There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner.
It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life as a writer, since for him, the two are neatly intertwined. So much so that he claims to have come to regard running as ‘both exercise and metaphor’.
Cheesy metaphors are the stock-in-trade of the self-improvement industry, and so it is perhaps inevitable that Murakami takes the opportunity to dish out more than a few life-lessons. ‘On the highway of life, you can’t always be in the fast lane’, is one unfortunate example. But it’s not all so bad, and in fact, as a pep-talk (perhaps I was in need of one) I found this book pretty effective.
It helps that Murakami is such a clean, transparent, seemingly ingenuous writer. This book, mostly written between mid-2005 and late 2006 (although it includes two excerpts from previously published magazine articles) comments on the importance of perseverance, the attractions of solitude and the benefits of being independent-minded.
But Murakami is refreshingly free from pushiness and, on the whole, reluctant to generalise. He doubts, for instance, the role of willpower in people’s achievements. In his experience, people just continue doing what they like doing. He likes running. And he likes writing: the stamina he needs for both comes from the liking, not from an imported act of will. But if you like what you are doing, you can tell yourself to go about it in a certain way, and much of this book details the writer’s own habits and preparations.
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