Wind / Pinball
In a winsome and revelatory essay in the UK newspaper The Telegraph, entitled “The Moment I Knew I Would Be a Novelist,” Haruki Murakami paints a vivid portrait of the bohemian scene in Japan in the early 1970s, and his own role in the milieu as a young, newly married man operating a café cum live music venue. The reader becomes so absorbed in the flow of restrained, precisely delivered sensual and emotional details that the actual purpose of the essay recedes into the lambent haze of nostalgia. Then, just when you think Murakami himself has forgotten the very theme of his piece, come these two paragraphs:
I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.
I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant – when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.
And so, just as in Murakami’s fabled and fabulaic novels, the reader is blindsided by a life-changing event that arises organically from the surrounding busyness and buzz of life, like some emergent magic sent from who knows what other realm.
But that’s perhaps the main attraction of Murakami’s fiction: its presentation of a quotidian existence that, despite any salient charms or engaging obstacles, proves to be only a threadbare scrim that can give way at the least-anticipated moment. His work dumps characters and readers alike into another dimension of existence — another way of being that is perhaps sharper and more vivid than consensus life, or perhaps blunter and more pale. But in any case, not your usual humdrum groove where we can blithely assume we know everything possible.
Murakami’s ability to soothe and entrap the reader before pulling the rug out from under her — seen most recently in last year’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage — was evident right from the first book that attracted the attention of an English-speaking audience in 1989, A Wild Sheep Chase. But Murakami wrote two books before that one. Formerly reluctant to have this apprentice work translated, the author has now relented, putting both slim books into one neat package (where that Telegraph essay reappears as introduction), and his fans can assess the formative steps that led to the more mature work.
{{ product: 9780385352123 }}Published in 1979, Hear the Wind Sing partakes of some of the ambient punk vibe of that era — only logical, given Murakami’s famous love of pop music. The same underground rumblings that would inspire cyberpunk — and Murakami is also an avowed SF reader from way back — inspire this naturalistic tale. At the same time, the book echoes earlier college novels such as Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. But its disaffected, somewhat listless and wandering narrator never succumbs to total nihilism. One senses that the punk motto of “No future!” and its ancillary prospect of suicide (an act referenced several times in this tale) hold no real allure for either Murakami or his narrator. Life is too strange and full of intriguing options to be deemed a pointless cul-de-sac.
Our nameless young narrator is back in his boring hometown for summer break from college. He spends most of his days drinking beer at his favorite bar, J’s, and hanging out with his best friend, Rat. They converse about philosophical, ethical, and metaphysical matters as most bright bohemian youths do, alternating between puzzled sincerity and bravado-laced snark. The memoir of this summer is framed as the hero’s decisive attempt to finally get down on paper the events of that era. Indeed, the coda finds him aged twenty-nine, married and relatively happy. But the perplexing events of that one season continue to haunt him.
The central enigma in his life is a young woman whom he rescues one night from her own drunkenness. Her embarrassed disdain for him gradually turns into fondness, and she shares her sadness and troubles without actually allowing our hero much chance to help. But her romantic appeal is limited, anyhow, as this segue indicates. “I could feel her breasts pressing against the pit of my stomach. I was dying for a beer.”
Threaded throughout are reflections on the stories and career of one Derek Hartfield, the narrator’s literary idol. “I learned a lot of what I know about writing from Derek Hartfield.” A Kilgore Trout–style outsider, Hartfield provides the signature motif of the book. As recounted by our hero, “The Martian Wells” tells of an explorer on the Red Planet who descends into one of the native subterranean passages and emerges down a time warp journey after a billion years have passed outside. The Martian wind whispers to him then of the upcoming death of the Sun, and the protagonist decides to commit suicide. For Murakami, who has said in an interview that “My lifetime dream is to be sitting at the bottom of a well,” the symbolic tale indicates both the knowledge and estrangement that comes from an all-too-alluring hermetic path — something the hero is struggling with in his interpersonal contacts.
Murakami speaks in his introduction of the laborious way he discovered what kind of unadorned yet powerful prose he wanted to write, and this translation by Ted Goossen conveys an almost noir flavor at times. The following passage is pure Chandler or Ross MacDonald:
I drove the streets that snaked through the hilly residential area before taking the river road down almost to the ocean, where I stopped to wet my feet in the fresh water. Two girls wearing white hats, sunglasses, and deep tans were batting a ball back and forth on the tennis court nearby. The midday sun was scorching, and each swing of their rackets sent a spray of sweat flying across the court.
In the end, the narrator’s chronicle of loves lost and unborn delivers no solutions or explanations for the mixed tragedies and comedies of life. He can merely affirm a Zen compassion: “All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.”
* * *
A pinball machine is described in Wind as “a piece of junk that offers dead time in return for small change.” But in Pinball, 1973 such machines offer much more, becoming a metaphor and crystallizing seed for the narrator’s life. Consider the nature of pinball play, Murakami seems to be subliminally bidding us: a combination of aleatory events — the path of the ball — is modified by the skill of the player to achieve an essentially meaningless result, a high score, that is nonetheless an accomplishment that reflects one unique nexus of consciousness and the universe.
Unlike Wind, which is basically linear and stripped-down, Pinball bounces all over like its namesake spheroid, diffuse yet stuffed full of people and events. Moreover, there is a Vonnegutian humor and whimsy present, along with the despair that is missing from Wind but present hereafter in Murakami’s oeuvre.
Rat and J’s Bar return and seem essentially the same. In a plot that runs parallel to the main storyline, Rat undergoes a tentative, abortive love affair, followed by an existential crisis that finds him leaving town. While resonant, this sidetrack cannot hold a candle to the main narrative.
Again, our nameless hero is a canny, sensitive youth. But this time around, by age twenty-three he is running his own business with a partner. They translate any document on demand, from French or English to Japanese. Their lone employee is a Gal Friday with her own sad competence and needs. Our hero currently shares his residence with twin women, mysterious sprite-like lovers who are known only as 208 and 209 (shades of the Seussian Thing One and Thing Two!), their names deriving from the numbered shirts they sport. The trio lead a kind of charmed and whimsical Jules and Jim existence, conducting funerals for inanimate objects and strolling golf courses by night to eat cookies and look for stray balls. And in fact the whole novel harks back to the most fey of French New Wave films. “Sometimes things that happened the day before felt like they had occurred a year earlier; at other times, last year’s events seemed to have happened yesterday. When it got really bad, next year’s events seemed to have taken place the previous day.” This untethered, floating incertitude speaks to the narrator’s emptiness and grasping after some revelation he cannot even visualize.
One undisputed highlight of his past is the brief, intense period when he fixated on playing the pinball machine known as Three-flipper Spaceship. The fixity of his mind and attention during that period seems to point toward some future avenue of exploration. And so he embarks on a quest to track down the old machine, which ends in a surreal moment in a deserted warehouse . . .
Again, all these oddball peregrinations and off-kilter moments refuse to be resolved into neat lessons. Perhaps the closest we come to any wisdom is J’s observation to Rat: “People keep changing . . . [They} are awkward creatures. A lot more awkward than you seem to realize.” J concludes with this bit of advice: “Walk slowly, and drink lots of water.”
Like J. G. Ballard, Murakami is fond of rearranging his obsessional objective correlatives, and wells crop up again. As he told the Guardian, “I love wells. Whenever I come across one I toss in a pebble. Nothing is more soothing than hearing that small splash rise from the bottom of a deep well.” A metaphor for sending one’s words out into the world? Perhaps.
Right from the outset of his career, Murakami was intent on showing us both the skull beneath the beautiful woman’s face, the marvelous universe in a dandelion, the deep echoes from a well. J says, “We can learn from anything if we put in the effort. Right down to the most everyday, commonplace thing. I read somewhere that how we shave in the morning has its own philosophy, too. Otherwise, we couldn’t survive.”
These two early novels show Murakami simultaneously learning his own way in the world, and teaching us how to learn ours.