'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' by Haruki Murakami

A Memoir

Haruki Murakami

Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

Alfred A. Knopf: 180 pp., $21

HOW MANY athletic activities are as well-suited to the writing life as long-distance running? It's cheap, for one -- writers are notoriously poor, and all you need to run is a good pair of sneakers. In a 1999 essay for the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates drew a parallel between the tireless walker-writers of the 19th century (Coleridge, Dickens, Whitman) and the contemplative present-day jogger. "In running," she wrote, "the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain." An afternoon run allows Oates to untangle the structural problems that bedevil her fiction in the morning.

Oates' essay aside, the literature of running is as thin as a mesh singlet. Running pops up in fiction and poetry from time to time, from Homer to John Updike, but the sport doesn't easily lend itself to the dramatic. The vagaries of weather, the joint pains and the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other can't compete with the traded blows of the boxing ring or a home run.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has run nearly every day for the last 23 years and participates in at least one marathon a year. In his slim memoir, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" -- the title is a nod to Raymond Carver, one of the many American writers that Murakami has translated -- he narrates his origin story as a novelist and as a runner. In his 20s, he owned and operated a jazz club. While watching a baseball game, he decided, "out of the blue," that he could write a novel. "Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it." After writing two books, he sold the club to devote himself to fiction -- his first novel to be translated into English, "A Wild Sheep Chase," followed. As his writing career took off, his health began to decline -- the result of all that sitting and smoking. Murakami decided to take up running.

Murakami draws parallels between training for races and writing novels. Both are long-term projects during which you have to keep the end in sight. Running, like writing, isn't really competitive -- each participant has a personal best. And the process of writing, like running, can be physically draining. Unlike Oates, however, Murakami doesn't use running as space to think about writing. "Essentially I'm not thinking of a thing," he writes. "All I do is keep running in my own cozy, homemade void."