Haruki Murakami Daily Routine

Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular Japanese writers nowadays. His books and stories are very interesting for people of different ages and it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t know any of them. His novel “1Q84” sold more than six million copies, another novel of him “Norwegian wood” sold more than 2 million copies, and his “Killing Commendatore” was about to get the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 2020.

But Murakami is interesting not only by his books, but he also owns a lot of attention just by himself. So, in this article, we will look closer at his daily schedule, which is quite astonishing.

(Photo: Ole Jensen/Corbis via Getty Images)

Murakami respects daily routine a lot. He wakes up around 4 o’clock, gets coffee, and starts to work. He writes about 5-6 hours, worth approximately around 10 pages of writings, then has his breakfast and goes for a jog, which is usually about 6 miles (9-10 km). And after that, from time to time, he can go for a swim as well. Sounds impressive! His words about daily routine to the “New York Magazine”: “I respect the daily routine. I get up early in the morning. I go to bed around nine o’clock, unless the baseball game is still going. And I run or I swim. I’m an ordinary guy”.

H.M. believes that a good daily routine and discipline in a healthy lifestyle allow him to write his surrealistic, magical stories.

“Some writers led very unhealthy lives—like Baudelaire. But, in my opinion, those days are gone. This is a very complicated world, and you have to be strong to survive, to get through the chaos. I became a writer when I was thirty years old, and I started running when I was thirty-two or thirty-three. I decided to start running every day because I wanted to see what would happen. I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything. And in the end I think it was good for me, because I became tough.” (Interview to “The New Yorker” Magazine,2019)

This discipline decision also based on his past when he was an owner of the jazz club, named after his cat in his early years “Peter Cat”.

“Owning a jazz club, life was so disorderly and confusing – going to bed at three or four in the morning – so when I became a writer, I decided to live a very solid life: get up early, go to bed early, exercise every day.”

 “My belief is that I should be strong physically in order to write strong things”

H.M. also combines his jogging with one of his passions – cats.

“How many cats do you have?

None at all. I go jogging around my house every morning and I regularly see three or four cats—they are friends of mine. I stop and say hello to them and they come to me; we know each other very well.”

It is great that people of art and culture in a present time go for health, mental and physical, and transmit that style to their fans and readers. On a question; what keeps H.M. healthy, his answer is simple and adorable:

(Credit:Photograph by Nathan Bajar / NYT / Redux)

“Music and cats. They have helped me a lot.”

Sources:

• Treisman, D. (2019, May 16). The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-underground-worlds-of-haruki-murakami
• Burkeman, O. (2018, October 11). Haruki Murakami: ‘You have to go through the darkness before you get to the light.’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/11/haruki-murakami-interview-killing-commendatore