Wind / Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami
translated by Ted Goossen

This beautifully presented hardback book contains Murakami’s two early novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. There’s nothing fantastic or surreal in them, if you discount the never-explained appearance of twins in “my” (i.e. the narrator’s) bed. (A young man’s wet dream come true?) The main themes and cultural references are all too familiar from the later Murakami books. Which is not bad as such, unless you expect to find something new in every book you read. Both novels are very short, yet could benefit from being abridged even further (really, all these minutiae of endless drinking or lighting up and extinguishing their ciggies don’t add much to the story). Most of the female characters lack names. Come to think of it, so do most male characters too. “I” make a (relatively) big deal out of friendship with the Rat who did not strike (real) me as remotely interesting. In fact, in Pinball there is no interaction between “me” and the said Rat at all.

The most fascinating parts of Wind are those that deal with Derek Hartfield, a Murakami’s version of Kilgore Trout. Of Pinball, the pinball machine.

There were so many questions I could have asked. Why did you choose my place? How long will you stay? Most of all, what are you? How old are you? Where were you born? But I never asked, and they never said. Pinball, 1973 It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams. But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place. Hear the Wind Sing