What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Running is what he talks about.  The book is less a memoir than a journal of Murakami's daily running and participation in marathons over a period of several years.
By his own account, he's not an exceptional runner, but he's a very determined runner, for whom finishing marathons, ideally with a time improvement, is extremely important.  Although focused on running, the book does relate his decision and determination to run to his writing. He desires to write into old age and states that fatigue is the enemy of writing - thus, for him, running is a discipline to maintain the strength and endurance necessary to continue writing.
I found the book to be mildly interesting, but one feature really struck me.  When I had read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I felt that the main character, Toru, was so flat, rational and unemotional that he did not seem real to me - his character was so different from my own and people I know that I almost believed that no one could actually be like that.  In What I Talk About, Murakami seems to have a personality very similar to Toru's, very flat and rational, so that it seems startling and almost incomprehensible that his writing is so vivid!  In fact, I almost wondered if the voice of Murakami in this book is actually not his own, but a deliberate replication or recreation of the persona he invented for Toru.