Wind/Pinball

June 8, 2015
Given Murakami’s (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) fervent fan base and the enduring strangeness that characterizes his work, it’s not surprising that an aura of mystery surrounds his first two novels: the only previous English translations were published in Japan and they’ve been difficult to find in the West. Now 1979’s Hear the Wind Sing and the following year’s Pinball, 1973, written while the budding author operated a Tokyo jazz club, are finally available in one volume as Wind/Pinball, and Murakami obsessives are in for a treat. All the hallmarks of Murakami are here at their genesis, including his seemingly simple style, which he describes in an indispensable foreword. Wind is a touching and almost totally uneventful sketch of a record-collecting regular at J’s Bar, his quiet romance with a nine-fingered woman, and his friendship with the dubious ne’er-do-well called the Rat. Pinball recounts the same narrator’s student days on the eve of the Vietnam War, his encounter with identical twins called 209 and 208, and how he and the Rat become swept up in “the occult world of pinball.” Both novels, of course, feature digressions on beer, historical oddballs, obscure trivia, and jazz. Elegiac, ambient, and matter-of-fact in their strangeness, these two novels might leave casual readers wondering what all the fuss is about. But for the rest of us, this may be the ultimate bit of Murakami arcana, both elevating his other books (including A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance, the sequels) and serving as two excellent, though fragile, works in their own right.

June 15, 2015
Two linked early novels from the prolific Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.)."I learned a lot of what I know about writing from Derek Hartfield," writes Murakami's alter ego, who has already warned us that "writing honestly is very difficult." Hartfield is a Murakami invention, the image of an utterly obscure writer jumping off the Empire State Building carrying a picture of Adolf Hitler and an umbrella both oddly unsettling and portentous. Though these stories-two of the so-called Rat Trilogy-are more than 40 years old, marking the very beginning of Murakami's career, they are full of trademark turns. One is the iron spring that lies hidden in the tatami-covered floor of even the most tranquil room: the narrator lies in bed, smoking, looking at the beautiful young woman lying next to him, and what grabs his attention, unpalatably and uncharitably, is the fact that her beach-won suntan has faded and "the white patches left by her swimsuit looked almost rotten." Another is the untrustworthiness of the narrator-and everyone else, for that matter. Elsewhere, a naked girl pads to the kitchen to make a sandwich, returning with her "cheeks stuffed with bread" just in time to catch him in a lie-but just one lie-while, still elsewhere, a girl stirs her drink with one of her nine fingers and listens to the narrator expatiate on why it is that people die, bullshitting with gusto even as he describes dissecting a cow. And if the narrator is a Murakami alter ego, is the Rat the alter ego once removed? It's a point to ponder. There's a Beatles record on the turntable at all times, of course, offering the possibility of peace and love and unity, but then there's that iron trap again.... Not as well-developed as the later books, and mostly for completists. Still, it's interesting to see hints of the masterly novels to come in these slender, pessimistic tales.

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August 1, 2015
These two short novels, never widely available in English, were Murakami's first published works. Written in the early 1970s, when the author was running a Tokyo jazz club, they display seeds of the style and tone that would eventually evolve into the mature Murakami. The first of the two, Hear the Wind Sing, follows a lonely college student through the idle days of a school vacation, hanging out with his best friend, Rat, similarly at loose ends, and wandering into an affair with an older woman. In Pinball, the same narrator embarks on a quest to find the specific pinball machine, now vanished, on which he amassed phenomenal scores. Both stories show Murakami learning to find reservoirs of emotion both beneath the apparent flatness in tone and within his seemingly diffident narrators, pointing toward the secret selves that would become a staple in his later fiction, especially in the shorter works such as After Dark (2007). The author's fans will find Murakami's introduction, in which he discusses his life in the '70s and his early attempts at writing, every bit as interesting as the stories themselves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2015

Before A Wild Sheep Chase made Murakami an international sensation, he wrote these "kitchen-table novels," so named for where his composition efforts took place after he wrapped up managing his Tokyo jazz bar for the day. Both Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are prequels to Sheep and comprise two-thirds of the "Trilogy of the Rat"; Dance Dance Dance, Sheep's sequel, actually makes the series a tetralogy. This latest two-title edition is a new translation from Canadian professor Goossen, who most recently translated Murakami's The Strange Library; Alfred Birnbaum, Murakami's earliest English translator (including Sheep) published translations of these two works in the mid-1980s, but distribution outside Japan remained mysteriously limited. Read side by side, the translations are not markedly different: Goossen's sentences seem slightly tighter, while Birnbaum's tend toward the more lyrical. Wind introduces the ever-unnamed protagonist and his friend the Rat and covers 18 days during a university summer break; Pinball follows our young man in Tokyo, Rat's growing alienation, and a wild chase to find the titular pinball (machine). Most fascinating is a new introduction in which Murakami shares the serendipitous (surreal) events that led to his novelist career, including a 1978 baseball game epiphany and a wounded bird. He divulges his uncommon style: he composes in English, then "transplants" his text into his native Japanese. The first line of his first novel proves to be a personal lifelong challenge: "There's no such thing as a perfect piece of writing." VERDICT Whether prompted by devotion, curiosity, or obsession, every Murakami fan will flock to this double feature. For newbies, this duo is an unparalleled opportunity to experience his progression from start to phenom: read in four-part order and witness the maturation of an iconic genius. [See Prepub Alert, 2/23/15.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015

Murakami is more popular than you ever imagined; 3.25 million copies of his 16-book backlist are in readers' hands, and Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage has sold upwards of 86,000 copies, having debuted last fall as No. 1 on the New York Times best sellers list. Here, the publisher releases two major early works--prequels to A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance--nearly 30 years out of print, newly translated, and together in a single volume with an exclusive introductory essay by the author.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015

Before A Wild Sheep Chase made Murakami an international sensation, he wrote these "kitchen-table novels," so named for where his composition efforts took place after he wrapped up managing his Tokyo jazz bar for the day. Both Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are prequels to Sheep and comprise two-thirds of the "Trilogy of the Rat"; Dance Dance Dance, Sheep's sequel, actually makes the series a tetralogy. This latest two-title edition is a new translation from Canadian professor Goossen, who most recently translated Murakami's The Strange Library; Alfred Birnbaum, Murakami's earliest English translator (including Sheep) published translations of these two works in the mid-1980s, but distribution outside Japan remained mysteriously limited. Read side by side, the translations are not markedly different: Goossen's sentences seem slightly tighter, while Birnbaum's tend toward the more lyrical. Wind introduces the ever-unnamed protagonist and his friend the Rat and covers 18 days during a university summer break; Pinball follows our young man in Tokyo, Rat's growing alienation, and a wild chase to find the titular pinball (machine). Most fascinating is a new introduction in which Murakami shares the serendipitous (surreal) events that led to his novelist career, including a 1978 baseball game epiphany and a wounded bird. He divulges his uncommon style: he composes in English, then "transplants" his text into his native Japanese. The first line of his first novel proves to be a personal lifelong challenge: "There's no such thing as a perfect piece of writing." VERDICT Whether prompted by devotion, curiosity, or obsession, every Murakami fan will flock to this double feature. For newbies, this duo is an unparalleled opportunity to experience his progression from start to phenom: read in four-part order and witness the maturation of an iconic genius. [See Prepub Alert, 2/23/15.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.