First published 2024
After selling his Tokyo jazz club in 1982, Haruki Murakami takes up distance running to stay healthy while pursuing his writing career. This memoir blends training diary, travel writing, and personal reflection as Murakami prepares for the 2005 New York City Marathon over four months. He runs through Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens alongside an Olympic athlete, jogs the Charles River in Boston where younger women leave him behind, and completes the solo Athens to Marathon route. The book traces connections between his two pursuits across decades of races and novels. Murakami examines the moment he chose writing as his profession, his literary successes and failures, his love for old vinyl records, and the reality of aging as a runner past fifty when times first drop then climb again. The memoir offers both humor and seriousness as it explores how physical endurance shapes creative work, appealing to readers of his fiction and the growing community of recreational runners seeking meaning in their sport.
Genres: autobiography, sports, memoir, non-fiction
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: personal-journey, reflective-narrative
Setting: Tokyo, New York City, Boston, Athens, Marathon
Period: 1982, 2005
180 pages · Hardcover · Knopf Publishing Group