The first Haruki Murakami line I ever read came from a book about running:
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
But he never claimed it as his own.
In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he credits it to a mantra passed between marathon runners, the kind of phrase you repeat under your breath when your legs stop cooperating.
I have carried it with me ever since, because it draws a line I had never seen drawn so cleanly. Pain arrives without asking. We build a story around suffering, and we can revise it.
That distinction is at the center of Murakami’s existentialism.
His novels follow ordinary men to whom strange things happen: a wife vanishes, a friend cuts off contact, a cat starts talking. Nobody explains why.
The universe stays silent as Camus described, yet Murakami’s answer to that silence feels gentler than Camus’s.
His characters boil spaghetti, iron shirts, listen to old jazz records, and keep going. In his world, meaning comes from small rituals performed faithfully.
In Norwegian Wood, after his closest friend dies, Toru Watanabe arrives at a realization that Jay Rubin renders like this:
“Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”
Death is not the wall at the end of the corridor, and Murakami moves it into the room through his writing.
The people we lose travel alongside us, shaping who we become, and grief becomes a form of companionship.
Kafka on the Shore gave me a way to understand hardship.
The famous storm passage tells a fifteen-year-old runaway that the storm he faces is inside him, and that once it passes:
“You won’t be the same person who walked in.”
I read this as permission to stop measuring difficult seasons by whether I came through them intact. Being changed by them was always the point.
Memory is the subject of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a novel about a man cut off by his friends without explanation, who spends sixteen years carrying the wound. His girlfriend Sara tells him this:
“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.”
I love this line. Every attempt to bury an old hurt leaves its shape intact underneath. Murakami suggests going back, asking the questions, and facing the people involved. Tsukuru does exactly that, and the answers he finds hurt less than the silence did.
Accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2009, Murakami described a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, and told his audience where he stood:
“I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
The wall, he explained, is the system; each of us is an egg, fragile and singular.
I return to this whenever institutions (in this case, it’s my job/company) ask me to forget the individual person in front of me. In his view, a novelist exists to keep that person visible.
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