Pinball

Pinball, 1973 is Murakami's second novel, available for the first time in English outside Japan. With a new introduction by the author.Pinball, 1973 picks up three years after the events of Murakami's debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing. The narrator has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls, but the Rat has remained behind, despite his efforts to leave both the town and his girlfriend. The narrator finds himself haunted by memories of his own doomed relationship but also, more bizarrely, by his short-lived obsession with playing pinball in J's Bar. This sends him on a quest to find the exact model of pinball machine he had enjoyed playing years earlier: the three-flipper Spaceship.

Murakami fans will no doubt delight in this new publication. For newcomers, these early works are an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation, Murakami’s way of making emotionally resonant images and symbols bump around on the page, and in one’s mind, remains fresh, miraculously, more than 35 years on, Wind/Pinball is a fresh, heart-warming dose of the Japanese master, To read a Murakami book is to feel comforted by the familiarity and predictability of its strangeness. These are Murakami’s two earliest novels and so, like archaeological artefacts, they detail the early construction of his now-famous style., quintessential Murakami… an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation

Haruki Murakami (Author, Introducer) In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Book Partnerships

For the Fans