Review: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I ought to be the target audience for this. I very much admire Murakami and have read most of his novels. I’m also a fairly committed runner and triathlete, the subjects of his meditations in this journal-like collection of essays he wrote over about a year and a half in the middle 2000s.

And yet, this one really falls flat. There’s little sustained self-exploration: we get, for instance, the now famous declaration that he was watching a baseball game (he names the exact player at-bat) when he suddenly decided he could write a novel. He’d been running a jazz club – something that comes, again, with little detail – and then he decided that’s what he’d do. He wrote it, sent it out, and won a contest. If it was really that easy, then I hate him. (Maybe that’s how many small-college basketball players feel about Lebron James, but still…) If it was more complicated, as I am certain it was, then it shows him dodging some of the real material on the table.

The sustained problem here is the banality. Murakami doesn’t censor his observations – it made him happy to run past a beautiful woman on Cambridge mornings, or he counsels high school gym coaches against insisting all students should run the same distance – which generally means that he doesn’t pursue any either. There’s no thesis here, no center. There isn’t even a clear narrative, since he begins by talking about distance running, with a sort of goal at the New York City marathon, and then he goes on a long tangent about bike and swimming training for unrelated triathlons. He essentially compiles a series of reflections he wrote every week or so over the period.

As I reflect on this, I’m reminded of Murakami’s particular genius. His best work is filled with banality, with individuals in the midst of daily transactions with nothing spectacular about them. What makes Murakami special is two-fold, though. First, he has a gift for creating characters who are just mildly out of step with such everyday rhythms. They typically seem to fit in well and only slowly discover their own “strangeness.”

In that light, “normal,” is a fundamental concept for him. There’s always a sense of how things should be, of how people should act, but his characters gradually become estranged from it.

Second, and even more memorably, he has a gift for excavating a space beneath the normal. His characters descend, often literally, to strange depths of alternate worlds or experiences. He isn’t quite a science fiction or fantasy writer – his work is always anchored in our world – but the cumulative effect of his magical work is to make the ground beneath us seem less solid.

Read Hardboiled Wonderland. Read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And read 1Q84. Skip this one, though. It has the surface that Murakami punches through in his real and memorable work. Here, though, it remains at that surface, giving us a mostly superficial look at his mid-life experiences as a committed but unspectacular runner.


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