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Authors: Haruki Murakami

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BOOK: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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After I had unpacked everything, gone through the red tape involved in moving here, and settled into life in Cambridge, I got down to some serious running again. Breathing in the crisp, bracing, early-morning air, I felt once again the joy of running on familiar ground. The sounds of my footsteps, my breathing and heartbeats, all blended together in a unique polyrhythm. The Charles River is a holy spot for regatta racing, and there is always someone rowing on the river. I like to race them. Most of the time, of course, the boats are faster. But when a single scull is leisurely rowing I can give it a good run for its money.

Maybe because it’s the home of the Boston Marathon, Cambridge is full of runners. The jogging path along the Charles goes on forever, and if you wanted to, you could run for hours. The problem is, it’s also used by cyclists, so you have to watch out for speeding bikes whizzing past from behind. At various places, too, there are cracks in the pavement you have to make sure you don’t trip over, and a couple of long traffic signals you can get stuck at, which can put a kink in your run. Otherwise, it’s a wonderful jogging path.

Sometimes when I run, I listen to jazz, but usually it’s rock, since its beat is the best accompaniment to the rhythm of running. I prefer the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gorillaz, and Beck, and oldies like Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Beach Boys. Music with as simple a rhythm as possible. A lot of runners now use iPods, but I prefer the MD player I’m used to. It’s a little bigger than an iPod and can’t hold nearly as much data, but it works for me. At this point I don’t want to mix music and computers. Just like it’s not good to mix friends and work, and sex.

 

As I mentioned, in July I ran 186 miles. It rained two days that month, and I spent two days on the road. And there were quite a few days when the weather was too muggy and hot to run. So all in all, running 186 miles wasn’t so bad. Not bad at all. If running 136 miles in a month amounts to serious running, then 186 miles must be
rigorous
running. The farther I ran, the more weight I lost, too. In two and a half months I dropped about seven pounds, and the bit of flab I was starting to see around my stomach disappeared. Picture going to the butcher shop, buying seven pounds of meat, and carrying it home. You get the idea. I had mixed emotions about carrying around that extra weight with me every day. If you live in Boston, Samuel Adams draft beer (Summer Ale) and Dunkin’ Donuts are essentials of life. But I discovered to my delight that even these indulgences can be offset by persistent exercise.

It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly: I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who
doesn’t find it painful
to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

Even so, after I got married at an early age (I was twenty-two) I gradually got used to living with someone else. After I left college I ran a bar, so I learned the importance of being with others and the obvious point that we can’t survive on our own. Gradually, then, though perhaps with my own spin on it, through personal experience I discovered how to be sociable. Looking back on that time now, I can see that during my twenties my worldview changed, and I matured. By sticking my nose into all sorts of places, I acquired the practical skills I needed to live. Without those ten tough years I don’t think I would have written novels, and even if I’d tried, I wouldn’t have been able to. Not that people’s personalities change that dramatically. The desire in me to be alone hasn’t changed. Which is why the hour or so I spend running, maintaining my own silent, private time, is important to help me keep my mental well-being. When I’m running I don’t have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody. All I need to do is gaze at the scenery passing by. This is a part of my day I can’t do without.

I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly
do
I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.

On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days. When I’m sad I think a little about sadness. When I’m happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of
anything
worth mentioning.

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to
acquire
a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.

I’m in my late fifties now. When I was young, I never imagined the twenty-first century would actually come and that, all joking aside, I’d turn fifty. In theory, of course, it was self-evident that someday, if nothing else happened, the twenty-first century would roll around and I’d turn fifty. When I was young, being asked to imagine myself at fifty was as difficult as being asked to imagine, concretely, the world after death. Mick Jagger once boasted that “I’d rather be dead than still singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five.” But now he’s over sixty and still singing “Satisfaction.” Some people might find this funny, but not me. When he was young, Mick Jagger couldn’t imagine himself at forty-five. When I was young, I was the same. Can I laugh at Mick Jagger? No way. I just happen not to be a young rock singer. Nobody remembers what stupid things I might have said back then, so they’re not about to quote them back at me. That’s the only difference.

And now here I am living in this unimaginable world. It feels really strange, and I can’t tell if I’m fortunate or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. For me—and for everybody else, probably—this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I’m having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I’d experienced before, then I’d be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can’t. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there’s also something kind of comical about it all, something you don’t want to discard completely.

 

As I mentioned before, competing against other people, whether in daily life or in my field of work, is just not the sort of lifestyle I’m after. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own values to live by, and the same holds true with me. These differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of these disagreements can give rise to even greater misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly criticized. This goes without saying. It’s not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I’ve written. So the fact that I’m
me
and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

That’s what I basically believe, and I’ve lived my life accordingly. In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside. I think in my own way I’m aware of this danger—probably through experience—and that’s why I’ve had to constantly keep my body in motion, in some cases pushing myself to the limit, in order to heal the loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective. Not so much as an intentional act, but as an instinctive reaction.

Let me be more specific.

When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint, at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points. And one of the results of running a little farther than usual is that I become that much stronger. If I’m angry, I direct that anger toward myself. If I have a frustrating experience, I use that to improve myself. That’s the way I’ve always lived. I quietly absorb the things I’m able to, releasing them later, and in as changed a form as possible, as part of the story line in a novel.

I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might be a few—
very
few, I would imagine—who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn’t compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no idea. Maybe somewhere in the world it is. It’s hard to generalize. For me, at least, as I’ve written novels over many years, I just can’t picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural. Not that I’m relieved when that happens. Even I’m not happy when someone dislikes me.

But that’s another story. Let’s get back to running. I’ve gotten back into a running lifestyle again. I started seriously running and am now rigorously running. What this might mean for me, now that I’m in my late fifties, I don’t know yet. But I think it’s got to mean
something.
Maybe not anything profound, but there must be significance to it. Anyway, right now I’m running hard. I’ll wait till later to think about what it all means. (Putting off thinking about something is one of my specialties, a skill I’ve honed as I’ve grown older.) I shine my running shoes, rub some sunscreen on my face and neck, set my watch, and hit the road. With the trade winds wafting against my face, a white heron up above, its legs dutifully aligned as it crosses the sky, and me listening to my old favorite, the Lovin’ Spoonful.

As I was running I was struck by a thought: Even if my time in races doesn’t improve, there’s not much I can do about it. I’ve gotten older, and time has taken its toll. It’s nobody’s fault. Those are the rules of the game. Just as a river flows to the sea, growing older and slowing down are just part of the natural scenery, and I’ve got to accept it. It might not be a very enjoyable process, and what I discover as a result might not be all that pleasant. But what choice do I have, anyway? In my own way, I’ve enjoyed my life so far, even if I can’t say I’ve
fully
enjoyed it.

I’m not trying to brag or anything—who in the world would brag about something like this?—but I’m not the brightest person. I’m the kind of person who has to experience something physically, actually touch something, before I have a clear sense of it. No matter what it is, unless I see it with my own eyes I’m not convinced. I’m a physical, not intellectual, type of person. Of course I have a certain amount of intelligence—at least I think I do. If I totally lacked that there’d be no way I could write novels. But I’m not the type who operates through pure theory or logic, not the type whose energy source is intellectual speculation. Only when I’m given an actual physical burden and my muscles start to groan (and sometimes scream) does my comprehension meter shoot upward and I’m finally able to grasp something. Needless to say, it takes quite a bit of time, plus effort, to go through each stage, step by step, and arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes it takes too long, and by the time I’m convinced, it’s already too late. But what’re you going to do? That’s the kind of person I am.

As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

Two

AUGUST
14, 2005

KAUAI, HAWAII

Tips on Becoming a Running Novelist

I
t’s August 14th,
a Sunday. This morning I ran an hour and fifteen minutes, listening to Carla Thomas and Otis Redding on my MD player. In the afternoon I swam 1,400 yards at the pool and in the evening swam at the beach. And after that I had dinner—beer and fish—at the Hanalea Dolphin Restaurant just outside the town of Hanalea. The dish I have is walu, a kind of white fish. They grill it for me over charcoal, and I eat it with soy sauce. The side dish is vegetable kebabs, plus a large salad.

So far in August I’ve racked up ninety-three miles.

It was a long time ago that I first started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then.

Not long before, I’d been running a sort of jazz club near Sendagaya Station. Soon after college—actually I’d been so busy with side jobs I was still a few credits short of graduating and was still officially a student—I opened a small club at the south entrance to Kokubunji Station and ran it for about three years; when they started to rebuild the building I was in, I moved to a new location closer to the center of Tokyo. This new venue wasn’t so big, or so small, either. We had a grand piano and just barely enough space to squeeze in a quintet. During the day we served coffee, at night it was a bar. We served pretty decent food, too, and on the weekends featured live performances. This kind of live jazz club was still pretty rare back then, so we gained a steady clientele and the place did all right financially.

Most people I knew had predicted that the bar wouldn’t do well. They figured that an establishment run as a kind of hobby wouldn’t work out, that somebody like me, who was pretty naive and most likely didn’t have the slightest aptitude for running a business, wouldn’t be able to make a go of it. Well, their predictions were totally off. To tell the truth, I didn’t think I had much aptitude for business either. I just figured, though, that since failure was not an option, I’d have to give it everything I had. My only strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can take a lot physically. I’m more a workhorse than a racehorse. I was raised in a white-collar household, so I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, but fortunately my wife’s family ran a business, so her natural intuition was a great help. No matter how great a workhorse I might have been, I never would have been able to make it on my own.

The work itself was hard. I worked from morning till late at night, until I was exhausted. I had all kinds of painful experiences, things I had to rack my brains about, and plenty of disappointments. But I worked like crazy, and I finally began to make enough profit to hire other people to help out. And as I neared the end of my twenties, I was finally able to take a breather. To start the bar I’d borrowed as much as I could from every place that would lend me money, and I’d almost repaid it all. Things were settling down. Up till then, it had been a question of sheer survival, of keeping my head above water, and I didn’t have room to think of anything else. I felt like I’d reached the top of some steep staircase and come out to a fairly open place and was confident that because I’d reached it safely, I could handle any future problems that might crop up and I’d survive. I took a deep breath, slowly gazed around me, glanced back at the steps I’d taken here, and began to contemplate the next stage. Turning thirty was just around the corner. I was reaching the age when I couldn’t be considered young anymore. And pretty much out of the blue I got the idea to write a novel.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first thought I could write a novel. It was around one thirty in the afternoon of April 1, 1978. I was at Jingu Stadium that day, alone in the outfield drinking beer and watching the game. Jingu Stadium was within walking distance of my apartment at the time, and I was a fairly big Yakult Swallows fan. It was a perfectly beautiful spring day, not a cloud in the sky, with a warm breeze blowing. There weren’t any benches in the outfield seating back then, just a grassy slope. I was lying on the grass, sipping cold beer, gazing up occasionally at the sky, and leisurely enjoying the game. As usual for the Swallows, the stadium wasn’t very crowded. It was the season opener, and they were taking on the Hiroshima Carp at home. I remember that Yasuda was pitching for the Swallows. He was a short, stocky sort of pitcher with a wicked curve. He easily retired the side in the top of the first inning, and in the bottom of the inning the leadoff batter for the Swallows was Dave Hilton, a young American player new to the team. Hilton got a hit down the left field line. The crack of bat meeting ball right on the sweet spot echoed through the stadium. Hilton easily rounded first and pulled up to second. And it was at that exact moment that a thought struck me:
You know what? I could try writing a novel.
I still can remember the wide open sky, the feel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it.

I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I’d find convincing. When I thought about sitting down at my desk at home and setting out to write I realized I didn’t even own a decent fountain pen. So I went to the Kinokuniya store in Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of manuscript paper and a five-dollar Sailor fountain pen. A small capital investment on my part.

This was in the spring of 1978, and by fall I’d finished a two-hundred-page work handwritten on Japanese manuscript paper. After I finished it I felt great. I had no idea what to do with the novel once I finished it, but I just sort of let the momentum carry me and sent it in to be considered for a literary magazine’s new-writers prize. I shipped it off without making a copy, so it seems I didn’t much care if it wasn’t selected and vanished forever. This is the work that’s published under the title
Hear the Wind Sing.
I was more interested in having finished it than in whether or not it would ever see the light of day.

That fall the perennial underdog Yakult Swallows won the pennant and went on to defeat the Hankyu Braves in the Japan Series. I was really excited and attended several games at Korakuen Stadium. (Nobody ever thought that Yakult would win, so they had already arranged for their home venue, Jingu Stadium, to be used for college baseball.) So I remember that time very clearly. It was a particularly gorgeous autumn, with wonderful sunny weather. The sky was perfectly clear, and the ginkgo trees in front of the Meiji Memorial Gallery were more golden than I’d ever seen them. This was the last fall of my twenties.

By the next spring, when I got a phone call from an editor at
Gunzo
telling me my novel had made the short list, I’d completely forgotten that I’d entered the contest. I’d been so busy with other things. At first I had no idea what he was talking about. But the novel won the prize and was published in the summer. The book was fairly well received. I was thirty, and without really knowing what was going on I suddenly found myself labeled a new, up-and-coming writer. I was pretty surprised, but people who knew me were even more surprised.

After this, while still running my business, I wrote a medium-length second novel,
Pinball, 1973
, and while working on this I wrote a few short stories and translated some short fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both
Hear the Wind Sing
and
Pinball, 1973
were nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, for which they were said to be strong contenders, but in the end neither won. To tell the truth, though, I didn’t care one way or the other. If I did win it I’d become busy with interviews and writing assignments, and I was afraid this would interfere with running the club.

Every day for three years I ran my jazz club—keeping accounts, checking inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter myself mixing up cocktails and cooking, closing up in the wee hours of the morning—and only then writing at home at the kitchen table until I got sleepy. I felt like I was living enough for two people’s lives. Physically, every day was tough, and writing novels and running a business at the same time made for all sorts of other problems. Running a service-oriented business means you have to accept whoever comes through the door. No matter who comes in, unless they’re really awful, you have to greet them with a friendly smile on your face. Thanks to this, though, I met all kinds of offbeat people and had some unusual encounters. Before I began writing, I dutifully, even enthusiastically, absorbed a variety of experiences. For the most part I think I enjoyed these and all the stimuli that they brought.

Gradually, though, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. With the first two,
Hear the Wind Sing
and
Pinball, 1973
, I basically enjoyed the process of writing, but there were parts I wasn’t too pleased with. With these first two novels I was only able to write in spurts, snatching bits of time here and there—a half hour here, an hour there—and because I was always tired and felt like I was competing against the clock as I wrote, I was never able to concentrate. With this kind of scattered approach I was able to write some interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from a complex or profound novel. I felt I’d been given a wonderful opportunity to be a novelist—a chance you just don’t get every day—and a natural desire sprang up to take it as far as I possibly could and write the kind of novel I’d feel satisfied with. I knew I could write something more large-scale. And after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business for a while and concentrate solely on writing. At this point my income from the jazz club was more than my income as a novelist, a reality I had to resign myself to.

Most people I knew were flat out against my decision, or else had grave doubts about it. “Your business is doing fine now,” they said. “Why not just let someone else run it for a time while you go and write your novels?” From the world’s viewpoint this makes perfect sense. And most people probably didn’t think I’d make it as a professional writer. But I couldn’t follow their advice. I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do. I just couldn’t do something clever like writing a novel while someone else ran the business. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.

Despite the objections of everybody else, I sold the business and, though a bit embarrassed about it, hung out my sign as a novelist and set out to make a living writing. “I’d just like to be free for two years to write,” I explained to my wife. “If it doesn’t work out we can always open up another little bar somewhere. I’m still young and we can always start over.” “All right,” she said. This was in 1981 and we still had a considerable amount of debt, but I figured I’d just do my best and see what happened.

I settled down to write my novel and that fall traveled to Hokkaido for a week to research it. By the following April I’d completed
A Wild Sheep Chase.
I figured it was do or die, so I’d put everything I had into it. This novel was much longer than either of my previous two, larger in scope, and much more story-driven.

When I finished the novel I had a good feeling that I’d created my own writing style. My whole body thrilled at the thought of how wonderful—and how difficult—it is to be able to sit at my desk, not worrying about time, and concentrate on writing. There were untouched veins still dormant within me, I felt, and now I could actually picture myself making a living as a novelist. So in the end the fallback idea of opening a small bar again never materialized. Sometimes, though, even now, I think how nice it would be to run a little bar somewhere.

The editors at
Gunzo,
who were looking for something more mainstream, didn’t like
A Wild Sheep Chase
at all, and I recall how unenthusiastic their reception was. It seems like back then (what about now, I wonder) my notion of the novel was pretty unorthodox. Readers, though, seemed to love this new book, and that’s what made me happiest. This was the real starting point for me as a novelist. I think if I’d continued writing the kind of instinctual novels I’d completed while running the bar—
Hear the Wind Sing
and
Pinball, 1973
—I would have soon hit a dead end.

A problem arose, though, with my decision to become a professional writer: the question of how to keep physically fit. I tend to gain weight if I don’t do anything. Running the bar required hard physical labor every day, and I could keep my weight down, but once I started sitting at my desk all day writing, my energy level gradually declined and I started putting on the pounds. I was smoking too much, too, as I concentrated on my work. Back then I was smoking sixty cigarettes a day. All my fingers were yellow, and my whole body reeked of smoke.
This can’t be good for me,
I decided. If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to keep fit and maintain a healthy weight.

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