村上讲到由放弃酒吧到专心写小说的抉择，生活模式也随之改变。
I take a deep breath, glance back at the stairs I'd just climbed, then begin to contemplate the next stage of my life.
"I'd just like to be free to wirte for two years," I explained to my wife. "If it doesn't work out, we can always open up another bar somewhere. I'm still young and we'll have time to start over."
Once I began my life as a novelist, my wife and I decided that we'd go to bed soon after it got dark and wake up with the sun. To our minds, this was a more natural, respectable way to live. We also decided that from then on we'd try to see, only the people we wanted to see, and as much as possible, get by without seeing those we didn't.朋友建议他一边试着写小说，一边经营酒吧，但被他否决，否决的原因是为了专注。
Most of my friends were adamantly against my decision, or at least had doubts aout it. “Your business is doing fine now,” they said. “Why not just let someone else run it while you write your novels?” But I couldn't follow their advice. I'm the kind of person who has to commit totally to whatever I do. If, having committed, I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn't work out I'd always have regrets.早年对爵士乐的着迷及音乐对其创作的启发
Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing.
My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.全身心的投入创作后，缺少了早年酒吧里的“体力劳动”，于是村上在32岁时开始跑步，同时戒了烟。不过他并不推荐所有人都去跑步，并且跑步也不一定就是毅力的表现。简而言之，只是跑步适合他而已。
When I tell people that I run everyday, some are quite impressed. “You must have a lot of will power,” they tell me. Of course, it's nice to be praised like this – a lot better being disparaged. But I don't think it's merely will power that makes once able to do something. The world isn't that simple. To tell the truth, I don't even think there's much correlation between my running everyday and whether or not I have will power. I think I've been able to run more than twenty-five years for one reason: it suits me. Or, at least, I don't find it all that painful. Human beings naturally continue to do things they like, and they don't continue doing what they don't like.
跑步总会有想偷懒的时候，村上也不例外，但他有自己的办法
Now whenever I feel like I don't to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You're able to make a living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours. Yo don't have to commute on a packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don't you realize how fortunate you are? Compared with that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Then I laced up my running shoes and set off without hesitating.The running novelist和Jazz Messenger两篇各提到了一个小故事，分别涉及创作和跑步：
故事一：
One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
故事二：
No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel lethargic and don't want to do it. On days like that, I try to come up with all kinds of plausible excuses not to run. Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he had retired from running. I asked him, "Does a runner at your level ever feel like you'd rather not run today?" He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, "Of course. All the time!"
Now that I look back on it, I can see what a dumb question it was. I guess that even back then I knew how dumb it was, but I wanted to hear the answer directly from someone of Seko's calibre. I wanted to know whether, although we were worlds apart in terms of strength and motivation, we felt the same way when we laced up our running shoes in the morning. Seko's reply came as a great relief. In the final analysis, we're all the same, I thought.
The running novelis的结尾，村上讲到
At any rate, this how how I started running. Thirty-three--that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It's an age that may be a kind of crossorads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.这种具有历史的纵深和人生的无常的句型虽然老套，但很实用，《李敖回忆录》开始也用了类似手法：
“1935年的世界是一个多变的世界。这一年在世界上，波斯改国号叫伊朗了、英国鲍尔温当首相了、墨西哥革命失败了、意大利墨索里 尼身兼八职并侵略阿比西尼亚了、法国赖伐尔当总理了、挪威在南极发现新大陆了、德国希特勒撕毁凡尔赛条约扩张军力了、捷克马萨利克辞掉总统职务了、土耳其 凯末尔第三次连任总统了、 菲律宾脱离美国独立了。......”另，还有一篇文章也值得一读，虽然有些教条 What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami
