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THIS WEEK IN
JUNE 20 — JUNE 26
Haruki Murakami completes his first ultramarathon On June 23, 1996, Haruki Murkami, the world’s most famous running novelist, ran his first (and only) ultramarathon, at Lake Saroma, in Hokkaido, Japan. An ultramarathon, if you don’t know, is sixty-two miles. As Murakami would later write in his running memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “No normal person would ever do something so foolhardy.” (Well, after all, “normal” is perhaps not the first word that comes to mind when thinking of ways to describe the author of Kafka on the Shore.)
Murakami was already a serious runner, of course, but this was the first time he’d ever run more than a marathon—26.2 miles. “For me this was the Strait of Gibraltar, beyond which lay an unknown sea,” he wrote. “What lay in wait beyond this, what unknown creatures were living there, I didn’t have a clue. In my own small way I felt the same fear that sailors of old must have felt.” After the 34-mile mark, his body began to revolt.
I felt like a piece of beef being run, slowly, through a meat grinder. . . It felt like a car trying to go up a slope with the parking brake on. My body felt like it was falling apart and would soon come completely undone. Out of oil, the bolts coming loose, the wrong cogs in gear, I was rapidly slowing down as one runner after another passed me. A tiny old lady around seventy or so passed me and shouted out, “Hang in there!” Man alive. What was going to happen the rest of the way? There were still twenty-five miles to go.
Spoiler alert: he made it. He got himself through by telling himself that he was a machine who could feel no pain. After 47 miles, he wrote, “My muscles were no longer a seething Revolutionary Tribunal and seemed to have given up on complaining. Nobody pounded the table anymore, nobody threw their cups. My muscles silently accepted this exhaustion now as a historical inevitability, an ineluctable outcome of the revolution.” In the end, he didn’t walk a single step of the race. It took him eleven hours and forty-two minutes. He was 47 years old. “It was like a tight knot inside me was gradually loosening,” he wrote, “a knot I’d never even realized, until then, was there.”
Of course, Murakami is more than just a runner—and a little more than just your average novelist, too. For a famously reclusive (or at least interview-shy) writer, Murakami gets around. He has inspired visual artists, architects, T-shirt collections, video games, and incoming college students. He has offended entire towns. He has hosted bossa nova jams and radio shows. (He loves music.) (Also baseball.) (Also the work of Mieko Kawakami—who in turn has some thoughts about Murakami.) He gives good rain. He likes to compare things to writing. (Here is a list of everything he has ever compared to writing.) He is a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature but he never wins (and that might be just fine). He is guaranteed to be the favorite writer of at least three people you know . . . which is almost as impressive a feat as running an ultramarathon.
SPONSORED BY NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 
Join LIVE From NYPL and a packed lineup of special guests to celebrate Octavia E. Butler on what would have been her 74th birthday. In 2006, writers, performers, editors, and friends gathered at The New York Public Library to honor Butler, whose untimely death at the age of 58 had cut short one of the great careers in American letters. Fifteen years later, as the Library of Congress releases the first of its Butler collections, LIVE From NYPL pays tribute to her work with an evening of talks, readings, and performances. Register for the free event now.
MORE MURAKAMI
WRITING ADVICE “The key component is not the quality of the materials─what’s needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication.” —HARUKI MURAKAMI
In other (old) news this week Jack London’s novel The Call of the Wild begins serialization in the Saturday Evening Post (June 20, 1903) • The US Supreme Court overturns a lower court ruling that found Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to be obscene (June 22, 1964) • Octavia Butler is born; 73 years later, her books will hit the best-seller lists where they belong (June 22, 1947) • Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” is published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (June 23, 1819) • All the theaters in London are closed on account of an outbreak of bubonic plague (June 23, 1592) • The patent for the first typewriter (made with piano keys!) is issued (June 23, 1868) • Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” soon to become one of the most iconic short stories in English language, is published in The New Yorker (June 26, 1948) • Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford (June 26, 1907) 
“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” 
–OCTAVIA BUTLER Born this week in 1947 “You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?” 
–FROM “THE GLASS ESSAY” BY ANNE CARSON Born this week in 1950
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