What I'm talking about when I talk about running

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What I'm talking about when I from running speech ( Jap. 走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること, Hashiru koto ni tsuite Kataru Toki ni boku no Kataru koto ) is an autobiographical book by Haruki Murakami , where he made his career as a long distance runner and write down his development as a writer. The title is a modified quote from Raymond Carver , which Murakami translated into Japanese: What we talk about when we talk about love.

Data

The book can be seen as a summary of his life so far and the knowledge gained from it. The first edition appeared in 2007 in Tokyo . The German edition was published by DuMont Verlag Cologne in 2008 ( ISBN 978-3-8321-8064-5 ) in a translation by Ursula Gräfe . In 2010 it was also published as a paperback by btb-Verlag Munich ( ISBN 978-3-442-73945-5 ).

content

In the first part, Murakami gives reasons that make him run. Physical fitness is important to him and the constant challenge of breaking the previous day's record gives him the incentive to keep moving until he is forty. The point at which he finds that he cannot improve his times any longer gives him a shock. A motive is thus lost. He struggles with the fact of getting old and accepting the associated limits of his performance. By describing his sport, Murakami also describes his character and his way of coping with life. Without constantly feeling his physical limits anew, he could not follow his calling as a writer. He combines running with writing in a symbiosis : the one is not possible without the other.

After his school education and studies, Murakami founded the jazz club Peter Cat in Tokyo , which earned him and his wife a decent salary after the first few years of hard work and gave him some free hours. During a break like this, the idea of ​​writing a novel occurs to him. With his first work When the Wind Sings , he took part in a competition for young and unknown authors and, to his surprise, won first prize. From then on he decided to devote himself entirely to writing and, despite contradictions from all sides, gave up his well-known club. A complete change in lifestyle follows. His physical work is now changing into a spiritual one. This leads him to find running as a balance, and since his strong addiction to cigarettes is incompatible with this sport, he even gives up this habit. From now on he trains his concentration in order to concentrate his attention on a single project for as long as possible. In addition, he claims that a healthy body is an important requirement.

In the second part, Murakami lists excerpts from his life, mostly in chronological order. His first major running event was the birth route of the marathon in Greece in 1983. Other significant races were the 1983 Antalya Marathon , the Saroma Lake 100 km Ultramarathon on Hokkaido in 1996 and the New York City Marathon in 2005 The writer runs through traces of the past again in his head. Murakami goes to Greece where he runs his first marathon under the scorching sun from Athens to Marathon (birthplace of the marathon). On these 42 kilometers he is accompanied by a team of reporters from his native Japan . From then on, Murakami took part in a marathon every year. One of his greatest achievements is completing the 100-kilometer run in northern Japan, where he crossed the finish line after eleven hours and forty-two minutes. In the last chapter he reports how he takes part in a triathlon in search of new challenges .

Reviews

Steffen Gnam from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes, among other things:

Running towards the void: Haruki Murakami philosophizes on the analogy of running and writing - and thus reveals his poetological process. He juggles the cryptic, the supernatural, with set pieces from contemporary history, pop culture, Eastern and Western mythology ...

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ FAZ review