Run with the Wind

About

After shoplifting bread one night near Kansei University, former high school track star Kakeru Kurahara is caught — not by police, but by Haiji, a fellow student who recognizes a runner when he sees one. Haiji has a plan: assemble a team from the misfit residents of their shared dormitory and compete in the Hakone Ekiden, Japan's most prestigious collegiate relay race. Most of them have never run competitively. Some can barely run at all. Shion Miura's bestseller is a sports novel that transcends the genre. The race is real and the training sequences are precise, but the novel's deeper interest is in how a shared impossible goal transforms a group of strangers into a team — and how the discipline of running, one step at a time, becomes a metaphor for facing everything else. A novel about running toward something instead of away from it — and the discovery that the hardest races are the ones you never expected to enter.