Book review: Haruki Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball, 1973
Publication of these two early novels, which the author describes as 'much like friends from long ago', will only add to the Japanese writer's reputation
Magical, mystical and magnificent? Messy, middling and monotonous? Whatever. It doesn't matter what you think, because the publication of these two early novels by Haruki Murakami is only going to further enhance his reputation.
Murakami has reached that stage - 40-plus years into a stellar career - where he is unassailable, where the early work and the juvenilia are read in the vast bright burning light of the later work, which lends it all a lovely lambent glow. Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Pinball, 1973 (1980) - commercially available together in English translation, by Ted Goossen, for the first time - could be absolute drivel and still people would be fascinated. Fortunately, they are not drivel. Early Murakami isn't Murakami-in-the-making, it's already and entirely Murakami.
Take the introduction to the books, a lovely little essay titled The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction, which provides him with the opportunity to rehearse the oft-told story of how he became a novelist, after leaving university, getting married, running a jazz bar and doing "hard physical labour" (by which Murakami means making sandwiches and cocktails).
The Murakami myth of origin goes like this: he was at a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in 1978 when a player named Dave Hilton hit a double and "In that instant, for no reason and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel."
