The fol­low­ing is more from Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Run­ning:

It might be a lit­tle silly for some­one get­ting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly: I’m the kind of per­son who likes to be by him­self. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of per­son who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spend­ing an hour or two every day run­ning alone, not speak­ing to any­one, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be nei­ther dif­fi­cult nor bor­ing. I’ve had this ten­dency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much pre­ferred read­ing books on my own or con­cen­trat­ing on lis­ten­ing to music over being with some­one else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

…I’m in my late fifties now. When I was young, I never imag­ined the twenty-first cen­tury would actu­ally come and that, all jok­ing aside, I’d turn fifty. In the­ory, of course, it was self-evident that some­day, if noth­ing else hap­pened, the twenty-first cen­tury would roll around and I’d turn fifty. When I was young, being asked to imag­ine myself at fifty was as dif­fi­cult as being asked to imag­ine, con­cretely, the world after death. Mick Jag­ger once boasted that “I’d rather be dead than still singing ‘Sat­is­fac­tion’ when I’m forty-five.” But now he’s over sixty and still singing. “Sat­is­fac­tion.” Some peo­ple might find this funny, but not me. When he was young, Mick Jag­ger couldn’t imag­ine him­self at forty-five. When I was young, I was the same. Can I laugh at Mick Jag­ger? No way. I just hap­pen not to be a young rock singer. Nobody remem­bers what stu­pid things I might have said back then, so they’re not about to quote them back at me. That’s the only difference.

And now here I am liv­ing in this unimag­in­able world. It feels really strange, and I can’t tell if I’m for­tu­nate or not. Maybe it doesn’t mat­ter. For me—and for every­body else, probably—this is my first expe­ri­ence grow­ing old, and the emo­tions I’m hav­ing, too, are all first-time feel­ings. If it were some­thing I’d expe­ri­enced before, then I’d be able to under­stand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can’t. For now all I can do is put off mak­ing any detailed judge­ments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there’s also some­thing kind of com­i­cal about it all, some­thing you don’t want to dis­card completely.

pgs 15–18

Putting off think­ing about some­thing is one of my spe­cial­i­ties, a skill I’ve honed as I’ve grown older.

p 21

After I closed the bar and began my life as a nov­el­ist, the first thing we—and by we I mean my wife and I—did was com­pletely revamp our lifestyle. We decided we’d go to bed soon after it got dark, and wake up with the sun. To our minds this was nat­ural, the kind of life respectable peo­ple lived. We’d closed the club, so we also decided that from now on we’d meet with only the peo­ple we wanted to see and, as much as pos­si­ble, get by not see­ing those we didn’t. We felt that, for a time at least, we could allow our­selves this mod­est indulgence.

…So my new, sim­ple, and reg­u­lar life began. I got up before five a.m. and went to bed before ten p.m. Peo­ple are at their best at dif­fer­ent times of day, but I’m def­i­nitely a morn­ing per­son. That’s when I can focus and fin­ish up impor­tant work I have to do. After­ward I work out or do other errands that don’t take much con­cen­tra­tion. At the end of the day I relax and don’t do any more work. I read, lis­ten to music, take it easy, and try to go to bed early. This is the pat­tern I’ve mostly fol­lowed up till today. Thanks to this, I’ve been able to work effi­ciently these past twenty-four years. It’s a lifestyle, though, that doesn’t allow for much nightlife, and some­times your rela­tion­ships with other peo­ple become prob­lem­atic. Some peo­ple even get mad at you, because they invite you to go some­where or do some­thing with them and you keep turn­ing them down.

I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to pri­or­i­tize in life, fig­ur­ing out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of sys­tem set by  a cer­tain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of bal­ance. I placed the high­est pri­or­ity on the sort of life that lets me focus on writ­ing, not asso­ci­at­ing with all the peo­ple around me. I felt that the indis­pens­able rela­tion­ship I build in my life was not with a spe­cific per­son, but with an unspec­i­fied num­ber of read­ers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improve­ment over the last, then many of my read­ers would wel­come what­ever life I chose for myself. Shouldn’t this be my duty as a nov­el­ist, and my top pri­or­ity? My opnion hasn’t changed over the years. I can’t see my read­ers’ faces, so in a sense it’s a con­cep­tual type of human rela­tion­ship, but I’ve con­sis­tently con­sid­ered this invis­i­ble, con­cep­tual rela­tion­ship to be the most impor­tant thing in my life.

In other words, you can’t please everybody.

Even when I ran my bar I fol­lowed the same pol­icy. A lot of cus­tomers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat cus­tomer, then the busi­ness would sur­vive. To put it the other way, it didn’t mat­ter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This real­iza­tion lifted a weight off my shoul­ders. Still, I had to make sure that the one per­son who did like the place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my phi­los­o­phy and stance clear-cut, and patiently main­tain that stance no mat­ter what. This is what I learned through run­ning a business.

pgs 36–38

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Writ­ers who are blessed with inborn tal­ent can freely write nov­els no mat­ter what they do–or don’t do. Like water from a nat­ural spring, the sen­tences just well up, and with lit­tle or no effort these writ­ers can com­plete a work. Occa­sion­ally you’ll find some­one like that, but, unfor­tu­nately, that cat­e­gory wouldn’t include me. I haven’t spot­ted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of cre­ativ­ity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard phys­i­cally and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sus­tained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite effi­cient, both tech­ni­cally and phys­i­cally, at open­ing a hole in the hard rock and locat­ing a new water vein. So as soon as  I notice one water source dry­ing up, I can move on right away to another. If peo­ple who rely on a nat­ural spring of tal­ent sud­denly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.

In other words, let’s face it: Life is basi­cally unfair. But even in a sit­u­a­tion that’s unfair, I think it’s pssi­ble to seek out a kind of fair­ness. Of course, that might take time and effort. And maybe it won’t seem to be worth all that. It’s up to each indi­vid­ual to decide whether or not it is.

p 43

In every inter­view I’m asked what’s the most impor­tant qual­ity a nov­el­ist has to have. It’s pretty obvi­ous: tal­ent. No mat­ter how much enthu­si­asm and effort you put into writ­ing, if you totally lack lit­er­ary tal­ent you can for­get about being a nov­el­ist. This is more of a pre­req­ui­site than a nec­es­sary qual­ity. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.

The prob­lem with tal­ent, though, is that in most cases the per­son involved can’t con­trol its amount or qual­ity. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be fru­gal to make it last longer, but in nei­ther case do things work out that eas­ily. Tal­ent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it. Of course cer­tain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory—people like Schu­bert and Mozart, whose dra­matic early deaths turned them into legends—have a cer­tain appeal, but for the vast major­ity of us this isn’t the model we follow.

If I’m asked what the next most impor­tant qual­ity is for a nov­el­ist, that’s easy too: focus—the abil­ity to con­cen­trate all your lim­ited tal­ents on whatever’s crit­i­cal at the moment. With­out that you can’t accom­plish any­thing of value, while, if you can focus effec­tively, you’ll be able to com­pen­sate for an erratic tal­ent or even a short­age of it. I gen­er­ally con­cen­trate on work for three or four hours ever morn­ing. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writ­ing. I don’t see any­thing else, I don’t think about any­thing else. Even a nov­el­ist who has a lot of tal­ent and a mind full of great new ideas prob­a­bly can’t write a thing if, for instance he’s suf­fer­ing a lot of pain from a cav­ity. The pain blocks con­cen­tra­tion. That’s what I mean when I say that with­out focus you can’t accom­plish anything.

After focus, the next most impor­tant thing for a nov­el­ist is, hands down, endurance. If you con­cen­trate on writ­ing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed for a writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, two years. You can com­pare it to breath­ing. If con­cen­tra­tion is the process of just hold­ing your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, qui­etly breath­ing at the same time you’re stor­ing air in your lungs. Unless you can find a bal­ance between both, it’ll be dif­fi­cult to write nov­els pro­fes­sion­ally over a long time. Con­tin­u­ing to breathe while you hold your breath.

For­tu­nately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are dif­fer­ent from tal­ent, since they can be acquired and sharp­ened through train­ing. You’ll nat­u­rally learn both con­cen­tra­tion and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train your­self to focus on one point. This is a lot like the train­ing of mus­cles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to con­tin­u­ally trans­mit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thor­oughly assim­i­lates the infor­ma­tion nec­es­sary for you to write every sin­gle day and con­cen­trate on the work at hand. And grad­u­ally you’ll expand the lim­its of what you’re able to do. Almost imper­cep­ti­bly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jog­ging every day to strengthen your mus­cles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stim­u­lus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guar­an­tee the results will come.

In pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence the great mys­tery writer Ray­mond Chan­dler once con­fessed that even if he didn’t write any­thing, he made sure he sat down at his desk every sin­gle day and con­cen­trated. I under­stand the pur­pose behind his doing this. This is the way Chan­dler gave him­self the phys­i­cal sta­mina a pro­fes­sional writer needs, qui­etly strength­en­ing his willpower. This sort of daily train­ing was indis­pens­able to him.

Writ­ing nov­els, to me, is basi­cally a kind of man­ual labor. Writ­ing itself is men­tal labor, but fin­ish­ing an entire boo is closer to man­ual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lift­ing, run­ning fast, or leap­ing high. Most peo­ple, though, only see the sur­face real­ity of writ­ing and think of writ­ers as involved in quiet, intel­lec­tual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a cof­fee cup, they fig­ure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peace­ful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focus­ing your mind like a laser beam, imag­in­ing some­thing out of a blank hori­zon, cre­at­ing a story, select­ing the right words, one by one, keep­ing the flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most peo­ple ever imag­ine. You might not move your body around, but there’s gru­el­ing, dynamic labor going on inside you. Every­body uses their mind when they think. but a writer puts on an out­fit called nar­ra­tive and thinks with his entire being; and for the nov­el­ist that process requires putting into play all your phys­i­cal reserve, often to the point of overexertion.

…Writ­ers who aren’t blessed with much talent—those who barely make the grade—need to build up their strength at their own expense. They have to train them­selves to improve their focus, to increase their endurance. To a cer­tain extent they’re forced to make these qual­i­ties stand in for tal­ent. And while they’re get­ting by on these, they may actu­ally dis­cover real, hid­den tal­ent within them. They’re sweat­ing, dig­ging out a hole at their feet with a shovel, when they run across a deep, secret water vein. It’s a lucky thing, but what made this good for­tune pos­si­ble was all the train­ing they did that gave them the strength to keep on dig­ging. I imag­ine that late-blooming writ­ers have all gone through a sim­i­lar process.

pgs 76–81

Most of what I know about writ­ing I’ve learned through run­ning every day. These are prac­ti­cal, phys­i­cal lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take some­thing and still keep it decent and con­sis­tent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflex­i­ble? How much should I be aware of the world out­side, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be con­fi­dent in my abil­i­ties, and when should I start doubt­ing myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance run­ner when I became a nov­el­ist, my work would have been vastly dif­fer­ent. How dif­fer­ent? Hard to say. But some­thing would have def­i­nitely been different.

…Peo­ple some­times sneer at those who run every day, claim­ing they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the rea­son most peo­ple run. Most run­ners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far bet­ter to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe run­ning helps you do that. Exert­ing your­self to the fullest within your indi­vid­ual lim­its: that’s the essence of run­ning, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writ­ing as well.

pgs 81–83

Some­times peo­ple will ask me this: “You live such a healthy life every day, Mr. Murakami, so don’t you think you’ll one day find your­self unable to write nov­els any­more?” Peo­ple don’t say this much when I’m abroad, but  a lot of peo­ple in Japan seem to hold the view that writ­ing nov­els is an unhealthy activ­ity, that nov­el­ists are some­what degen­er­ate and have to live haz­ardous lives in order to write. There’s a widely held view that by liv­ing an unhealthy lifestyle a writer can remove him­self from the pro­fane world and attain a kind of purity that has artis­tic value. This idea has taken shape over a long period of time. Movies and TV dra­mas per­pet­u­ate this stereotypical—or, to put a pos­i­tive spin on it, legendary—figure of the artist.

Basi­cally I agree with the view that writ­ing nov­els is an unhealthy type of work. When we set off to write a novel, when we use writ­ing to cre­ate a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all human­ity rises to the sur­face. All writ­ers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the dan­ger involved, dis­cover a way to deal with it, because oth­er­wise no cre­ative activ­ity in the real sense can take place. (Please excuse the strange anal­ogy: with a fugu fish, the tasti­est part is the por­tion near the poison—this might be some­thing sim­i­lar to what I’m get­ting at.) No mat­ter how you spin it, this isn’t a healthy activity.

So from the start, artis­tic activ­ity con­tains ele­ments that are unhealthy and anti­so­cial. I’ll admit this. This is why among writ­ers and other artists there are quite a few whose real lives are deca­dent or who pre­tend to be anti­so­cial. I can under­stand this. Or, rather, I don’t nec­es­sar­ily deny this phenomenon.

But those of us hop­ing to have long careers as pro­fes­sional writ­ers have to develop an autoim­mune sys­tem of our own that can resist the dan­ger­ous (in some cases lethal) toxin that resides within. Do this, and we can more effi­ciently dis­pose of even stronger tox­ins. In other words, we can cre­ate even more pow­er­ful nar­ra­tives to deal with these. But you need a great deal of energy to cre­ate an immune sys­tem and main­tain it over a long period. You have to find that energy some­where, and where else to find it but in our own basic phys­i­cal being?

Please don’t mis­un­der­stand me; I’m not argu­ing that this is the only cor­rect path that writ­ers should take. Just as there are lots of types of lit­er­a­ture, there are many types of writ­ers, each with his own world­view. What they deal with is dif­fer­ent, as are their goals. So there’s no such thing as one right way for nov­el­ists. This goes with­out say­ing. But, frankly, if I want to write a largescale work, increas­ing my strength and sta­mina is a must, and I believe this is some­thing worth doing, or at least that doing it is much bet­ter than not.

…To deal with some­thing unhealthy, a per­son needs to be as healthy as pos­si­ble. That’s my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. This might sound para­dox­i­cal, but it’s some­thing I’ve felt very keenly ever since I became a pro­fes­sional writer. The healthy and the unhealthy are not nec­es­sar­ily at oppo­site ends of the spec­trum. They don’t stand in oppo­si­tion to each other, but rather com­ple­ment each other, and in some cases even band together. Sure, many peo­ple who are on a healthy track in life think only of good health, while those who are get­ting unhealthy think only of that. But if you fol­low this sort of one-sided view, your life won’t be fruitful.

Some writ­ers who in their youth wrote won­der­ful, beau­ti­ful, pow­er­ful works find that when they reach a cer­tain age exhaus­tion sud­denly takes over. The term lit­er­ary burnout is quite apt here. Their later works may still be beau­ti­ful, and their exhaus­tion might impart its own spe­cial mean­ing, but it’s obvi­ous these writ­ers’ cre­ative energy is in decline. This results, I believe, from their phys­i­cal energy not being able to over­come the toxin they’re deal­ing with. The phys­i­cal vital­ity that up till now was nat­u­rally able to over­come the toxin has passed its peak, and its effec­tive­ness in their immune sys­tems is grad­u­ally wear­ing off. When this hap­pens it’s dif­fi­cult for a writer to remain intu­itively cre­ative. The bal­ance between imag­i­na­tive power and the phys­i­cal abil­i­ties that sus­tain it has crum­bled. The writer is left employ­ing the tech­niques and meth­ods he has cul­ti­vated, using a kind of resid­ual heat to mold some­thing into what looks like a lit­er­ary work—a restrained method that can’t be a very pleas­ant jour­ney. Some writ­ers take their own lives at this point, while oth­ers just give up writ­ing and choose another path.

If pos­si­ble, I’d like to avoid that kind of lit­er­ary burnout. My idea of lit­er­a­ture is some­thing more spon­ta­neous, more cohe­sive, some­thing with a kind of nat­ural, pos­i­tive vital­ity. For me, writ­ing a novel is like climb­ing a steep moun­tain, strug­gling up the face of the cliff, reach­ing the sum­mit after a long and ardu­ous ordeal. You over­come your lim­i­ta­tions, or you don’t, one or the other. I always keep that inner image with me as I write.

Need­less to say, some­day you’re going to lose. Over time the body inevitably dete­ri­o­rates. Sooner or later, it’s defeated and dis­ap­pears. When the body dis­in­te­grates, the spirit also (most likely) is gone too. I’m well aware of that. How­ever, I’d like to post­pone, for as long as  I pos­si­bly can, the point where my vital­ity is defeated and sur­passed by the toxin. That’s my aim as a nov­el­ist. And besides, at this point I don’t have the leisure to be burned out. Which is exactly why even though peo­ple say, “He’s no artist,” I keep on running.

pgs 96–99

What I mean is, I didn’t start run­ning because some­body asked me to become a run­ner. Just like I didn’t become a nov­el­ist because some­one asked me to one. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done what­ever I felt like doing in life. Peo­ple may try to stop me, and con­vince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.

p 150