The loneliness of the long-distance writer

“What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami wrote his first two short novels while managing a successful jazz club in Tokyo. Both were nominated for Japan’s most prestigious literary prize which was a double surprise to him when he heard the news because he had forgotten that he had even entered the manuscripts for consideration. He did not even consider himself a novelist at that time, having completed his first two works “in spurts, snatching bits of time here and there” while running his bar.

But to write his third novel, Murakami knew that if he followed the old formula he would fall short. He would not be able to produce a work he intended to be more complex and consciously thought out. He could no longer live at the mercy of his customers at the bar; staying up as late as they did, inhaling their smoke (as well as his own) and processing their orders in the unquestioning way that any bar owner must if he’s to maintain his business. Murakami tells us that he never had any ambitions to be a novelist, nor did he have concrete ideas of what he wanted to write about, just a conviction.

“If I wrote it now I could come up with something that I’d find convincing,” he thought to himself lying on his back on a grass slope which served as spectators’ seating at a baseball arena. The decision to write his first novel fell to him from the cloudless blue sky above. But the decision to write the third came from within him – and with it came long-distance running.

There are those who might hope that hidden away in this book are secrets of how to become a great writer, that perhaps this is a book about writing novels disguised as a book about running. For them there are six short pages at the centre of the book which serve to inform would-be writers that talent is a pre-requisite but that focus and endurance can be learned. That’s how to write a novel. You decide, you write and you finish it. “Writing is mental labor,” says Murakami, “but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor.” Now go pick up your fountain pen.

How to write a novel may not be something a writer could really tell anyone about anyway. To approach such an intimate part of the artist head on would seem almost barbarous. So, for his personal memoir, Murakami instead chooses to approach his career from a tangent, writing about an activity which has been a loyal partner to him ever since he gave up his jazz club; long-distance running – an activity which has tested him, humbled him and dragged him through intense physical pain and psychological distress. An activity which has laid bare his facticity, his inner call to authenticity and his mortality, things we all share whether we are writers, readers, runners or none of the above.

We all have bodies, we all move. We all have minds, we all communicate. We move from place to place, we converse with others and we think to ourselves privately. If communication is the essence of the mind, then perhaps the essence of the body is motion, to cover distance. One could say conversation and chatter are like the everyday movements of our mundane lives. A stimulating intellectual debate might be the equivalent of a hard-fought game of tennis or squash. Long, solo training runs akin to introspection. Who is to say that novel-writing might not be the long-distance running of the mind?

But not everyone has the inclination to enforce upon themselves the hard discipline of a daily writing schedule. And neither is everyone suited to the solitude of long-distance running. Murakami tells us that he runs simply because it “suits him”. He has come to know that he is an essentially solitary character who has had to “learn” to be sociable. Solitude is neither “difficult nor painful” for him. While he is running he doesn’t “have to talk to anybody, have to listen to anybody”. Running brings him closer to the stillness which occupies a place within us all. His “own cozy, homemade void, [his] own nostalgic silence”.

Aside from the comfort, with introspection also comes a certain danger. Murakami talks of the “sense of isolation like acid spilling out of a bottle” which “can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart”. “That’s why I’ve had to keep my body in motion,” he says, “in order to heal the loneliness inside and put it into perspective.”

As he describes the tortuous final stretch of his one and only 60 mile “ultra-marathon”, pain becomes transcendence. Murakami describes passing through an “unseen barrier”. “I hardly knew who I was or what I was doing,” Murakami writes. “By then, running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the entity of running and then there came the entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.”

This brush with nothingness brings on what Murakami magnanimously calls the “runner’s blues” but which for a dedicated marathon-runner must feel full-blown existential crisis. In the course of this mind-alteringly demanding race he has traversed the entirety of life and experiences a kind of ego-death as he crosses a finish line which strikes him as an arbitrary marker. A line in the sand for which the path that brought him there fails to offer any justification. “Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has a meaning,” is the thought that strikes him in his meta-conscious state as he punches a weary fist into the air.

With the relentless pushing of one foot in front of the other, stride after stride through external physical space and internal barriers both physical and psychological, Murakami confronts time and mortality. Each stride is a moment longer lived and a step that cannot be retaken. It’s always there. Whether you brood on it, choose to ignore it or laugh it into the background. The always approaching end of possibilities. The finish line. However arbitrarily it may mark the end of your race.

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Running doesn’t talk much. It doesn’t have much to say that you could really call ideas. The physical body has its own ways of communicating but the messages it delivers to us are nowhere near as complex as those which bubble up through our minds. Sure, there is no clear distinction between the mind and the body since they interact in myriad ways which we may never fully understand. But in the day-to-day lives we lead we often make the distinction, mostly unconsciously. We know that we have a lot to do and need to sit down at our desks but the body demands motion and gets restless. The mind craves that extra slice of cake or to drink another beer but it’s our bodies that tell us the consequences over time. The body might not be as articulate as the mind but if we listen carefully enough we might get some advance warnings.

I think Murakami has heard the voice of his body, communing with it over the course of thousands of kilometers of track and road. It has spoken to him of the void, the will and the end. If running hadn’t helped him to become the writer he is today i guess we wouldn’t be reading this book, because he wouldn’t have written it. I guess you could say that Murakami is expressing his gratitude.

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