HEAR THE WIND SING/ PINBALL 1973
by Haruki Murakami Harvill Secker, £ 16.99
I WAS introduced to the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami by a woman I met in a bus queue. We struck up a conversation about our respective literary tastes and when I told her mine ( Paul Auster, David Nobbs, Italo Calvino) she said that I’d love Murakami.
She was right. I started with the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes, followed it with his epic novel The Wind- Up Bird Chronicle then I devoured everything else that was available in English.
Murakami’s works defy classification. His extraordinary imagination combined with a meticulously realistic attention to detail tell of ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happen or extraordinary people going about their everyday business.
He always gets to the heart of the human condition and the mixture of shallowness and intensity of our relationships with others.
This new title is two books in one. One way up, you can read Hear The Wind Sing but turn the book upside down and start at the other end and you find yourself reading Pinball 1973. These were his first two novels written in 1979 and 1980, translated into English in delicious style by Ted Goossen.
Both books cover periods in the lives of two men: the unnamed narrator and a character referred to only as “the Rat”. Both men are simultaneously ordinary and obsessive. Both drink a good deal of beer and smoke a lot of cigarettes. They are friends in the first story ( Wind) but never meet in the second ( Pinball).
Other characters include a girl with only four fingers on one hand, a mysteriously reticent bar owner and a pair of identical twins who the storyteller lives with but can only tell apart from the numbers on their T- shirts. As they swap shirts he can’t tell them apart at all.
These early works display several features that will be familiar to anyone who has read Murakami’s later works such as The Wind- Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka On The Shore or 1Q84. His fascination with deep wells, cats and parallel universes which are recurring themes in his mature novels can all be spotted in embryonic form.
Murakami has written a new introduction to these two early works in which he tells of the moment he realised he was going to be a novelist. In this essay, he almost comes across as a character in one of his own novels. The book is worth buying for this alone.
These books are about life, individuality, relationships, memories and, halfway through the second book, one man’s obsession with a pinball machine. Perhaps above all they are about the ways chance encounters and tiny details can have dramatic effects on one’s mundane, everyday life. Much as a chance meeting in a bus queue had a massive effect on my literary tastes I suppose.