Wind PinBall

That’s Who I am.’ Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s earliest novels, never before published in English outside Japan. They follow the fortunes of the narrator and his friends, known only by his nickname, the Rat. In Hear the Wind Sing the narrator is home from collage on his summer break. He spends his time drinking beer and smoking in J’s Bar with the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and the women he has slept with, an pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later, in Pinball, 1973, he has moved to Tokyo where he works as a translator and lives with indistinguishable twin girls, but the Rat has remained behind, despite his efforts to leave both the town and his girlfriend. The narrator finds himself haunted by memories of his own doomed relationship but also, more bizarrely, by his short-lived obsession with playing pinball in J’s Bar. This sends hm on a quest to find the exact model of pinball machine he had enjoyd playing years earlier: the three-flipper Spaceship.