When I first started reading Haruki Murakami’s books about 10 years ago in 2016, I really did not get, or honestly, like them. In 2017 and then in 2019, I visited Japan, and after which his books just opened up to me. There’s something about the atmosphere in Japan— a carefully crafted balance between beauty, tension and detachment— that I’ve always felt is perfectly mimicked in Murakami’s novels. Having physically immersed myself in that air twice, my subsequent enjoyment of Murakami’s novels stems largely from the fact that they make me feel that I’m back in Japan, albeit in temporary bursts.

This summer, I revisited Hear the Wind Sing/ Pinball for the first time since before I visited Japan. Previously, this book felt abrasive and strange. This time, I was completely absorbed and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Hear the Wind Sing/ Pinball is the first part of the Rat trilogy that comprise two others, A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance. It introduces a nameless protagonist, his friend Rat and a mysterious bartender, J. In Wind, the three men are in the same physical space often and they share the same narrative. In Pinball, the protagonist and Rat occupy two separate narratives. Whether or not they are concurrent is unclear. Wind reads like part writer’s journal (Murakami the writer?), part fiction while Pinball reads entirely like fiction.

Wind includes random biographical facts and a radio broadcaster’s speech on top of the protagonist’s storyline. At times, it is clear how the three are related, other times it is not. In this patchwork style, the story moves forward.Pinball on the other hand follows the protagonist and the Rat’s storylines quite closely. The Rat lives in a state of unresolved tension, driving himself mad over a woman as he debates about whether to leave his town. As the Rat makes himself an outsider to the town, he is also an outlier compared to the other characters, who seem to take change a lot easier. Meanwhile, the protagonist lives with twin girls by a golf course and finds himself on a mission to reunite with a pinball machine which he is obsessed with. The protagonist, who seems to have little emotional attachment to people, is strongly drawn to this pinball machine. “She” even talks to him in his head. The parallel narratives juxtaposing the protagonist’s experience with the Rat’s lightly suggest that the pinball machine is the former’s emotional lover while the twins are his physical ones. There are two mirrors in Pinball: the twins; his story and the Rat’s. They both have opposite but parallel goals: the protagonist embarks on an odyssey to find his lost lover while the Rat tortures himself trying to stay away from his in order to be able to take the first step in his own quest.

Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball was one of my first Murakami reads all those years ago when I wasn’t able to make his novels quite stick. Ten years later and now a die-hard Murakami fan who has read 12 of his books and considers him my favourite author of all time, it felt like a treasure hunt coming back to his first two novellas. In them, we can already see his signature sparse, postmodern style expressed through nonlinear, disjointed narratives that may or may not have common threads. The part I loved most was seeing the familiar themes that recur in so many of his later novels already present in Wind/Pinball—wells, long and mysterious journeys and quests, and frustrated love affairs.

One of my favourite features about Murakami’s writing style is his use of highly original, extended metaphors that stop me in my tracks. In Wind, there weren’t any that caught my eye, but they did start to emerge in Pinball. One in particular muses about changing seasons:

“One season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. You might run to the open door and call out, Wait, there’s something I forgot to tell you! But no one is there. When you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. If you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? I might pass the message along if I get the chance. Not that’s all right, you say. It’s no big deal. The sound of wind fills the room. No big deal. Just another season dead and gone.”

This allegory captures the themes of loss, change and Murakami’s characters’ usual detachment from either, as if they were leaves floating on the surface of a rushing stream. If they initially have any strong attachment to anything or anyone, it always seemed like the goal was to free themselves.

All in all, reading Wind/Pinball for the second time after ten years felt like a journey of my own, as I travelled back to the start. This time, my reading experience was much richer, many scenes having something I already carried to echo against. With this read, I had so many of his other texts under my belt to compare them to, and through which I could see the beginnings of the style and emotional tone that I seek out again and again, in life and in literature.