By Megan Thomas
I’m admittedly underread when it comes to Haruki Murakami, though Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore wait patiently for their turn on my TBR pile. I listened to an audiobook of The Strange Library on a road trip once, which is essentially a children’s novella, but otherwise I basically went into his memoir being unfamiliar with his work. A strange way around to do it, but it has worked out for the best, because my interest is fully piqued to read more of his fiction after learning more about his life.
I love a disguised memoir, which I think this can be categorised as. Essentially, Murakami is running us (ha) through his running career, which is rather remarkable – the man runs every day, including a marathon every year. But in doing this, he also runs us through his life.
So much of life, at large, comes down to chance, but it’s very easy for people who have reached the levels of success as Murakami has to say things like “I always knew I wanted to be a writer”, or make poetic analogies on how the discipline of writing transfers to running. But Murakami is very straightforward when retrospectively sharing his life experiences, admitting that he had never intended on becoming a writer (in fact, he owned and ran a jazz club until his late 20s), and that his running was born out of necessity – he was getting chubby writing instead of missioning around a jazz club.
By being so straightforward, the patterns reveal themselves. There is no need for Murakami to clumsily liken his insistence on not walking during marathons to his compulsion to sell his jazz club rather than let someone else manage it while he tries out nothing. Just by telling us these stories, we learn that he is very much an “all or nothing” kind of person.
I listened to this as an audiobook while I was finishing the Couch to 5K, which was really inspiring. I think I’m going to try out Born To Run by Christopher McDougall next while I’m running, as there’s something about hearing about an experience that you are quite literally doing as they speak that really takes the edge off, even if they’re talking about annual marathons and you’re wheezing along the road.
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