Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball Combines the Early Works of a Surrealist Master

The story in full of how Murakami became a writer is nearly as uncanny as one of his novels, as he tells it in the preface to Wind/Pinball, the first U.S. release of his debut and its follow-up, Pinball 1973. Even more interesting is his account of how he settled on his simple, water-clear style, a huge departure from contemporary Japanese literature of the time: he wrote first in simple English, of which he had an incomplete grasp, then translated the text into lucid, radically conversational Japanese.
Wind and Pinball exist in the same universe as and share a narrator with later masterpieces A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, which cemented Murakami as a writer of surreal, understated brilliance. Like many of the works that followed, this tetralogy revolves around a passive, introspective hero and his encounters with uncanny women, supernatural phenomena, and dark places, recounted in between oddly irresistible passages about simple meals, domestic routines, and the rhythms of life in Japan.
Wind follows an unnamed narrator over the course of a long hot summer between college terms. He drifts, he daydreams, he meets girls. Mostly he drinks beer with his friend the Rat, at a dive called J’s Bar. The narrative is tinged with melancholy; he seems to remember moments even as they’re still happening, and maintains the zen aloofness shared by Murakami’s later protagonists. “I discovered,” he says, “that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.” In Pinball 1973, he and the Rat have parted ways. Our narrator still perches lightly on life, stumbling into strange relationships and falling down a rabbit hole investigating a defunct pinball machine. Meanwhile the Rat, whose phantom the narrator will later follow through A Wild Sheep Chase, begins the process of detaching from life completely.
Both novella-length stories are fresh and bracingly weird. Wind is built like a mix tape, shuffling chunks of connected story, radio transcripts, and musings on the nature of art, life and writing. Pinball has a more conventional dual narrative structure, but it’s no more straightforward. They’re stream of consciousness without being purposeless, clever without being self-satisfied, a window onto an idiosyncratic mind that’s either making it up as he goes along or utterly in control of his universe. They’re the gateway texts for everything that came after, and wonderfully odd and addictive on their own merit. Murakami fans can’t miss them, and first-time readers will be sucked into the mesmerizing flow of his off-kilter world, so simple yet utterly beguiling you’ll look for the trick, but never find it.