Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball, 1973
Haruki Murakami
Harvill Secker
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 were the first published works by Haruki Murakami, and form the initial two parts of his Trilogy of the Rat, together with the better-known A Wild Sheep Chase. For an author constantly touted to pick up the Nobel Prize, it’s a fright these novels were not more widely available before. English translations of both have been knocking around since the late ’80s, but only in microscopic A6 size. For this edition, both works are newly translated by Professor Ted Goossen, and have been packaged crosswise, so that Wind is read in the Japanese style from back to front, while Pinball, its opposite number, sits at the front.
Both novels centre on the narrator and his childhood friend the Rat. The development of Murakami’s trademark ironic style can be seen in Wind, but mercifully he never ratchets up the whimsy as in his later novels. Pinball continues the narrator/Rat story, although neither character meets. Instead their narratives run parallel with the focus pinging from one to the other, exactly like a pinball. This symmetry continues in the narrator’s new living arrangements with a pair of twins in a ménage a trois. Ultimately, Pinball is the better novel: the narrator’s transfixion by a singular pinball machine – the three-flipper Spaceship – and his efforts to find it are deeply engaging.
Words: Eoin Tierney
