Wind/Pinball collects Haruki Murakami’s first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. I give Wind 3 stars and Pinball 2 stars so I guess technically it’s a 2.5 stars but neither book was that impressive so I rounded down to 2 stars - it’s really only for Murakami fans. I reviewed each book individually below - enjoy!
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Hear the Wind Sing - 3 stars
Haruki Murakami’s first novel Hear the Wind Sing is like a lot of first novels in that it’s unfocused, rambling and mostly about the author - and yet it’s kinda compelling because of how well written it is!
There’s no story to speak of. The novel takes place within 3 weeks of the summer of 1970 where our nameless narrator in his early 20s bums around his small town. He meets a wealthy spoilt brat called The Rat who sits in a bar, reads Western novels, and spouts pseudo-intellectual nonsense. He meets a young woman with nine fingers who works in a record shop. The characters interact, a sense of youthful directionless and vague hope sorta permeates the book, and then it’s over.
I’ve read 11 of Murakami’s books before this one and I definitely wouldn’t recommend readers curious about the author to start here - begin with Wind-Up Bird, Wild Sheep Chase or one of his short story collections like after the quake instead. But if you’re familiar with the author you’ll notice a lot of things in this first novel that he’ll go on to feature in many of his subsequent books. Music - especially jazz - cats, precise descriptions of meals, emotionally-detached people, bookworms, sad relationships with sad women, loneliness, and physically deformed characters.
None of the characters here could be called well-rounded; they’re very one-dimensional especially the female characters - Murakami usually writes women quite poorly. More often than not they’re there as literary devices for the male characters to either learn something about the story they’re in or to learn something about themselves; it’s the latter in this book.
However, if the narrative leaves a lot to be desired, the writing is at least very fluid, accessible, and renders the spare story with an ethereal elegance. The pages fly by and that’s a rare quality in a first novel. Besides the overall lack of characterisation, the writing annoyed me only a couple of times like when one character launches into a pages-long speech about nothing, Murakami failing to pass this off as casual conversation, and the parts where a radio DJ rambles on the air were entirely needless. The book definitely feels too slight - it’s a good example of style over substance though I can’t help but admire the stylishness!
For a novel with no story, great characters, or memorable scenes or dialogue, I didn’t dislike Hear the Wind Sing. The writing is much better than you’d expect for a first novel and pulled me swiftly along to the end - the talent is obvious and you can see the writer he’ll become. That said, I’d say it’s really only for fans than casual readers – with this book Murakami’s clearly finding his voice and figuring out what he wants to write about which isn’t always the best place for anyone to start. Unfamiliar readers wanting to understand Murakami’s popularity would do better to check out his later, more original and enthralling efforts when he incorporates magical realism into actual stories that go somewhere.
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Pinball, 1973 - 2 stars
Haruki Murakami tends to write two kinds of novel: ones with a story and ones without; Pinball, 1973 is unfortunately the latter.
A translator with twin live-in girlfriends (I know, just humour the author’s sad wish fulfilment fantasy) develops an obsession with pinball, specifically a pinball machine called Spaceship. One day his machine disappears. He half-heartedly goes looking for it…. zzz…
This is part of Murakami’s Rat series where a character called The Rat appears. It’s even more underwhelming than it sounds. The Rat is just a moody barfly who drinks beer and doesn’t do much else – I really don’t know why Murakami kept putting him in books as a recurring character given how dull he was. It’s not even clear why he’s called The Rat, unless it’s a description of his general uselessness.
The Rat chapters read like the worst kind of pretentious arthouse movie scenes – he drinks, he smokes, he says inane drivel that I guess is intended to be profound wisdom – and I have no idea what his inclusion added to the novel; far as I can tell, it’s nothing.
There are bits and pieces of the book that are intermittently interesting like the section on the country well digger, the history of the pinball manufacturer and the twins, who were just strange as they didn’t seem real. And the book overall is as clearly written as most of Murakami’s work is.
This being Murakami’s second novel, readers familiar with his later, much better books will recognise here what will become trademarks of his storytelling style: cats, wells, jazz, The Beatles (the book closes with the protagonist playing Rubber Soul, the second track of which, Norwegian Wood, would become the title of his breakthrough novel).
His female characters though remain as one-dimensional as ever. Besides a minor character at the start, none of the female characters are named – the interpreter’s colleague is simply referred to as “the girl”, as is the college girl in his flashback, while the twins are numbers, 208 and 209!
I’ve tried deciphering it but I’m completely clueless as to what this one was supposed to be about. The narrator talks about meeting people from Saturn and Venus at the start, the pinball machine is called Spaceship, so… ? Is the pinball machine meant to symbolise something, like a lost love – is that what that hallucinatory sequence at the end was about? No real point is established and the book just stops so it’s fairly unsatisfying. What I’ll charitably call “the story” as a whole was a bit too obtuse for me and could’ve been more focused.
It wasn’t a total bust but Pinball, 1973 is definitely one of Haruki Murakami’s lesser novels – fans only. For those who’d like to start reading Murakami, I recommend checking out A Wild Sheep Chase or The Strange Library instead.
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