On to the beginning

Wind/Pinball: Two Novels. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Ted Goossen. Knopf; 256 pages; $25.95. Harvill Secker; £16.99.

IN 1978, over the course of six months or so, Haruki Murakami juggled running a Tokyo jazz bar with writing a novel. A year later, using the same routine, he penned a sequel. “Hear the Wind Sing” and “Pinball, 1973”, to give the two books their full titles, launched the author’s career in Japan and went on to comprise the first two-thirds of his “Trilogy of the Rat”. Never before published in English outside Japan, these two early works now appear in a single volume expertly translated by Ted Goossen.

“Hear the Wind Sing” follows the summer escapades of an unnamed narrator and his friend, known as the Rat. The hero spends his university break propping up J’s bar with the Rat, listening to music, meditating on writing, reminiscing about ex-girlfriends (mourning one who hanged herself) and chasing a potential new one who has nine fingers.

The meatier and more surreal “Pinball, 1973” follows on directly. The narrator has moved on from university and away from the Rat. He now manages a translation company in Tokyo, lives with identical twin girls and becomes obsessed with the “occult world of pinball”—a turnaround from the previous novel in which he scorned the pinball machine as a “piece of junk that...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Dc9yii