a similarly-titled Raymond Carver novel, and within this memoir's pages Murakami discusses his work translating Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two of his favorites. There are also some good tips for writers within, but the memoir is primarily devoted to the topic of running, and as such has a limited audience - specifically runners and Haruki Murakami readers. If you fall into one of these two categories, this is an opportunity to run alongside a man who has some interesting thoughts to share on the matter.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.