Two
AUGUST 14, 2005 • KAUAI, HAWAII
Tips on Becoming a Running Novelist
It’s August 14th, a Sunday. This morning I ran an hour and fifteen minutes, listening to Carla
Thomas and Otis Redding on my MD player. In the afternoon I swam 1,400 yards at the pool and in
the evening swam at the beach. And after that I had dinner—beer and fish—at the Hanalea Dolphin
Restaurant just outside the town of Hanalea. The dish I have is walu, a kind of white fish. They grill it
for me over charcoal, and I eat it with soy sauce. The side dish is vegetable kebabs, plus a large salad.
So far in August I’ve racked up ninety-three miles.It was a long time ago that I first started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of
- I was thirty-three then.
Not long before, I’d been running a sort of jazz club near Sendagaya Station. Soon after college—
actually I’d been so busy with side jobs I was still a few credits short of graduating and was still
officially a student—I opened a small club at the south entrance to Kokubunji Station and ran it for
about three years; when they started to rebuild the building I was in, I moved to a new location closer
to the center of Tokyo. This new venue wasn’t so big, or so small, either. We had a grand piano and
just barely enough space to squeeze in a quintet. During the day we served coffee, at night it was a bar.
We served pretty decent food, too, and on the weekends featured live performances. This kind of live
jazz club was still pretty rare back then, so we gained a steady clientele and the place did all right
financially.
Most people I knew had predicted that the bar wouldn’t do well. They figured that an establishment
run as a kind of hobby wouldn’t work out, that somebody like me, who was pretty naive and most
likely didn’t have the slightest aptitude for running a business, wouldn’t be able to make a go of it.
Well, their predictions were totally off. To tell the truth, I didn’t think I had much aptitude for
business either. I just figured, though, that since failure was not an option, I’d have to give it
everything I had. My only strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can take a lot
physically. I’m more a workhorse than a racehorse. I was raised in a white-collar household, so I
didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, but fortunately my wife’s family ran a business, so her
natural intuition was a great help. No matter how great a workhorse I might have been, I never would
have been able to make it on my own.
The work itself was hard. I worked from morning till late at night, until I was exhausted. I had all