Review by New York Times Review
more than anyone, Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction, which says as much about the 21st century as it does about Murakami. He is the novelist of our mash-up epoch and the subversive who, by intent or not, lit the fuse to whatever "canon" of the previous century anybody still takes seriously. Unless some aging secret master clandestinely labors away at the center of the Tokyo labyrinth, Murakami is the first major Japanese author born in the radioactive white light of the modern age that commenced in the zero-years of 1945, with nuclear decimation by the United States, and, even more traumatically, 1946, with the emperor's admission to the Japanese public that he wasn't divine. Murakami defies claustrophobic aesthetic values that preclude possibilities rather than explode them. The result is a Frankenstein oeuvre of pop detritus that still manages to comment seriously on the Great Contemporaneous - time and space without boundaries. Crossing Kafka and the Beatles with Kenzaburo Oe (not an early Murakami fan), adding dashes of noir and science fantasy and creating an irresistible amalgam of East and West, Murakami sometimes has been odd man out to both: English-speaking readers may find it even less convincing than have the guardians of Murakami's native culture when, for instance, he writes that something "blew my mind." But authenticity is the enemy of audacity, and Murakami's atomic sensibility characterizes world literature. Don't tell the rest of the country, because it may blow their minds, but American fiction plays catch-up. As he makes clear in his introduction to this inaugural American edition of his first two novels, "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball, 1973," Murakami doesn't particularly welcome their stateside publication. But slightly embarrassed as he may be by these slim late-1970s works, they nevertheless provide an archaeology for who Murakami became as a writer, with the subsequent conceptual breakthrough "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (1985), the commercial hit "Norwegian Wood" (1987) and the fully realized literary arrival "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (1994-95). Identity in both the personal and the national sense is an awfully interior concern to so dominate such outsize stories, but at the intersection of those books' far-flung plotlines have been protagonists at a loss culturally and politically, romantically and sexually, often with nothing less than their humanity at stake. If Murakami's hybrid futurism is a product of Japanese tradition clashing with local postmodernism, then the greatest revelation of his debut is how this contradiction has raged in Murakami from the outset. Although Tokyo-located and barely 100 pages long, "Hear the Wind Sing" is crammed with references to Woodstock, Glenn Gould, Marvin Gaye, Henry James, President Kennedy, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Mickey Mouse Club, the 1960s TV series "Route 66" and - the avatar that cracks the code to everything - the Beach Boys' "California Girls." Recalling the prologue that Thomas Pynchon wrote more than 30 years ago for his collection "Slow Learner," Murakami's introduction to "Wind/Pinball" affords the reader a rare glimpse behind the curtain of a mysterious creative process, repeating the familiar story of how his aspirations as a novelist were born watching a game of baseball, that national pastime to which both Japanese and Americans can lay equal claim. More fascinating is that when Murakami had trouble getting "Hear the Wind Sing" off the ground to his satisfaction, he embarked on an experiment that now renders his misgivings about its English-language publication all the more ironic: He began writing the novel in English, not despite his limitations with the language but because of them. In the rigor and rhythms that those limitations imposed, Murakami found liberation from the pretensions that were derailing him; in any case the author's hot-wired East/West artistic persona was forged before he published a word. Whether it has become a conscious mandate on his part or is only an obsession indulged, he has since gone on to translate American fiction from Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" to J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" to, recently, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," the more naturalistic likes of which bear little overt resemblance to Murakami's own work, which one suspects is the point. Tellingly, Murakami's early narrators are all Nick Carraways on the sideline of their own narratives. In the thrall of some more charismatic central figure like the Rat - the loudmouth barfly and determined human disaster who makes his presence impossible to ignore in "Wind/Pinball" before later elbowing his way into "A Wild Sheep Chase" and "Dance Dance Dance" - Murakami's loner-heroes, rootless and quasi-anonymous, suggest an author occasionally and fitfully alienated from his own imagination. If this sounds like conversation for a psychotherapy session, welcome to Being a Writer. On some subliminal level the tension and power of Murakami's stories reside in the reader's hope, sometimes fulfilled and sometimes dashed, for reconciliation between the storyteller and his story; and from the initial passages of his initial novel about the difficulties of initiating a novel, Murakami now and then feels the need to tether himself. Interspersing inventions with asides verging on memoir, he interrupts his hyperchatty muse with quieter and more intimate confessions, in contrast with the turn-of-the-decade, thousand-page Murakami-to-the-max opus "IQ84" (2009-10) that turned him into a phenomenon, a prospect as perilous for a novelist as it might be enviable. THE KEY EXCAVATION of "Wind/Pinball" comes late in the second novel, which Murakami started almost immediately after finishing the first. With its more assured voice, its greater mastery of tone and the confidence of a sharper and more mature whimsy, "Pinball, 1973" demonstrates the extent to which the author was already progressing in leaps. As in many novels, the crucial scene is the one that doesn't take place, the ghost scene that haunts corporeal ones, the passage that an author plans to write until arriving at the plotline's next station, where the novel, which always has a secret itinerary of its own, declines to disembark. ("Gatsby" has more secret scenes than real ones.) Stumbling on a veritable harem of pinball machines in a warehouse, the narrator tracks down his old lover Spaceship, a femme fatale with three flippers, into whose womb the player launches from the game's chute its silver seed. Spaceship offers the narrator a final rendezvous - and he declines, perhaps against the author's desires. By the laws of Murakami physics, where murderesses abandon taxis in "IQ84" and take the emergency exit only to vanish through trapdoors of time and space, who knows where the 21st century's avant-laureate would have wound up had the narrator of "Pinball, 1973" succumbed to this last seduction? The reader imagines dropping down a black hole like a pinball only to resurface on the Murakami Universe's far side, having missed the glittering in-flight wonders of getting there the long way. Murakami's first two novels provide an archeology for who he became as a writer. STEVE ERICKSON is the recipient of the 2014 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His 10th novel, "Shadowbahn," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 9, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
These two short novels, never widely available in English, were Murakami's first published works. Written in the early 1970s, when the author was running a Tokyo jazz club, they display seeds of the style and tone that would eventually evolve into the mature Murakami. The first of the two, Hear the Wind Sing, follows a lonely college student through the idle days of a school vacation, hanging out with his best friend, Rat, similarly at loose ends, and wandering into an affair with an older woman. In Pinball, the same narrator embarks on a quest to find the specific pinball machine, now vanished, on which he amassed phenomenal scores. Both stories show Murakami learning to find reservoirs of emotion both beneath the apparent flatness in tone and within his seemingly diffident narrators, pointing toward the secret selves that would become a staple in his later fiction, especially in the shorter works such as After Dark (2007). The author's fans will find Murakami's introduction, in which he discusses his life in the '70s and his early attempts at writing, every bit as interesting as the stories themselves.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Given Murakami's (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) fervent fan base and the enduring strangeness that characterizes his work, it's not surprising that an aura of mystery surrounds his first two novels: the only previous English translations were published in Japan and they've been difficult to find in the West. Now 1979's Hear the Wind Sing and the following year's Pinball, 1973, written while the budding author operated a Tokyo jazz club, are finally available in one volume as Wind/Pinball, and Murakami obsessives are in for a treat. All the hallmarks of Murakami are here at their genesis, including his seemingly simple style, which he describes in an indispensable foreword. Wind is a touching and almost totally uneventful sketch of a record-collecting regular at J's Bar, his quiet romance with a nine-fingered woman, and his friendship with the dubious ne'er-do-well called the Rat. Pinball recounts the same narrator's student days on the eve of the Vietnam War, his encounter with identical twins called 209 and 208, and how he and the Rat become swept up in "the occult world of pinball." Both novels, of course, feature digressions on beer, historical oddballs, obscure trivia, and jazz. Elegiac, ambient, and matter-of-fact in their strangeness, these two novels might leave casual readers wondering what all the fuss is about. But for the rest of us, this may be the ultimate bit of Murakami arcana, both elevating his other books (including A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance, the sequels) and serving as two excellent, though fragile, works in their own right. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This production offers two early Murakami novels newly translated into English by Ted Goossen, with a new introduction, "The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction." These are well arranged and given an excellent reading by Kirby Heyborne. Both stories are coming-of-age tales of the unnamed narrator and his drinking buddy, a rich university dropout, the Rat, who was a main character in A Wild Sheep Chase, the first Murakami novel translated into English. As in much of the author's work, the trivial becomes important, the extraordinary may become commonplace, and the ordinary becomes bizarre, supernatural, or meaningless. Decisions are made, or not made, according to maintaining the status quo, with little thought or feeling that one might influence an outcome. All of this is punctuated with cigarette smoke and dulled by alcohol. -VERDICT This audio is well worth a listen and is a solid choice for adult collections. Since the novels are not truly sequential, a pause to let the first work settle in before continuing with the second is advised.-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two linked early novels from the prolific Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.)."I learned a lot of what I know about writing from Derek Hartfield," writes Murakami's alter ego, who has already warned us that "writing honestly is very difficult." Hartfield is a Murakami invention, the image of an utterly obscure writer jumping off the Empire State Building carrying a picture of Adolf Hitler and an umbrella both oddly unsettling and portentous. Though these storiestwo of the so-called Rat Trilogyare more than 40 years old, marking the very beginning of Murakami's career, they are full of trademark turns. One is the iron spring that lies hidden in the tatami-covered floor of even the most tranquil room: the narrator lies in bed, smoking, looking at the beautiful young woman lying next to him, and what grabs his attention, unpalatably and uncharitably, is the fact that her beach-won suntan has faded and "the white patches left by her swimsuit looked almost rotten." Another is the untrustworthiness of the narratorand everyone else, for that matter. Elsewhere, a naked girl pads to the kitchen to make a sandwich, returning with her "cheeks stuffed with bread" just in time to catch him in a liebut just one liewhile, still elsewhere, a girl stirs her drink with one of her nine fingers and listens to the narrator expatiate on why it is that people die, bullshitting with gusto even as he describes dissecting a cow. And if the narrator is a Murakami alter ego, is the Rat the alter ego once removed? It's a point to ponder. There's a Beatles record on the turntable at all times, of course, offering the possibility of peace and love and unity, but then there's that iron trap again. Not as well-developed as the later books, and mostly for completists. Still, it's interesting to see hints of the masterly novels to come in these slender, pessimistic tales. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
