i recently signed up for the Murakami Reading Challenge, which involves reading any number of books written by Murakami over the span of 2011. i’ve more or less targeted 5 books, which means at least 5 of the 30 books i intend to complete by year end will be written by perhaps one of my most favorite authors of all time, Haruki  Murakami. my Murakami books were all in Manila, so i took about a week off reading while waiting either for the Norwegian Wood i ordered from The Book Depository to arrive or for me to fly out to Manila (the latter preceded the former) . before joining mum in USTH, i managed to pick up Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” on the way out of the house. i’m typing up my reflections on the book fresh after i finished my re-read.

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Murakami

I think I’ve been reading Murakami’s work for more than a full decade now. People used to ask me what I liked about Murakami (yes, there was a time when the people around me were unfamiliar, and even reluctant, to read Murakami): I’d always say that I liked his works because it always sounded like the voice inside my head.

A decade on, this remains to be the primary reason that I have  devoted years to reading, collecting, and proselytizing people to his works.

See, the voice in my head normally sounds as though every thought is being constantly written down onto paper (this, of course, happens when the voice in my head is slow enough). When my thoughts aren’t racing, the voice in my head is very much like the Boku’s in Murakami’s books, mulling over the meaning of ordinary things, reflecting on random memories, and sentimentalizing the rhythms of the life I choose to live.

There were times when I found myself relating to his characters more than I wanted to; although, I appreciate to no end the literary quiet he managed to bring to the act of cooking pasta, listening to the water slowly boil while a jazz record played in the background. Really, it felt like the scenes of my life literally being written on the pages of a book I’m reading.

I find it oddly consoling to admit that there’s a degree of vanity associated to my liking of Murakami. I’d like to think instead that we are kindred souls.

Reading Murakami’s memoir on running affirmed how richly I could relate to Murakami and the voice with which he writes with that manages to comes off his works. For a while in university, I ran a lot, and a lot of his reflections in running mirrored a lot of my sentiments about it. I never ran to the extent where I developed the physical requisites for distance running like he did; however, when I picked up the book some months into being employed some 2 years ago, reading about his struggles into finding his distance-running form allowed me to come to terms with a lot of the struggles I faced as a returning runner. In truth, I don’t think I’d have considered running again had I not cross-checked my experience of pain with his.

Needless to say, I understand what he means when he says that many things in life are learned best when reinforced with pain.

Obviously, I appreciated this book for its running angle; I love running (although I am painfully inconsistent with it), and the fact that the work covered richly a wide array of thoughts related to running (or, more accurately, to the thoughts that permeate a runner) is one of the reasons that I love this piece of work. It came to me at a time that I was trying to run again, and because like Murakami, I dislike sharing very specifically the effort I try to put into keeping fit, finding a very intimate means to listen and in a way, converse with someone about the journey into running was (and has remained) valuable to me.

However, I also love this work because to me, it was a treatise on how a man lived his life and how he’s come to terms with the decisions he’s made. It’s almost like having someone come as they are and watch them understand the person they have become over the years.

I’ve come to appreciate the wealth of wisdom that comes with self-awareness, and the extent with which I’ve tried to remain self-aware has helped me more deliberately define the  person I am right now. There’s a lot of pain, shame, pride, and forgiveness repeatedly involved in the process, and reading through Murakami’s work felt as though I was vicariously living a self-aware life longer than the years I’ve been thusfar blessed with.

More importantly, reading Murakami write with so much self-awareness about his life in relation to running made me realize that perhaps, the other important reason I’ve remained with Murakami for so long was because I learned navigating through my own mind into becoming more self-aware from reading Murakami’s Boku’s undergo the same journey. It’s almost as though the voice in my head just happened to sound a lot like Murakami’s stream-of-consciousness writing; and then as I became more self-aware, the voice that I was constantly occupied with in my reading was Murakami’s. These two near serendipitous conditions thus reinforced the similarity of the voice we send into our consciousness in hopes of an echo that we can decipher in its return.

However, it’s important to note at this junction that there are fundamental differences between myself and Murakami— while we both relish our times alone, and learned by way of our circumstances how to better relate with people, I like competition. It matters to me what I win and the journey I take to winning. I loved school and excelled in it; I was raised in an environment where success in everything that I dedicated my time to was a given.

Just the same, the moment a jazz record plays through my earphones, I smile and wish I were somewhere else tossing noodles slowly during the last minutes of cooking in boiling water (like Toru in Wind-up Bird Chronicle). Then, my mind speaks to me in lines from Murakami’s works, and I feel as though a part of me has come full-circle.