Bingo 2: Asia & Oceania
I’ve read a few of Haruki Murakami’s novels (in translation; I don’t read Japanese); I enjoyed them but they’re definitely something you need to be in the right mood for. His non-fiction What I Talk About When I Talk About Running sounds exactly like the kind of guy who would write some of those stories, at least style-wise.
Murakami is a long-time distance runner as the title suggests, and basically he’s turned bits of his running journal into a nine segment memoir. I have to say, this book is definitely more memoir than biography or running journal. Each piece is kind of centered over a running-related experience, often preparing for or doing a marathon, several parts leading up to the New York Marathon of 2005, but also there’s bits about triathalon training and competing, and an ultra-marathon. The personal reflecting that is implied in the term memoir is definitely the center of this book, not the facts of his life or the specifics of his training. There are a few scattered bits of both, but not nearly as much as the ‘here’s what I think or feel about this’. The feeling I got from everything is sort of a blasé ‘whatever, man’ attitude, and that’s definitely something that kind of drives his novels too.
He’s obviously a decent runner (he’s done the Boston Marathon a half dozen times, and that’s a hard one to get into) but there’s so much ‘I don’t know if I’m any good’ and ‘I’m just kind of winging it training’ that it bugged me a little. Does he not do any cross-training? Not for most of the book. I know runners can get to be that way, and that what’s easy or hard for one may not be for another, but the seeming total lack of appreciation for being able to run not just marathons, but top tier ones, is a little off putting.
His perceptions about what it is to be a professional writer are interesting (apparently he feels it’s kind of an unhealthy profession to be in) and who can/should do it, but that’s not the main focus of the book. That’s probably for the better since you’d have to appreciate his fiction style to really want to know or enjoy more of that. As he points out, a lot of people told him quitting his day job to be a writer before he’d published anything was a bad idea, but he’s stubborn and did what he wanted to, and it worked out. Good for him with that, but I personally will never see how that kind of approach to life works for anyone who doesn’t have a ton of support beforehand.
