What I Talk About When I Talk About Running [Mass Market Paperback]

Hauiki Murakami (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2009

Murakami's fascinating thoughts on running, training and life in general. Written in 2007

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Vintage International (2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307473392
• ISBN-13: 978-0307473394
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.4 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (114 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,155,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into forty-two languages. The most recent of his many honours is the Franz Kafka Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Written for Murakami enthusiasts..., August 18, 2008

By 

D. Kanigan (CT, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Hardcover)

Murakami, 58, authored 15+ novels, many highly acclaimed. He has received many literary awards and honorary doctorates. I have read and thoroughly enjoyed most of his best selling works (including my favorites: Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood and A Wild Sheep Chase). In reading this book, I had come to learn that Murakami had completed 25+ marathons, 1 ultra marathon (60+miles) and 5+ triathlons - this is a truly extraordinary accomplishment.

Murakami is humble, candid and straightforward exposing his mistakes, flaws and shortcomings - - one passage: "But this wretched story of feeling I had as I stood in front of the mirror at sixteen, listing all of my physical shortcomings, is still sort of touchstone for me even now. The sad spreadsheet of my life reveals how my debts outweigh my assets."

You get into his mind and his incredible determination to complete marathons and triathlons - feeling the sun baking his skin and the water filling his lungs - yet he keeps his feet and arms moving despite his mind and body telling him to stop.

You also learn about the impact that advancing middle age has on his performance times and that they are no longer improving despite a rigorous training regimen - "even if, seen from the outside, or from some higher vantage point, this sort of life looks pointless or futile, or even extremely efficient, it doesn't bother me. Maybe it's a pointless act like as I've said before, pouring water into an old pan that has a hole in the bottom, but at least the effort you put into it remains. Whether it's good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart."

The book is described by Murakami as a collection of essays he wrote between 2005 and 2007 and then pieced together and edited for this book. I felt that the book often read like a loosely edited diary - - in contrast to his visually beautiful, smooth, multi-layered, dreamy fictional works. While I found flashes of the profile of his prior novels in a few passages, I found this book to be choppy and informal in comparison.

Early on in the book, Murakami discusses his strategy in running a Jazz bar in Tokyo - he wasn't out "to please everybody" - "it didn't matter if 9 out of 10" didn't like his bar but that "if one in ten was a repeat customer" his business would survive. My sense is that this book will narrowly appeal to the "one in ten repeaters" of devoted Murakami's fans (me being one of them) - - readers who wish to learn more about his life, his experiences, what makes him "tick" - and more specifically, the role that running, biking, swimming and training for marathons and triathlons had on his writing and his life.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A runner out of steam, March 16, 2010

By 

Christian Kober (Shanghai) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International) (Paperback)

If Murakami had never written another novel after writing 'Norwegian Wood' he would have been a great writer.... Alas he did. Not that his other novels are bad as such. Some are even good. Others are mediocre. And his most recent novels seem to have been copies of other novels he wrote before. And as if he realized by himself that his recent novels are all much too similar to each other he has started to write semi autobiographical books, about the poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway or, now, about running.
These are not badly written, after all he is a good writer and a perceptive man. But much is missing. I had been looking forward, as an avid runner myself, to read the reflections of someone more perceptive than me, someone who might have another take on running than myself. Instead, I found a mixture of semi-baked philosophical thought and cliche observations. Yes, it sometimes rains when you run. And, yes, running a Marathon requires some self discipline. And, yes, stretching helps. And Mizuno shoes are good running shoes...
The book is a quick and nice read and I cannot claim that I disliked reading it. But afterwards there was nothing left. Popcorn for the mind.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What I Don't Want to Read When I Want To Read About Running and Writing, April 13, 2010

By 

Alfonso Mangione "Loves the three Rs: Readin'... (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International) (Paperback)

I hate to say it, but this is probably the worst thing I've read by Murakami.

On paper--or rather, on the back of the paperback--it sounded like a sure thing; I'm a writer, and I've got a few marathons under my belt, and I was spellbound by the three other books I've read of his. So I thought I'd hit the trifecta when I pulled this off the shelf (at Border's--sorry, Amazon!) and saw that he'd written about writing and running.

And by and large, I felt a rush of excitement in the early chapters, a sensation not unlike the fresh lively feeling one gets at the start of a marathon, when the exhilaration far outweighs the effort that's been expended. It's fascinating, for instance, to read that he'd been the owner of a small jazz nightclub and hadn't had any particular ambitions to be a writer until he was in his 30s. I couldn't identify with that, but I could relate to his persistent attitude about writing. There's a romanticized notion of writers living the bad life, drinking and smoking and doing their best to churn out a great manuscript or two before their hard living catches up with them. (I've lived that life, but in my experience it doesn't necessarily make one a better writer, unless one's writing about what it feels like to drink and smoke, and that eventually makes for boring reading. This "But-Hemingway-did-it!" attitude often eventually becomes just an extra excuse to drink and smoke. Anyway, I digress.) It turns out that the lessons of physical fitness--persistence, mental toughness, goal-setting--can be far more useful and applicable to writing, a lesson Murakami and I have both apparently learned.

But those insights are, by and large, done by the midway point, and what remains is a long and boring slog. I've heard that a writer should never confuse how they feel about a story with how good the story actually is, and Murakami would have done well to heed this advice; his training efforts and race times were obviously near and dear and dear to his heart, but they make for rather unexciting reading. Also, his observations and analyses often come off as flat and uninspired; as an author, he's great at conjuring up memorably fantastic scenarios that still seem real, characters that feel full, and plots that work like a Swiss watch, but without the ability to make things up and take them in unexpected directions, he's reduced to stating banalities like "Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane."

To be fair, I'm possibly a little jealous. Murakami's enough of an established author that he could probably print out, say, every email he's sent in the last ten years, staple them together and call them a book, and sell a kajillion copies, whereas some of us are still toiling away in obscurity, unable to sell manuscripts over which we've slaved for years. But it seems even Murakami has the sense that this is a substandard work. After describing a disappointing performance at the Boston Marathon, he says, "This may be a sort of conclusion. An understated, rainy-day sneakers sort of conclusion. An anticlimax, if you will. Turn it into a screenplay, and the Hollywood producer would just glance at the last page and toss it back." Elsewhere, he mentions reworking the manuscript many times; while some amount of revision is obviously necessary, too much ends up leaving the writer with no sense of perspective on whether or not the work's any good. Like a jogger slogging towards the finish line, one ends up thinking about just getting the damn thing done with and resting for a while.

In lieu of this, I'd suggest getting Ann Lamott's "Bird by Bird," which doesn't have any fitness tips but is perhaps the best book I've ever read about writing. But if your desire to read is as automatic as Murakami's desire to run, you may end up picking this up anyway. And if you're anything like me you may end up turning the final page wearily, muttering the tired marathoner's frequent post-race lament: "Never again."