Perhaps she knows, at some level hidden even to herself, that my reasoning and hers parted ways long ago, long before this moment when we face each other over the last unsealed box. It’s been ten years of upheaval, tenuous equilibrium and rebirth, and how often have you been this close? How much do you know about a life still carried on the slash and burn momentum of brutal youth, fertilised on fresh ashes. I ask myself, how much more of this, how much more of this before… before what exactly? Whatever she is telling me this time, my mind has already reached a far beyond place and most of the boxes already sealed.

**

“William, where are you?”

“Somewhere else,” I reply and my voice traveled through walls, passed unlit rooms and my sleeping grandmother before I realized how true this was.

“I wanted to drink tea and eat nuts,” she said, summoning me for shared moments. The darkness of low cloud and unceasing rain now thickened by oncoming night. In her disembodied, plaintive voice, she’s alone in the kitchen, I hear a parting of the ways, and I leave what I am doing to join her.

She pulled the two halves of the door shut with a polite thud, they lodged comfortably as they had been accustomed, left before right, held firm by the reciprocal pressure they exerted on each other. Two halves of a heart, her husband used to say when Changiz was young, like us, That’s how we’ve kept warm all this time. Except that now he was gone and the door still closed and the nights of early spring were warm but lonely.

With a series of shuffling steps she turned away from the door, feet first, thighs then hips, taking pains to turn fully about face before she made toward the gate of the porch, really just a fraying square Changiz had cut from the side of a discarded shop fitting, held in place by a length of synthetic twine hooked round a nail. The sandals and plastic baskets had the neglected look that things left outside take on in the morning, protesting their hours outside your ken by remaining exactly where you left them, colors a shade closer to gray than their more vivid presence in the daytime.

She pushed the gate out in front of her, sliding her hand across the cracking grain of paint on its surface towards the hinge. She felt the reciprocal force grow against her hand, the way all things pushed back these days. With her upper body, right hand pressing the wall for support, elbow bent behind her, she sent the cast-off panel past the point where it would not swing shut again. It congratulated her with a creak and bounced, indolent against the painted adobe, straining slightly at the screws that her son had bored directly into the wall rather than replace the rotten wooden post on which the old gate had hung.

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.

–

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.

Anti-government graffiti, scribbled out and signed “death to Israel”.

© William Yong, 2010

“Men of Iran, famous for jealousy. How can you stand to see your women naked? Take heed of jealousy, silent and indifferent men.”

© William Yong, 2009

I

The street was already clear from yesterday’s snow though patches still reflected luminous white from the bare earth of the mountainside. The brushes, tins, knives and rubber heels in Hosein’s wooden cart rattled as its wheels stuttered over the gravel left behind from the salt trucks. A Peykan taxi trundled past in low gear, pulling its thick steel carcass up the hill without complaint like a passive mule. Snow had again not been forthcoming this year, the extended autumn was proving as dry and bright as the summer. Though his grandfather’s orchard in the north had been sold long ago, out of habit, Hosein wondered whether the mild winter would snap suddenly and decisively like the year before and throttle the unripe fruit of the orange trees.

Up ahead, a four-wheel drive attempted a handbrake turn but could only manage a disappointing two metre skid, grinding the gravel into the unrelenting asphalt with a scrape. The gleaming hulk sped away and Hosein could again hear the rattle which attended the wheels of his hand-built cart. He neared the corner where the street turned back on itself and climbed further up the mountainside. He stopped and felt a breeze, chilled by the snowy peaks above, waft down and touch the light sweat on his forehead. He closed his eyes, breathed, and frigid air stung a little on the inside of his sinuses. “Allah-e Shokr”, he whispered to himself, moved by the alternate sensations of heat from the pale winter sunlight and the ripples of cold in the air.

On the last Friday of every month, Hosein the Kaffash brought his work up to this pleasant part of town, perched high on the Tochal foothills, detached from the polluted inner-city air. The neighbourhood knew him well enough by now for many of the residents of the forty or so low-rise apartment buildings to keep any shoes in need of repair at home, anticipating his next visit, rather than carry them to Tajrish Square where two other cobblers plied their trade on the steps by the bank.

Hosein turned and saw that his son had fallen some way behind. “Ali-jaan, come to daddy, come on!” At his father’s call Ali broke into a staccato run. Thick layers of clothing under his puffer jacket made it difficult for his arms to swing and he held them out stiffly to his sides, the yellow woollen bobble on his winter hat bounced with each tiny stride. Now nearly seven years old, Ali was old enough to accompany his father on his Friday rounds, a convenience which gave father and son their only prolonged contact during the week and Mariam some respite at home, though for this Hosein sacrificed his day of rest.

Hosein the kaffash knelt down in front of his son from whose mouth steam-laden breath was pumping out in short gusts. His wide, pebble-black eyes blinked twice and opened to their widest and the boy smiled as Hosein pulled off his hat, dried off his hot brow with a gloved hand and ruffled his son’s matted hair.

II

Ali stood mutely observing a mean-looking black and white tomcat while his father climbed the steps of another of the three-storey blocks. The cat pleaded at regular intervals with a persistent howl issuing from the depths of unfulfilled hunger and lust. A middle-aged woman with no headscarf appeared at a second floor window to toss down a plastic bag of chicken bones. The bones half spilled onto the paving stones and the sound of the mesh screen sliding shut scratched the prevailing hush. Hosein rang the first floor buzzer and could hear the cat pawing at the plastic bag for a few seconds before the click of the intercom and a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Good morning miss, I’m the kaffash. If you have any shoes to shine or repairs for me I’m at your service.”

“Oh, I see…. Let me ask my husband… Mehrdad!”

Another click and the intercom fell silent. Hosein rang the second and third floor buzzers but no answer came to disturb the greedy, hollow sound of the cat’s hard teeth on bare bones. Hosein shifted his cart into a bright triangle which the sun threw over the steps up to the entrance. From it he withdrew a tattered square of coarsely woven stuff cut from the thick material of a motorcycle saddlebag which he placed on the first step where he would sit. A man he recognised from previous visits emerged wearing a long overcoat over a casual t-shirt carrying a pair of black leather shoes in one hand.

“Salaam Agha, I’m sorry but it’s just these today. You repaired them the last time you were here, may your hands not hurt! If you could just shine them for me and leave them inside the front door when you finish.”

He handed the shoes down from his place on the landing and opened his wallet. He drew out a crisp two thousand toman note and both men’s eyes held the folded blue rectangle for a shared moment from opposite sides of a great divide.

“It has no value, I’m at your service.” Hosein offered his ta’arof, the ritual refusal to be payed, but the money was already in his hand. The shoes had lost little of the shine that Hosein himself had put on them a month before and with every stroke of his brush he fought off the sense that he was in league with the mendicant accordian players and street sweepers who rang the same doorbells for small change. His eyes narrowed on the smudged outline of his own face which was beginning to emerge on the shoe in his blackened hand.

The door of the next block opened and an amply-proportioned female form emerged, draped in a pale grey floral print chador. She edged sideways to plant her feet on the first step, directly opposite where Hosein was sitting, one hand holding the moulded concrete bannister and the other cradling a tray against her bosom.

“Ali, go and help the lady. Quick!”

Without a word, the boy ran to the bottom of the steps, slipping and saving himself from a fall with both his hands. He beat his gloves free of the still fresh snow.

“Careful now, Ali.” Hosein observed the handover with as much care as the woman and young Ali executed it. “May your hands not hurt, you’ve made so much effort, thank you ma’am. Say thank you Ali,” to which Ali responded with a straightforward, “merci.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, I’m so ashamed,” the woman replied with a self-deprecating chuckle. She had a round face and a turned up nose. With her arms concealed under her grey chador she looked comically like an owl. “I’ll ask my grandson if he has any work for you,” she said.

Calling on Imam Ali for strength, the old woman hauled herself back up the steps with the same determined effort with which she had descended. Hosein rested the tray on his wooden cart and as father and son shared the unfamiliar tasting food, the relentless mewing of the vagrant black and white cat began once again. Hosein tossed him a scrap which did nothing to silence him.

© William Yong, 2009