Haruki Murakami Resources - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

exorcising ghosts
haruki murakami resources in english

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること)

Translated by Philip Gabriel

US Publication:
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Knopf (29th July 2008)
ISBN-13: 978-0307269195

Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage (11th August 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0307389831

UK Publication:
Hardcover: 112 pages
Publisher: Harvill Secker (7 Aug 2008) ISBN-13: 978-1846552205

Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage (2nd April 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0099526155

An eBook wil also be available from Random House

Buy from amazon.co.uk
Buy from amazon.com

Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems.

The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being, and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.

synopsis

In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and - even more important - on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and settings ranging from Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him.

Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back.By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running. (amazon.co.uk)

Nobody pounded the table anymore, nobody threw their cups, 2nd extract from the Observer

Pain is inevitable, suffering optional - 1st extract available from the Guardian newspaper

First Chapter excerpt from the Random House site