‘Wind/Pinball’ by Haruki Murakami

Finished 3/25/17 at 12:01 AM

One of the best “useless” classes I took in college was “Japanese New Media”. It’s focus was to study the differences and evolutions happening inside of Japan, and how the culture there is developing unique patterns of media creation, and in doing so making something original.

We studied many things, and for some reason, the period I took this class happened to coincide with the period of time where I actually began reading some of the books I’ve been assigned to read (personally, I’ve always had trouble with this — while I constantly read, I don’t much like being asked/told to read something by someone else at a specific cadence). One of these books was Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.

Almost immediately, I was pulled into his style, vibe and surrealism. It really felt like something original that I never read before; that book is famous for it’s “double-helix” structure where there’s two stories that twist into one another and crescendo at the end (with different tense used for both, different settings, different vibe). It got me hooked.

Since then, I’ve read quite a bit of Murakami — *1Q84 (one of my favorite books of all time, albeit the weirdest), What We Talk About When We Talk About Running, *and *A Wild Sheep Chase *to name a few, but haven’t had the chance to read his earliest works until recently, when *Hear the Wind Sing *and *Pinball, 1973 *were released as one published book.

These book, which Murakami references as his “kitchen table fiction” originate from a famous origin story on how the author began writing.

After school, Murakami and his wife ran a small jazz bar in Tokyo for a number of years, playing american music and reading voraciously. Then, on a spring day in 1978, he went to a baseball game between the Yakult Swallos and the Hiroshima Carp. There, an American batsman came to the plate, hit a “satisfying” double, and it was at the moment, for reasons he can not explain, Murakami felt as though he could write a novel.

He left the stadium, picked up paper and a fountain pen, and started that night. A few months later, he sent his only copy to a literary magazine contest, and almost completely forgot about it. He won. The rest is history.

For this story along, Wind/Pinball was enough for me to read. What kind-of book did he pump out in those early years? How did the English-to-Japanese-to-English style sound (he said he found his writing voice by writing in English first, then translating back to Japanese)? Were these books, which Murakami sought to not publish widely for some time, as good as the others? How did these tie into A Wild Sheep Chase, of which they are loose prequels with the same characters?

After reading both, I can say that they are fascinating. While not as developed as his later works, both novels include a sense of the surreal in every day realism, and include a hard-boiled spartan style that is famous in his later works.

*Hear the Wind Sing *is loosely about the lives of the unnamed narrator, his friend the Rat, their bartender J, the times they are all going through (at a bar mostly, right out of school) and a loose relationship that the narrator has with a woman. I like this book more, as even though it contains no major surreal moments, it does carry the vibe that I love and has a definitive trajectory. It paints a picture / moment-in-life vividly; the fact that it’s a debut novel only makes the maturity of it’s words and vision strong.

Pinball, 1973 was fascinating, though not as direct in it’s story. It includes the same characters, minus the girl but plus a love interest of the Rat, a set of twins living with the narrator, and a quest for a strange spaceship pinball machine. To me, this book is the beginning of Murakami’s venture into the surreal — you can see the direction he’s taking, and how this leads to *A Wild Sheep Chase, *which is a fantastic book that real set forward the style he’d refine in the following years. While I sometimes failed to transition to different story segments (he seemed to also be experimenting with the “double-helix” structure in an early stage here) it was a worthwhile read.

I find myself often suggesting Murakami to any other curious readers who will listen. While I wouldn’t suggest Wind/Pinball as the first read, I think they hold water as great works, especially if you’re a fan of the author and want to better understand his origins as a writer. It’s inspiring to see the imperfect early creations of someone you admire — it makes them human, motivates you towards the possible and can help hurl you towards your own dreams and goals.