What I Talk About When I Talk About Running with Haruki Murakami

The first time I met Haruki Murakami was at around five in the morning in a corner of Honolulu’s Kapi‘olani Park.

I was there to run a 20K and had staked out an empty patch of grass for my pre-race stretches. As I strained to touch my toes, I glanced over at another runner a few feet away. With all of that blood rushing to my head, there must have been a moment when I thought I was hallucinating, but no, that broad face was definitely the one I knew from the backs of so many books. Haruki Murakami was in that small pantheon of writers who had made me want to be one myself someday. I had read every one of his books that had been translated into English and tried to read one that hadn’t. I had heard gossip about his wintering in Hawaiʻi, and I’d seen him read once at the university, even got him to sign my copy of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but I certainly never expected to meet him under extra-literary circumstances like these.

“Murakami-san?”

He looked up.

I introduced myself and told him how excited I was about his new novel, 1Q84, which was due out in a few days. I wasn’t just buttering him up; the release of a new Murakami novel now and then was one of a handful of checks in the life-is-worth-living column of my existential balance sheet.

“Is that so?” he said.

I proceeded to tell him how important his work had been to me, and mentioned that I was a novelist, too. Because we were about to run a long-distance race, I brought up his book on running, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and said I thought often of his insights into how running can be a useful means of cross-training for writers since both demand great feats of endurance. The rhythm of our conversation was awkward at best. When lulls came, he didn’t volunteer much. Cross-training or not, he was here to be a runner, not a writer, and my knowing who he was might well have made him uncomfortable. He probably liked living here because it afforded him some degree of anonymity. In Japan, he is Stephen-King-level famous; when 1Q84 was released in that country the prior year, most of its print run sold out in one day. 

After a few minutes, I left him to his stretching, emboldened by the thought that I had been in such close proximity to that weird, prolific, world-famous brain. 

The second time I met Haruki Murakami was at another reading at the university, where he spoke to a full house in a large ballroom. 

During the Q&A, someone asked him about his daily routine. Murakami said something like, “I get up at five, write till noon, eat lunch, translate in the afternoon, eat dinner, drink a beer, listen to music, and go to bed.” 

Someone else asked what he did on his days off, and he said, “Same thing.”

After the talk, when Murakami was heading out of the room with his entourage, I greeted him and was relieved to find he remembered me. But when I tried to give him a copy of my first published novel, Big in Japan, he waved his hand and said, “No, thank you.”

I gave it to his interpreter instead.

The third time I met Haruki Murakami was at a 25K the following year in Kailua, a beach town on the windward side of the island. I was somewhere around mile eleven of the fifteen-and-a-half-mile race when Murakami appeared at my left side. Sometimes, when running long distances, it’s helpful to have a pace partner. You don’t necessarily speak to each other, but you form a temporary union of sorts. It’s a very intimate thing really. You listen to each other breathe as your legs move in lockstep, two organisms pushing each other and giving tacit encouragement. Murakami ran with me like that for the next three miles. I can’t remember how we got separated or who finished first. I do remember that I looked for him near the Gatorade coolers after, but he was gone.

The last time I met Haruki Murakami, I was at a café called The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Diamond Head, working on my surrealistic second book, Jellyfish Dreams. I was the only customer until Murakami came in, ordered a coffee, and sat at the table directly beside mine. He pulled out a novel and read while he drank his coffee. The book was old and tattered, and in English; it took a Herculean effort on my part not to ask what it was, but I was determined not to be a pest and made myself focus on my work. I took some comfort in knowing that a literary giant like Murakami is still just a coffee-drinking, paperback-reading, time-bound creature not wholly unlike me. 

At some point, I felt him notice me. Shortly after that, he got up and left.

This was all some years ago. I confess that I’ve wished those interactions with Murakami might have meant more than they seem to have, that our pace-partnering that day might have stood in as a metaphor for something of greater cosmic significance, but if there is such a meaning, it’s as elusive as that of, say, the fish that rain from the sky in Kafka on the Shore.

After the Honolulu Marathon, a photography company emails you a handful of watermarked photos they snapped of you during the race so that you can buy hardcopies if you like. One year, after checking out my own photos, I spotted a handful of Murakami’s as well. One of them showed blood dripping down his leg, as if he’d taken a nasty spill halfway through the course. Still, he ran on, with that same stoic expression you find in nearly every photo of him.

If I’ve learned anything from Murakami, it’s connected somehow with that bloody knee. “Pain,” he writes in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” He has said that if his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, hadn’t won an award, he might never have written again, so I don’t want to ignore the material conditions that have enabled him to flourish as he has, but it should be clear to anyone who knows the man’s work that his motivation runs deeper than that. He’s a kind of warrior for art, and he writes for the same reason he runs: “In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

And that’s a goal every writer can aspire to. Be better than you used to be. The rest will take care of itself.

Or maybe it won’t. In either case, you have to do the work.

---

Image by Afiq Fatah.