Haruki Murakami, A Companion for the Long Run

In his New York Times review of the book Geoff Dyer wrote, “I’m guessing that the potential readership for What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is 70 percent Murakami nuts, 10 percent running enthusiasts and an overlapping 20 percent who will be on the brink of orgasm before they’ve even sprinted to the cash register.”

This was the first book by Murakami that Dyer ever read, and he hated it.

It’s an odd place to start, I admit. Even by Murakami standards the prose is sparse, the descriptions minimalist. But he’s a writer who’s made the act of celebrating the mundane essential to his writing process. And What I Talk About has lingered in my mind for years, with every reread tightening its grip on me with more assuredness. 

Murakami began to take running seriously in 1982 when he was about to reach his mid-30s. This slim volume traces the journey that follows locating the unique relationship that an artist’s mind can share with the limits of their body. That makes it a running memoir – if there exists such a genre. But if one starts peeling the layers, this book slowly unravels itself as a meditation on solitude and explores the idea of being content with the time we get to truly spend with just ourselves.

The parallels are easy to draw when it comes to running and writing. It takes the same amount of personal discipline to get up and sit at your desk or put on the running shoes for another round of labour every day. On some days a writer reaches their daily word count, and on some they don’t – much like a runner who may not always make it to the finishing line. The frustrations mount, but there’s a kind of dogged industriousness that makes both a successful writer and a runner. Murakami separates reward from the toil when he talks about either of these two things around which his own life largely revolves. In that sense, this is a deeply philosophical book too. 

His majestic story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is about to be published during the time when he was working on these essays on running, “though nobody in particular had asked me to,” he says. “Just like a silent village blacksmith, tinkering away.” Like an athlete does to muscles to prepare them for a marathon. Throw in this book somewhere inside your suitcase for your journey, it’s a good friend to have in the long run.