How to Journal Like Haruki Murakami

The safest path to seeing what is inside of you is writing about the world around you.

My grandmother used to tell me that if I ever need to have a difficult conversation with someone, I should do it in the car.

This advice feels counterintuitive. I was taught to face the person I’m speaking to and make eye contact. But I’ve found that this makes me feel self-conscious when I’m trying to say something difficult.

When I look directly at someone, I watch them react to my words in real-time. If I’m expressing something difficult like my grievances, or their flaws, or “I’m sorry Kate, but this relationship just isn’t working” watching their reactions causes me to panic. I see them get sad or angry, and I instinctively edit the truth to soften the blow. I lose my nerve. I end up letting a relationship drag out for months longer than it should because I couldn’t get through that difficult conversation.

The car is different. In the car, you are side-by-side. You are facing the same direction. You are both looking out at the passing landscape, watching the same world move. Because you aren’t staring at the other person, you stop performing for them. You are just two people watching the road and it becomes easier to be honest.

Journaling works in the same way for me.

I used to struggle to maintain a consistent journaling habit. I would make time for it, sit down at my desk, open a blank page and then… nothing. I wanted to write something profound. Something that sounded like it belonged in a memoir. But because I was watching myself think, I would flinch. I was trying to force depth rather than letting it come to me naturally. And it made the whole experience feel awkward and contrived, so I would stop.

Sitting down at a blank page and demanding a profound insight was like walking into a gas station at 2:00 AM and immediately asking the clerk about his relationship with his father. I can’t do that. That’s insane. I have to make small talk first. I have to buy a Slim Jim first. I have to mention the humidity outside. I need a transaction of the ordinary so I can arrive at depth naturally.

I went back to my grandmother’s advice. Instead of trying to focus on my “feelings,” I shifted my attention toward the physical details of my day.

When I anchored my journal in the external world, the weather, the miles I biked, what I ate that day, the performance anxiety vanished. I stopped trying to sound smart.

Paradoxically, recording the dry facts of my day gave me a clearer picture of my mood than my actual feelings did. Spending two paragraphs describing a storm told me more about my state of mind than simply stating “I’m sad.” The focus on the grey light and the oppressive dampness revealed the heaviness I was trying to ignore.

I started to see patterns in my life that I was too close to see in the moment. I could see how my activities were causing certain behaviors.

To understand this, look at What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

A lot of it is pretty ordinary. He begins many chapters by talking about the distance he ran that day, the temperature, the specific clouds in the sky, or the music he listened to. But beneath those surface details, something deeper starts to emerge.

In one section, he reviews his training log and looks at the miles he ran over the past month. He notices his times have slowed. The data forces him to confront what it means to age, to lose physical capability, and to accept limitations.

Approaching journaling this way breaks the paralysis. Instead of sitting down and forcing yourself to answer a big question—What does it mean to get older?—you are drawn into that conversation in a more natural way. It doesn’t feel forced or contrived. In fact, you didn’t even know it was going to come up, so you’re more honest about it.

Introspection is often treated like mining. We try to dig straight down into the dark to find a gem. But accurate journaling is actually more like land surveying.

You cannot measure the elevation of your own mood without a benchmark. You need a fixed point outside of yourself to triangulate where you actually stand.

For Murakami, running is the anchor. For me, its cycling.

When you ride a bike, you tend to repeat the same routes. You climb the same hills in July that you climbed in December. You descend the same canyons in the rain that you descended in the heat. Because the route is a constant, it becomes a perfect control group for the experiment of the self.

When I ride a familiar segment, I am not just riding it in the present. I am riding alongside my past rides. The landscape acts as a trigger. As I pass a specific tree or ride down a familiar street, the memory of the last time I was there comes up.

This creates a “whole picture” view. I might remember riding this same curve a year ago. I might remember thinking, at the time, that I was happy and handling my life well. But as I ride it today, with the benefit of distance, I recall the tightness in my chest I felt back then.

I realize I wasn’t happy then, I was stressed and suppressing it. The bike ride forces a confrontation with the reality of my history. And when I write it down, it creates a composite image of who I was and who I am, overlaid on the same stretch of asphalt.

It’s hard to accurately convey how you really feel. It’s easy to fool yourself. Maybe you only write when you’re happy or when you’re sad. But if you focus on capturing the benign details of your day, you can see how you really felt based on your actions. You stop trying to stare your life in the eyes to find the truth. Instead, you just sit next to it, watching the road, and let the truth arrive naturally.