Thirty years ago, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami owned a jazz club in Tokyo. It was a tiny place, just big enough for a quintet. During the day he served coffee, and at night the club became a bar. Mr. Murakami closed up himself, arriving home as the yolky sun was rising in the sky. It had never occurred to him to do anything else, let alone write fiction. And then it did.

FILE/Karl Stolleis

This charming, sober little book tells the story of how, shortly after Mr. Murakami embarked on a career as a novelist, he was blind-sided by an even unlikelier idea: to go for a run. One can understand his surprise. At the time, he was smoking 60 cigarettes a day. He had never been an athlete. But he was a solitary person, and before long he was hooked on a new, far more salubrious ritual.

Runners will find a kindred soul on these pages. Here is everyman, hitting the pavement, falling into that peculiar mental void that opens up on a long jog. He endures the indignities, too. Completing his first marathon in Greece, he chugs along a commuter road in midsummer, stepping over dead dogs and cats. His sweat dries so fast it leaves behind smears of salt. "When I lick my lips," he writes, "they taste like anchovy paste."

Since that day, Mr. Murakami has run a marathon every year without fail. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Knopf , $21), skips around these races, circuitously filling out Mr. Murakami's thoughts on running as it links to writing. The two habits become a feedback loop that reinforce one another, solidifying the importance of routine and focus in his life. In this sense, the book provides a fascinating portrait of Mr. Murakami's working mind and how he comes to his magic on the page.

Since the early 1990s, he has been one of the world's most vibrant, spontaneous storytellers, improvising on the page like a jazz musician. Apparently, though, there is no author's high.

"Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor," Mr. Murakami writes. "I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity." This droll little book reminds us how he has pounded at that bedrock, one mile at a time.

John Freeman, past president of the National Book Critics Circle, is completing a book on the tyranny of e-mail.