Translated by Ted Goossen
That’s a pretty garish cover isn’t it, I think I prefer the audiobook, below. I listened to it at work, didn’t make any notes, then found the paper version in one of my three local libraries (Victoria Park, WA). Wind/Pinball (2015), containing Murakami’s first two published novels from 1979 and 1980, is a book in three parts. Murakami was born in 1949 so he wrote the novels when he was 30,31. They are not autobiographical – though I imagine he was writing about experiences and situations that were familiar – and are strictly realist, unlike 1Q84 and After Dark (review), the only others of his that I have read.
Introduction: The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction
Murakami married while he was still at university and he and his wife opened a small jazz bar in the student district of Tokyo, before graduating, to avoid having to take office jobs in the City. After five years of working day and night to pay off loans, a baseball game inspired him, he says, to become a writer. He dashed off a novel late at night using a pen and ink (for the Japanese characters) and hated it.
Since I was born in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about and the system crashed.
His solution was to get a typewriter and to write in English, which “led me to discover that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner.”
Then I sat down and “translated” the chapter or so that I had written in English into Japanese. Well “transplanted” might be more accurate, since it wasn’t a direct verbatim translation. In the process, inevitably, a new style of Japanese emerged. The style that would be mine.
The resulting novel, Hear the Wind Sing – almost a novella he says (it’s only 100pp) – was a success. He immediately wrote a sequel, Pinball, 1973, and these two, written on his kitchen table, with his next, and first full-length novel, Wild Sheep Chase, form the Trilogy of the Rat.
Hear the Wind Sing
An unnamed narrator and his rich friend, Rat, twenty-something young men, drink in J’s Bar (J, who is older and Chinese, is the bartender) somewhere on the coast, not Tokyo. Interestingly all the cultural references are Western – Hitler, JFK, Flaubert, Mozart, Brook Benton and so on.
The narrator wakes up naked, in bed with a naked young woman. They do not know each other. She interrogates him. He found her unconscious in the toilets in J’s bar, patched her up, brought her home. He didn’t sleep with her. She doesn’t believe him.
There are lots of short chapters. Scenes in the bar. Segments of a DJ on the radio, playing the Beach Boys. The narrator is fascinated by the (fictitious) author Derek Hartfield.
He goes into a record shop and the young woman is there behind the counter. He buys The Beach Boys, Beethoven and Glenn Gould.
The young woman finally works out for herself that nothing happened, gets his number from J’s Bar and phones him, they start going out.
Life goes on. He moves away, to Tokyo. The young woman has moved on. The Rat is writing novels. “California Girls still sits in the corner of my shelf”.
Pinball, 1973
The narrator is living with identical twin girls. They have adopted him, moved in without even a change of clothes, he doesn’t know their names, they tell him to choose, calls them 208 and 209, the numbers on their T-shirts. He is partner in a translation business, pays them pocket money for housekeeping and so on.
They tenderly laundered their sweatshirts once a week in the bath. Lying in bed reading the Critique of Pure Reason, I would glance up and see them kneeling side by side, naked on the tile floor, scrubbing away. Times like that made me feel as if I’d arrived at some faraway place…
Many times I came home after work to see the sweatshirts with the numbers 208 and 209 fluttering in my south-facing window. Occasionally, it brought tears to my eyes.
At college he had interviewed people about where they came from, become fascinated by Naoko who came from the country, a village with a bus stop, a few shops, and “there’s always a dog walking the platform from one end to the other. That kind of station”. No not fascinated by Naoko, by the dog. He has to see that dog.
The pinball machine sidles in later. He becomes expert, the record holder, on a rare three flipper machine, the ‘Spaceship’. When it’s taken away during renovations he has to track it down.
He and his business partner have an attractive receptionist who makes advances to him which he ignores. The Rat has a girlfriend who sold him a typewriter. This time it is the Rat who moves away. The twins move away too, going home they say.
Melanie at Grab The Lapels insists I should always answer the question ‘did I like the book?’ I loved it! As far as I’m concerned, Murakami is up there with William Gibson, and in my book that’s high praise indeed.
Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: two novels, Borzoi, New York, 2015. Originally published in Japanese in 1979 and 1980. Audio version, Random House Audio, read by Kirby Heyborne, 2015.
