Wind/Pinball: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels) (Vintage International)

Wind / Pinball is where it all starts. the musings of Murakami as told through a twenty something year old narrator. exploring his place in an ever changing world. asking all sorts of great questions and postulating some answers. not as " strange" as later writings but just as thought provoking for me.prelude to "A Wild Sheep Chase" and "Dance Dance Dance"all the stories work well as individual narrative. or read together.took me about five days to read them all, very delightful reading.

Bottom Line First:I have to agree that this two book special is going to hold the most interest for a reader who already likes later works by Murakami. I also second those reviewers who suggest that the best parts of this two for one book is Murakami telling how he came to be a writer. That I am among that group may be the only reason why I have posted four stars. These are the first books by this author, they have not been published in English before and this edition may be the only way to get them. Properly novellas, Pinball, 1973 is 123 pages And Hear the Wind Song is 101. If you are the kind of reader who likes to start at the beginning with a writer you will not regret starting with this author. Pinball, 1973 and Hear the WindSing introduce us to the unnamed narrator, his drinking buddy and sometime philosopher. I found them somewhat interesting. The two story lines are weak but there are flashes of good writing. I promise that Murakami gets better.Pinball will take us through the back story of an unnamed narrator/character. He is somewhat aimless but at least a capable translator. His luck with women is wildly uneven entirely credible and not entirely complementary towards women. One girl friend has left him via a suicide before the beginning of the book and he spends most of the book living with twins who names he never learns. They cater this animal needs, cooking and bedroom and never seem all that critical to the story. They seem to prefer being nameless and are in not in any kind of thrall to his power or worldliness. They are not exactly powerless victims of their man, but neither are they given any depth of personality.The Rat is one of two mentors to the narrator. He is apparently of independent means, something of a radical, and sometime center of the narrative. He also has a love life but seems unable to connect his happiness with her as something worth working to keep. The other major characters include J the local Chinese bartender and the people who work with the Narrator in his Translator shop. The Woman who works as the main secretarial staff between the Narrator and his partner seems to be the one person who cares about him and he never seems to notice.The two stories do not have a much plotting. There is a great deal about Pinball machines a topic Murakami eventually drops and a great deal about mostly American pop music and European classical music. These are topics that will reappear in every other Murakami book.If this sounds less than enthusiastic. That is how I felt at the end of the two stories. There are some wonderful moments. I enjoyed the flashes of how the author will develop. The books combine into a series of small more or less connected events and images that kept me reading.

So Murakami is my favorite author of all time. I've literally read every single thing that's available in the English language by him. 1Q84 is my all time favorite book too. I can't even begin to explain how excited and happy I was to hear that his first two works would finally be released in the English language. But then I got the book and read it.First off, let me say that the book cover design and the Apollo typeface is lovely. Knopf knows how to put out great looking books, that's for sure. The interior had a ton of pauses and stops in both stories (this book is broken into two narratives), and that got to be somewhat distracting by the 10th page of the book. By the end I was pulling my hair out in frustration because I started to feel like I was reading random diary entries than two coherent stories. So that wasn't so good.Then there's the story content for both narratives. I would argue that the second story had me slightly more interested in what was going on, being that the narrator is living with a set of twins. I found it rather amusing to imagine in my head, and thankfully, in true Murakami fashion, it's easy to imagine because he's so perfect with all the mundane details of everyday life.Aside from some rather extraneous descriptions in sections of each narrative, there were glimmers of a story here and there in both narratives. And a few memorable characters as well, besides the twins. But both stories just kind of went nowhere. I didn't feel I gained anything at all from reading them, which kind of is disappointing because when I finished 1Q84, I had tears in my eyes. I was so deeply moved by that story. I guess I can't be too hard on Murakami though... this WAS his first two attempts at writing, but still... I just had hoped for even more of a basic story, and instead I got diary entries pretending to be stories.I would say if you are a Murakami fan, get this book and add it to your collection of his works. If you are interested in reading Murakami but never have, avoid this book like the plague. Start with Hard-Boiled Wonderland, or 1Q84 if you feel like tackling a Bible-sized novel. Am I glad I read this? Sure, but I actually enjoyed the preface more than anything else, which is where Murakami talks about his introduction to writing and his inspiration for wanting to write in the first place. That was ten times more fascinating and interesting than anything else in the book, especially given the fact that we may never hear or see Murakami in real life talk about these things because he seemingly doesn't know what a book signing event is, or maybe he does book signings and speaking only in Japan? Who knows. But anytime we get some autobiographical discussion by Murakami, it's always brilliant and heart-warming.A good read, but not an essential one, by my favorite author of all time.

Llego muy bien y el libro está Perfecto.

Murakami is a perplexing author who always delivers a more perplexing story.

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Hear the Wind Sing is an uncommonly good book. One has to congratulate the translator for working out such a fine translation. Pinball is incredibly good for the first 40 pages or so. Murakami's sense of the passage of time is strong and it has never been stronger than in Pinball.

This beautiful edition by Harvill Secker books contains two stories from Murakami’s Trilogy of the Rat. Hear The Wing Sing and Pinball, 1973 tell the story of the narrator as he grows up and endures his early 20s alongside his only friend known as The Rat. These two stories are told as a series of recollections of present and past day experiences as both characters struggle to make sense of the world around him. Although these stories are enthralling, it is Murakami’s writing style that steals the show. The writing, particularly in Pinball, 1973 is simply mesmerising and borderline poetic. I found myself taking note of countless quotes as I made my way through these very readable novellas. These are two of Murakami’s earliest works and have only been translated and released recently.Haruki Murakami pens an interesting introduction to these stories to describe how he became a writer through the success of these, his ‘kitchen-table’ novellas. In his typical style, he paints a picture of two everyday moments when he realised that he was going to be a successful writer. He also gives the reader an insight into how he came about his distinctive prose. He did this by writing many of his earlier works in English and translated them back to Japanese, a respectable feat by anyone’s standard.As both stories are considered individual pieces of work in their own right, I will review them separately here:Hear the Wind SingBoth of these books have an almost autobiographical sense and remind me of the work of Charles Bukowaski. In Hear The Wind Sing, we meet the narrator and his friend the Rat for the first time. The narrator is on a break from college and back in his small home town for the summer. He spends most of his time drinking and smoking in J’s bar while discussing the pros and cons of life. The narrator, like Murakami himself at the time of writing, is considering a future as a writer. He also is curious about pursuing a relationship with a nine-fingered girl.This story spends most of its time building the world that we will come to know across the trilogy. We learn briefly of the narrator’s past through his reminiscence of three previous relationships. We learn that his town, like many small hometowns, is a place where dreams go to die. Writing these stories seems to be a watermark moment for the narrator who has recently decided to banish his optimistic ways. He used to follow the principle that ‘everything can be a learning experience’ but this only resulted in him being ‘cheated and misunderstood, used and abused, time and again.’ On the other hand, these it because of this that he has had ‘many strange experiences’ and so he has a lot to write about.It can be said that this story is a narrative littered with a sense of discontent. In many ways, it sows the seeds for a more frustrating time to come in Pinball, 1973. Murakami creates this uneasy tension in a roundabout way. He constantly references a hot and oppressive summer heat that frustrates the characters. He uses an unusual allegory of hell to compare life at home to life at college and he similarly uses an allegory of a sore tooth to personify the black frustration of life. Essentially, in Hear The Wind Sing, the characters have all worked very hard and endured various experiences to grow up, but now that they have reached the early stages of adulthood the big payoff seems to have only ever been an illusion.‘All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.’You would think that all these factors would make this a depressing read but you are wrong. Murakami writes his story as if he is standing on the outside. Through his use of a mysterious narrator, the author is able to stand back and smile at these many odd yet necessary life experiences. The narrator compares himself to ‘no more than a bridge’ that people and experiences ‘clatter across’ and it is because of this that he has many so stories to share.Pinball, 1973On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favourite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, deep wells dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.’I loved this story from start to finish and it was definitely the stronger of the two. It was built however by the sturdy foundations created in Wind and picks up where that story left off. It takes place three years later as the narrator is living and working as a translator in Tokyo. He is a self-made man and busy with ‘urgent’ yet pointless work. He questions:Who had commissioned these translations (and “urgently” no less), and for what reason? I hadn’t a clue. Was there a bear patiently standing beside a river somewhere waiting for my translation to arrive? Or a tongue-tied nurse unable to speak a word to her dying patient?’He is now separated from his friend, the Rat, so the narrative is split in half as we hop from one setting to another. Even though the Rat is still at home drinking by himself in J’s Bar and the narrator is in the exciting surrounds of Tokyo, both are enduring an existential crisis that you could see coming in Wind. This time however, they are enduring it alone. Both characters, even though very secure, are haunted by a feeling of having wasted their twenty four years on Earth to date. It is this security and a sense of having reached their pinnacle that seems to torment the characters the most.‘Twenty four years couldn’t disappear in a flash. I felt like someone who realises in the midst of looking for something that they have forgotten what it was.’‘The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, the other responds. Nothing more. Neither waves. Neither looks back.’Once again Murakami uses the weather to convey this inner sense of turmoil. There is a constant reference to the rain as it threatens to fall, swells in the clouds above and permeates everything without ever really being there. The Rat has the additional metaphor of his hometown lighthouse beacon and the sea to contend with. The water seems to conspire against him as it bubbles and broils in unnatural waves while he forlornly looks out at the old beacon that used to light up his childhood.‘I was born under a strange star. Like I’ve always been able to get whatever I want. But each time something new comes into my hands, I trample something else… No one believes me, but it’s the truth. It hit me about three years ago. So I decided. Not to want anything anymore.’Yet, eventually this restlessness manifests into an odd burning ambition for each character. The narrator becomes fixated with relocating a pinball machine from his youth. The Rat decides that he must leave his hometown and everything else behind him if he is to survive. Both decisions promise a sense of finality and meaning on their outcome, but we know that life is not that simple.‘All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us.’‘There was something that came out of nothing, and now it’s gone back to where it came from, that’s all.’