Wind/Pinball

Begin Again

Haruki Murakami is the most popular Japanese author today, whose name comes up every year as a contender for the Nobel Prize. 

His books are an enigmatic mix of social comment, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy and romance that no other writer has managed to put together with such dexterity. But how did this remarkable career begin?

           

Pinball, 1973 was first published in in 1980,  the second book in the Rat Trilogy, preceded by Hear The Wind Sing (1979) and followed by A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). Now Wind/Pinball  have been translated (by Ted Goossen) and published together, with an introduction -- The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction -- by Murakami himself, in which he reveals how he started writing.  They contain all the classic Murakami tropes, but are relatively simple as compared to his later, increasingly surreal, books.

The protagonist is a chain-smoking, heavy drinking drifter, with an oddly apathetic attitude to life. Both short novels feature this unnamed young man and his even more mysterious buddy, the Rat, hanging out at J’s bar and having desultory conversations.  In Pinball, the narrator  sets up a translation company, lives with submissive twins who could only come out of an adolescent’s fantasy, and becomes fixated on a particular pinball machine.

There is not much of a plot in either book, but a lot happens with the characters’ mindscapes. His books have been described as “super-elliptical pop-noir” and that’s about accurate. For Murakami fans, dazzled by his literary artistry in his books like Kafka On The Shore, The Windup Bird Chronicles, 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, this slim volume is a must read, to discover the making of a master.

Wind/Pinball

By Haruki Murakami

Published by: Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 234