Wind/Pinball: Two Novels by Haruki Murakami

Referred to by Haruki Murakami as his kitchen-table novels, Hear the Wind Sing and its follow-up, Pinball, mark the humble beginnings of a literary giant.

Book Review by Ross McIndoe | 31 Aug 2015
Book title: Wind/Pinball: Two Novels
Author: Haruki Murakami

Back then he would come home after closing up the bar he owned and ran with his wife, to sit up late, writing at his kitchen table. In the decades that have followed, Murakami has produced a formidable number of works, ranging from slender novellas to hefty tomes, some of which loosely connect to the characters found in his début works and all of which have stayed true to and nurtured their hypnotic blend of modern-day reality and dream-like strangeness.

The protagonist of both novels is the typical, most likely semi-autobiographical young man of Murakami prose – easygoing, a little adrift, socially detached and able to remain unruffled by the inexplicable things that occasionally befall him. Wind finds him in college, home for the summer to hang out with his old friend the Rat as the two of them haunt the local bar and wonder about life. Pinball catches up with him three years later, running his own translation company and living with the identical twin girls who appear in his bed one evening.

From the very beginning, it seems, Murakami has had the ability to make a story in which nothing happens seem completely irresistible. And to make almost any degree of bizarreness seem completely natural.


Out now, published by Harvill Secker, RRP £16.99