so you share some thoughts on running with Murakami?
When you talk about yourself, it’s maybe difficult to talk directly about yourself. To clearly grasp who you really are, and get the idea of what you really want to talk about yourself, something that has been taking a critical role in your life is also playing a critical role. A Critical thing in one’s life is different from person to person, and in Murakami’s case, it’s running, as some of you might be perplexed. Why not writing? If you know another aspect of him not as a novelist but as a running novelist, you can automatically understand why, and this book is the best stuff and a must read to know the other yin(陽) side of him.
Let me make it more specific, it’s not that he chose running as a main theme when he was trying to write about himself. It was the opposite that when he was trying to write about what running has meant to him as a person, he discovered that writing about running and writing about himself was not that different, or even they're almost same he thought.
It’s well-known scientific fact that running is good for you brain and a lot of people simply run, from university professors to corporate CEOs to ordinary office workers. While everybody has different reasons to run, there are some common reasons to run everybody can share, I guess. So what are the reasons to run for you? This book by Murakami, a kind of memoir of himself, perhaps gives you some reasons to try running, or if you’re already a runner, this helps you have fresh insights about why you run, or if you’re a fan of his novels, this is the book you can know him much better as a person, as a writer, and as a runner. (After all he is a professional novelist, not a professional athlete, and what makes this book so special is the fact that he obviously confesses if running didn’t take such a great part in his life his writing would be significantly different, although he never went deeper about what kind of differences are they.)
For me, this is the book which made me start a running habit after reading it, and here are some points from the book which resonated with me when I was reading it and crossed in my mind when I was running after reading it.
1. Muscle is an animal
Like a manual labor, if you carefully tell your body what you need him to do, and listen to what they say, and keep doing so, muscle will follow your order and do it’s jobs, gradually expand it’s limit. But if you are not paying enough attention and forget taking care of it, it soon gets used to that lazy life and forget what they’ve learnt easily.
2. Writing (for making living) is a manual labor
Obviously those who make a living as a professional writer have a privilege to work when and where they want. but even so, sitting at your desk for hours, keeping your mind focused like a laser beam, and creating a long, profound, and complex story is something we can’t imagine how tough it is unless you actually live that kind of life. In his own words it requires a lot energy over a long period that you imagine.
3. Unhealthy souls require healthy bodies
Even though he is a bit cynical to the idea that writing novels is a unhealthy type of work, he agrees with the idea. It is basically antisocial and unhealthy activity and many of writers and artists are actually living antisocial or decadent style of lives, he says. But his point is people who are healthy or love healthy life tends to think only of good health and who are unhealthy tends to think only of that, but looking your life with this kind of one-sided view is not make your life fertile. They don't conflict each other or even supplement each other.
4. Talent is most decisive, but you can’t control it
In this book, he writes If he’s asked what is the most critical factor to be a professional novelist that would definitely be a talent. But talent is not something you can always count on or consume when you need and save when you don’t. Of course through experience or trial and error, you could forge your way to efficiently work but if you totally lack talent, you can never be a professional writer.
5. Focus supplements talent to a certain extent
The second most critical factor to be a professional novelist he says is focus. The ability to concentrate your limited energy and talent on whatever critical at the moment. Some says to be able to focus like a lazor beam is a talent, but this is surely something you can control and you can even supplements a shortage of talent with that level of focus (to a certain amount, of course).6. Do what you can continue naturally
So you have a talent and strong focus, then you can write a novel? Maybe yes, but not sure whether you would still be writing as a professional writer 5, 10, 20 years later. Especially if you write long novels, something needs well organized story, you might need a regular rhythm to keep going. You need to sit at your desk every day writing for hours and continue this life over months. If you get tired of it after 2 weeks or one month, then this type of work is not for you. But don't think you can naturally reach that state easily. You take as much energy and concentration as you can manage to get things run smoothly. Same can be said to running a long-distance, it's not for everyone but for people who think it suits his or her nature. And you need a considerable amount of time and effort to actually run a long-distance.
7. Key to continue is not strong will but to do what suits your nature
7. Key to continue is not strong will but to do what suits your nature
It is incredible and somewhat odd for those who don’t run, that some runners wake up early and run in a brisk morning air for every day on top of their daily routine after that. But it is more likely that they are not that different from you, and not that they all have stronger will. Murakami says he can’t find any relation between running every day and whether he has a strong will. He runs simply because running suits his nature (not that he doesn’t feel it painful, it’s tough for him too, of course). He even says if you do something against your nature, you could never continue that activity no matter how you want to succeed and hate to lose, and even though if you could manage to continue it and achieve what you wish, it’s not good for you.
8. Your nature won’t change much as you get older
8. Your nature won’t change much as you get older
Of course people change day by day, year by year. You can learn and improve yourself through experiencing various new things and hard training. You used to be shy or unsocial but you could transform yourself into an out-going, friendly person, seriously? In some cases changing yourself is good for you or even a must thing to survive in society. But when you are a novelist and write a story with your entire being, no matter how you try to deny, the old you, for better or worse, are still there and you can’t hide it, maybe(you’ll only know when you write as a professional writer like Murakami…).
9. The only opponent you need to beat is yourself, the goal you set by yourself
9. The only opponent you need to beat is yourself, the goal you set by yourself
For most of long-distance runners, individual rivalry is, to beat someone or to lose to someone, not important to keep running. Or you don’t need it since there is most objective, inescapable standard in running, namely time. As long as you can reach the goal set by yourself, you will feel a sense of satisfaction. You can easily come up with excuses why you lost to someone, but you can’t fool yourself. Failing to reach a goal set by yourself is not something you can’t easily explain.
But after he got older, when he could no longer improve his time and slowly his time became going down, he naturally found what matters is whether he can enjoy running and feel a sense of contentment after a race and that trying to achieve a certain time no longer serves as a goal for his running.
10. You are not thinking while you are running
10. You are not thinking while you are running
You are basically not thinking while you run. When you run your mind is filed with void, and various thoughts cross your mind but they never take up this central void. He doesn’t reveal whether he has ever came up with ideas of his novels when he run or not, but that’s not important for him obviously. It’s rather he can get rid of bad feeling or extraneous thoughts by running to exhaustion than he finds a new idea as he runs.
11. You can keep running in early morning every day because of a beautiful young lady
11. You can keep running in early morning every day because of a beautiful young lady
Running is, without a doubt, a sports you (can) do by yourself all alone, and this is one of a greatest thing about running. But of course a beautiful lady you pass each other every day in a early morning run may reduce a pain of waking up every day when everybody is still sleeping. (He even says without pleasure like that it’s pretty difficult to get up early and go jogging every morning )
12. You need to balance your running and your work
12. You need to balance your running and your work
After all, if you're a runner, by being a runner I mean keep running for a long time, sometimes lifelong, the reason you run is most likely not only because you want to stay fit, but you want to live to the fullest.
As for Murakami, he is an enthusiastic runner (maybe it's stylish to call him simply "a runner" but he runs one marathon per year, so it's not far off to describe him as "enthusiastic"), but also a (running) novelist, a significantly renowned novelist. Maybe he can't do things halfhearted or perhaps that's his nature to choose something you can't accomplish halfhearted, and thereby when he started running when he was 33 in 1982, he has come all the way to running nearly 30 marathons and even one ultra marathon, where you run 100 km. But ultimately the reason or the goal of his running is to maintain and improve his physical condition in order to keep on writing. That's why he has tried to stay in a position where everything is balanced and doesn't run another ultramarathon even though he is eager to run the one.
13. A lesson you learn is got to be concrete
13. A lesson you learn is got to be concrete
“From out of the failures and joys I always try to come away having grasped a concrete lesson, (It’s got to be concrete, no matter how small it is.)”
By the time you’re reading this line of the book you’ll end up knowing why writing about running took so much time for him. It is from the beginning a vague theme, but lessons he learned through actually got his body moving and feeling pain is definitely concrete. Putting those lessons into words as concrete as possible is a kind of writing he’d never tried before and he needed to carefully create the his own way of completing the task.
amazon.com(USA) amazon.co.jp(日本)
