Wind/Pinball Two novels

more than anyone, Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction, which says as much about the 21st century as it does about Murakami. He is the novelist of our mash-up epoch and the subversive who, by intent or not, lit the fuse to whatever "canon" of the previous century anybody still takes seriously. Unless some aging secret master clandestinely labors away at the center of the Tokyo labyrinth, Murakami is the first major Japanese author born in the radioactive white light of the modern age that commenced in the zero-years of 1945, with nuclear decimation by the United States, and, even more traumatically, 1946, with the emperor's admission to the Japanese public that he wasn't divine. Murakami defies claustrophobic aesthetic values that preclude possibilities rather than explode them. The result is a Frankenstein oeuvre of pop detritus that still manages to comment seriously on the Great Contemporaneous - time and space without boundaries. Crossing Kafka and the Beatles with Kenzaburo Oe (not an early Murakami fan), adding dashes of noir and science fantasy and creating an irresistible amalgam of East and West, Murakami sometimes has been odd man out to both: English-speaking readers may find it even less convincing than have the guardians of Murakami's native culture when, for instance, he writes that something "blew my mind." But authenticity is the enemy of audacity, and Murakami's atomic sensibility characterizes world literature. Don't tell the rest of the country, because it may blow their minds, but American fiction plays catch-up. As he makes clear in his introduction to this inaugural American edition of his first two novels, "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball, 1973," Murakami doesn't particularly welcome their stateside publication. But slightly embarrassed as he may be by these slim late-1970s works, they nevertheless provide an archaeology for who Murakami became as a writer, with the subsequent conceptual breakthrough "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (1985), the commercial hit "Norwegian Wood" (1987) and the fully realized literary arrival "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (1994-95). Identity in both the personal and the national sense is an awfully interior concern to so dominate such outsize stories, but at the intersection of those books' far-flung plotlines have been protagonists at a loss culturally and politically, romantically and sexually, often with nothing less than their humanity at stake. If Murakami's hybrid futurism is a product of Japanese tradition clashing with local postmodernism, then the greatest revelation of his debut is how this contradiction has raged in Murakami from the outset. Although Tokyo-located and barely 100 pages long, "Hear the Wind Sing" is crammed with references to Woodstock, Glenn Gould, Marvin Gaye, Henry James, President Kennedy, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Mickey Mouse Club, the 1960s TV series "Route 66" and - the avatar that cracks the code to everything - the Beach Boys' "California Girls." Recalling the prologue that Thomas Pynchon wrote more than 30 years ago for his collection "Slow Learner," Murakami's introduction to "Wind/Pinball" affords the reader a rare glimpse behind the curtain of a mysterious creative process, repeating the familiar story of how his aspirations as a novelist were born watching a game of baseball, that national pastime to which both Japanese and Americans can lay equal claim. More fascinating is that when Murakami had trouble getting "Hear the Wind Sing" off the ground to his satisfaction, he embarked on an experiment that now renders his misgivings about its English-language publication all the more ironic: He began writing the novel in English, not despite his limitations with the language but because of them. In the rigor and rhythms that those limitations imposed, Murakami found liberation from the pretensions that were derailing him; in any case the author's hot-wired East/West artistic persona was forged before he published a word. Whether it has become a conscious mandate on his part or is only an obsession indulged, he has since gone on to translate American fiction from Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" to J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" to, recently, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," the more naturalistic likes of which bear little overt resemblance to Murakami's own work, which one suspects is the point. Tellingly, Murakami's early narrators are all Nick Carraways on the sideline of their own narratives. In the thrall of some more charismatic central figure like the Rat - the loudmouth barfly and determined human disaster who makes his presence impossible to ignore in "Wind/Pinball" before later elbowing his way into "A Wild Sheep Chase" and "Dance Dance Dance" - Murakami's loner-heroes, rootless and quasi-anonymous, suggest an author occasionally and fitfully alienated from his own imagination. If this sounds like conversation for a psychotherapy session, welcome to Being a Writer. On some subliminal level the tension and power of Murakami's stories reside in the reader's hope, sometimes fulfilled and sometimes dashed, for reconciliation between the storyteller and his story; and from the initial passages of his initial novel about the difficulties of initiating a novel, Murakami now and then feels the need to tether himself. Interspersing inventions with asides verging on memoir, he interrupts his hyperchatty muse with quieter and more intimate confessions, in contrast with the turn-of-the-decade, thousand-page Murakami-to-the-max opus "IQ84" (2009-10) that turned him into a phenomenon, a prospect as perilous for a novelist as it might be enviable. THE KEY EXCAVATION of "Wind/Pinball" comes late in the second novel, which Murakami started almost immediately after finishing the first. With its more assured voice, its greater mastery of tone and the confidence of a sharper and more mature whimsy, "Pinball, 1973" demonstrates the extent to which the author was already progressing in leaps. As in many novels, the crucial scene is the one that doesn't take place, the ghost scene that haunts corporeal ones, the passage that an author plans to write until arriving at the plotline's next station, where the novel, which always has a secret itinerary of its own, declines to disembark. ("Gatsby" has more secret scenes than real ones.) Stumbling on a veritable harem of pinball machines in a warehouse, the narrator tracks down his old lover Spaceship, a femme fatale with three flippers, into whose womb the player launches from the game's chute its silver seed. Spaceship offers the narrator a final rendezvous - and he declines, perhaps against the author's desires. By the laws of Murakami physics, where murderesses abandon taxis in "IQ84" and take the emergency exit only to vanish through trapdoors of time and space, who knows where the 21st century's avant-laureate would have wound up had the narrator of "Pinball, 1973" succumbed to this last seduction? The reader imagines dropping down a black hole like a pinball only to resurface on the Murakami Universe's far side, having missed the glittering in-flight wonders of getting there the long way. Murakami's first two novels provide an archeology for who he became as a writer. STEVE ERICKSON is the recipient of the 2014 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His 10th novel, "Shadowbahn," will be published next year.

This volume collects the first two novels, written in 1978 and never before published in the U.S., by internationally acclaimed Japanese author Murakami. Hear the Wind Sing is a touching and almost totally uneventful sketch of a record-collecting regular at J's Bar, his quiet romance with a nine-fingered woman, and his friendship with a ne'er-do-well called the Rat. Pinball recounts the same narrator's student days on the eve of the Vietnam War, his encounter with identical twins known as 209 and 208, and how he and the Rat become swept up in "the occult world of pinball." Introspective to the minute, both short novels have an almost Beat-generation feel in their depiction of 20-something life in Japan during the 1970s. Reader Heyborne's languid narration fits well with the elegiac tone of the author's prose. His slow, almost robotic reading of the descriptive passages accentuates Murakami's subtle, strange imagery amid simple prose. These two loosely connected, sometimes wandering stories from a first-time novelist destined for greatness are diamonds in the rough, but Heyborne helps them shine. A Knopf hardcover. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The twins woke me up on Thursday morning. Fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but what the heck. I shaved, drank my cof­fee, and pored over the morning paper, so fresh from the press that its ink looked ready to smear my hands. "We have a favor to ask," said one of the twins. "Think you can borrow a car on Sunday?" said the other. "I guess so," I said. "Where do you want to go?" "The reservoir." "The reservoir?" They nodded. "What are you planning to do at the reservoir?" "Hold a funeral." "Who for?" "The switch panel, of course." "I see," I said. And went back to my paper.   Unfortunately, a fine rain was falling Sunday morning. Not that I knew what sort of weather befitted a switch panel's funeral. The twins never mentioned the rain, so neither did I. I had borrowed my business partner's sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle. "Got a girl now, huh?" he asked. "Mm," I answered. His son had smeared milk chocolate or something all over the back­seat, leaving what looked like bloodstains from a gunfight. Not a single one of his cassette tapes was any good, so we spent the entire hour-and-a-half trip in silence. The rain grew stronger, then weaker, then stronger, then weaker again, at regular inter­vals. A yawn-inducing sort of rain. The only constant was the steady whoosh of oncoming traffic speeding by on the paved road. One twin sat in the front passenger seat, the other in the backseat, her arms around a thermos bottle and the shopping bag that held the switch panel. Their faces were grave, appropri­ate for a funeral. I matched my mood to theirs. We maintained that solemnity even when we stopped to eat roasted corn. All that broke the silence was the sound of kernels popping off the cob. We gnawed the cobs bare, tossed them away, and resumed our drive. The area turned out to be populated by hordes of dogs, who milled around in the rain like a school of yellowtail in an aquarium. As a result, I spent a lot of time leaning on the horn. The dogs showed no interest whatsoever in either the rain or our car. In fact, they looked downright pissed off by my honk­ing, although they scampered out of the way. It was impos­sible, of course, for them to avoid the rain. They were all soaked right down to their butt holes--some resembled the otter in Balzac's story, others reminded me of meditating Buddhist priests. One of the twins inserted a cigarette between my lips and lit it. Then she placed her little hand on the inner thigh of my cot­ton trousers and moved it up and down a few times. It seemed less a caress than an attempt to verify something. The rain looked as if it would continue forever. October rains are like that--they just go on and on until every last thing is soaked. The ground was a swamp. It was a chilly, unforgiving world: the trees, the highway, the fields, the cars, the houses, and the dogs, all were drenched. We climbed a stretch of mountain road, drove through a thick stand of trees, and there was the reservoir. Because of the rain there wasn't a soul around. Raindrops rippled the water's surface as far as the eye could see. The sight of the reservoir in the rain moved me in a way I hadn't expected. We pulled up next to the water and sat there in the car, drinking coffee from the thermos and munching the cookies the twins had bought. There were three kinds--buttercream, coffee cream, and maple--that we divided up into equal groups to give everyone a fair share. All the while the rain continued to fall on the reservoir. It made very little noise. About as much as if you dropped shred­ded newspaper on a thick carpet. The kind of rain you find in a Claude Lelouch film. We ate the cookies, drank two cups of coffee each, and brushed the crumbs off our laps at exactly the same moment. No one spoke. "Shall we?" one of the twins said at last. The other nodded. I put out my cigarette. Leaving our umbrellas behind, we picked up the switch panel and marched to the end of the dead-end bridge that jutted out into the water. The reservoir had been created by damming a river: its banks followed an unnatural curve, the water lapping halfway up the mountainside. The color of the water suggested an eerie depth. Falling drops made fine ripples on the surface. One of the twins took the switch panel from the paper bag and handed it to me. In the rain it looked even more pathetic than usual. "Now say a prayer," one of the twins said. "A prayer?" I cried in surprise. "It's a funeral. There's got to be a prayer." "But I'm not ready," I said. "I don't know any prayers by heart." "Any old prayer is all right," one said. "It's just a formality," added the other. I stood there, soaked from head to toenails, searching for something appropriate to say. The twins' eyes traveled back and forth between the switch panel and me. They were obvi­ously worried. "The obligation of philosophy," I began, quoting Kant, "is to dispel all illusions borne of misunderstanding . . . Rest in peace, ye switch panel, at the bottom of this reservoir." "Now throw it in." "Huh?" "The switch panel!" I drew my right arm all the way back and hurled the switch panel at a forty-five-degree angle into the air as hard as I could. It described a perfect arc as it flew through the rain, landing with a splash on the water's surface. The ripples spread slowly until they reached our feet. "What a beautiful prayer!" "Did you make it up yourself?" "You bet," I said. The three of us huddled together like dripping dogs, looking out over the reservoir. "How deep is it?" one asked. "Really, really deep," I answered. "Do you think there are fish?" asked the other. "Ponds always have fish." Seen from a distance, the three of us must have looked like an elegant memorial. Excerpted from Wind / Pinball: Two Novels by Haruki Murakami All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.