This weird book consists of entries from a journal Murakami kept about the running he does, interspersed with his thoughts on writing, and the perhaps unexpected relationship between the two. His "running journal" reads like an experiment in whether writing that is almost about nothing can be engaging. For example: "Since I arrived in Hawaii I've run about an hour every day, six days a week. It's two and a half months now since I resumed my old lifestyle in which, unless it's t... (show more)

This weird book consists of entries from a journal Murakami kept about the running he does, interspersed with his thoughts on writing, and the perhaps unexpected relationship between the two. His "running journal" reads like an experiment in whether writing that is almost about nothing can be engaging. For example: "Since I arrived in Hawaii I've run about an hour every day, six days a week. It's two and a half months now since I resumed my old lifestyle in which, unless it's totally unavoidable, I run every single day. Today I ran for an hour and ten minutes, listening on my Walkman to two albums by the Lovin' Spoonful -- Daydream and Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful -- which I'd recorded on an MD disc. Right now I'm aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue . . . ." Passages like these made me wonder why, exactly, I was reading this book.

But then Murakami sweetens each chapter with an essay about the ways writing and writing balance each other. These, of course, are the best parts of the book. His insights are always interesting, some of them are fascinating.

What to make of these ordinary journal entries about training for a marathon interspersed with essays about the lonely, arduous task of writing novels? I decided that the book is cleverly designed to show, by example, the discipline and single-minded focus writing requires, that the marathon is like the finished novel, the training runs the small work of putting lines down, one after another, and thinking hard about how best to tell your story. The message is that the daily work of writing fiction is deceptively banal, and that discipline pays, in the running and writing games both. (show less)