Track Record

Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist whose work has been compared to that of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, did not start out as a novelist. For a decade he ran his own jazz club in Tokyo. Then one day, while watching a baseball game, he thought perhaps he could write a novel. He did, entered it in a contest, and, after he had forgotten about it, learned he had won.

He wrote another novel, sold his club, and became a full-time writer. At the same time he took up running because he was a three-pack-a-day smoker and gained weight when sedentary. He knew that if he planned on being a writer for long, he had better live a more healthy life.

So Murakami rejected Yeats’s dictum that one must perfect the life or the art–although he does acknowledge there is an element of darkness in writing novels:

Murakami’s way of dealing with this toxin is through running and, recently, competing in triathlons. He doesn’t say everyone should do it this way, but he does say that it is better to deal with it in a healthy way, rather than the usual writers’ solutions: drinking, debauchery, etc.

Some would call this toxin by the traditional name of original sin, and suggest another healthy way of dealing with it is through prayer and repentance; others would call it the death wish and suggest psychotherapy. But Murakami exists in a world of his own making: Not that he literally believes he made the world, but that he writes from within a vacuum, as if he were the only person in the world and all his observations were written on a blank slate.

This is partly a matter of atmosphere, but it also shows in the lack of context that surrounds his -memoir. Admittedly this is a memoir that focuses on only one aspect of his own life–he has discovered, he says, that when he writes about running he writes about himself–but there is a curious emptiness here. Murakami mentions his wife a few times, other runners, he quotes Raymond Chandler and mentions Hemingway; but mostly it’s just him, his running and his writing. He admits he likes being alone–not unusual for writers–but when he gropes, fleetingly, into metaphysics he refers to nobody but himself, as if all the prophets, sages, and religious leaders (or Freud, for that matter) never said anything about the spiritual side of life.

But Murakami writes this way not out of pride or defiance: He takes no interest in certain things because he has to physically experience something to understand it. Or so he says.

I’m making this sound as though What I Talk About is devoid of humor, but anyone who reads Murakami knows that humor infuses his work:

Murakami subscribes to no orthodoxy, whether global warming or anything else, but he is not a “negative” writer, critical of everything, praising nothing. He is a big fan of The Great Gatsby (“I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it.”) and, in the tenor of his writing and running, resembles Jay Gatsby himself, as pictured in Fitzgerald’s last paragraph: Alone, but reaching for a vision of -paradise.

Franklin Freeman is a writer in Maine.