What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

In 1982, Murakami owned a jazz bar in Tokyo. He decided to become a novelist, sold the bar, and the next day started running. He has run at least one marathon a year for more than twenty-five years, completed several triathlons and ultramarathons, and trained for each of them with the same discipline he brings to writing — early mornings, solitude, an absence of complaint.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was written during the months of training before the 2005 New York City Marathon, and it moves between the daily log of a runner in training and a meditation on what running has to do with writing. The parallel is not metaphorical — it is structural. Both require the same things: sustained solitary effort, physical and mental endurance, the ability to tolerate discomfort without making it mean anything. Neither rewards talent alone; both require that you show up every day.

This is the most personal and direct book Murakami has written — the one that explains, obliquely but honestly, why his fiction is the way it is. Not an autobiography, not a training guide, but a self-portrait through the discipline that made him who he is.

Reading Guides

• Books About Japan

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set What I Talk About When I Talk About Running apart: Accessible to non-runners; The most direct account of Murakami’s own psychology available; and The writing-running parallel is genuinely illuminating. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. Running as model for the writer’s life — solitary, disciplined, self-imposed. Ageing and the body as subjects Murakami rarely addresses in fiction. Pain tolerance as creative virtue. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

The Reading Experience

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes What I Talk About When I Talk About Running from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

Not his most literarily ambitious work. Readers wanting fiction will find this too personal. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Runners, writers, and anyone curious about Murakami’s inner life

A Memoir of Discipline

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was published in Japan in 2007 and translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 2008. The title alludes to Raymond Carver’s story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — a deliberate homage from a writer who counts Carver among his formative influences. The book is a hybrid of memoir and essay, structured loosely around Murakami’s preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and a triathlon in Hawaii. It is not a conventional sports memoir; it is a meditation on the relationship between physical discipline and the discipline of writing, using running as a way to think about attention, endurance, solitude, and the management of decline.

Running as a Writer’s Practice

Murakami began running in 1982, the same year he sold his jazz bar and committed to writing full time. He has since run more than thirty marathons, including the Athens Marathon on the original course from Marathon to Athens. In the memoir he argues that the qualities required to run long distances — the ability to sustain effort without immediate reward, the management of tedium, the acceptance of physical discomfort as the price of forward movement — are the same qualities required to write long fiction. The book is one of the more unusual entries in the literature of creative process: not about inspiration or craft in the conventional sense, but about the infrastructure of daily life that makes sustained creative work possible.

The Ultramarathon Chapter

One of the book’s most memorable passages describes Murakami’s experience running a 62-mile ultramarathon on the original course from Lake Saroma in Hokkaido. The race takes place over a single day, and Murakami describes the mental stages with the same precision he brings to the writing process: the early miles of controlled effort, the middle miles where the body settles into its routine, the final miles — starting around the fiftieth — where the mechanism begins to fail and what is left is entirely will. He describes losing his sense of purpose somewhere in the fifties and running the final miles in a kind of blankness, moving without thought, the body continuing what the mind had vacated. The experience, he argues, taught him something about the difference between stubbornness and genuine endurance that he could not have learned from the shorter distance. The chapter reads as the memoir’s emotional center: the place where the running and writing metaphor becomes least metaphorical and most direct.

Ageing and the Acknowledgment of Limits

The memoir is unusual among sports writing in its refusal of triumphalism. Murakami is candid about the decline that comes with age — the slowing times, the longer recovery, the growing difficulty of maintaining the standard he set for himself in his thirties. He does not treat this as defeat but as a new form of the discipline: learning what the body will and will not do now, adjusting the expectations without abandoning the practice. For a writer in his late fifties when the book was published, the acknowledgment of limits is also a meditation on the writing life and what it means to continue it with the same seriousness through the years when the physical equipment begins to cost more and deliver less.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Part running memoir, part meditation on the writing life — Murakami’s most personal and accessible book, and a surprisingly moving account of what it means to pursue a solitary discipline for decades.