Vintage Classics: Wind/Pinball

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novels - here they are together in one edition.

Now I think it’s time to tell my story.

Home from college on his summer break, the narrator spends his time drinking beer and smoking with his friend nicknamed the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls. But the Rat has remained behind.

Haunted by memories of the past, the narrator embarks upon a quest to find the exact model of pinball machine he and the Rat had enjoyed playing years earlier: the three-flipper Spaceship.

About the Author

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 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, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 

About the Translator

Theodore (Ted) Goossen has translated the work of many Japanese writers, most notably Naoya Shiga, Haruki Murakami, and Hiromi Kawakami. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories (1997) and the co-editor and founder, with Motoyuki Shibata, of the annual literary journal Monkey Business (now Monkey: New Writing from Japan), which, since 2011, has introduced a new generation of Japanese writers to English-speaking readers. Essays and stories by, as well as interviews with, Murakami are a staple of every issue.

Dimensions: 12.8 x 2 x 19.8 cm