What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami
Vintage Books (e-book)
Haruki Murakami readers will be familiar with the loneliness that gnaws at characters in his novels. In his 'kind of memoir', What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami explains that he has constantly kept his body in motion to expel the isolation he feels inside. Running exhausts him to the point he can no longer feel discontent, he seems to say. It also makes him aware of his physical weakness. Fans will know that the author runs marathons, and that he used to work at a jazz bar in Tokyo. In this book he sort of talks about those subjects in the same way he sort of reveals other aspects of his life: that he feels more comfortable giving speeches in English than in his native Japanese because he knows he is limited by his English; that the idea to become a novelist came to him at a baseball game; that he runs to music with as simple a rhythm as possible. Despite centring the book on running, What I Talk About feels loose, poorly executed and unsatisfying as anything other than the inchoate musings of Murakami.
