Wind/ Pinball
Includes:: Haruki Murakami`s first two novels, published back-to-back, available for the first time in English outside Japan. Published as a reversible hardback with a new introduction by the author, Hear the Wind Sing & Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami`s earliest novels. They follow the fortunes of the narrator & his friend, known only by his nickname, the Rat. In Hear the Wind Sing the narrator is home from college on his summer break. He spends his time drinking beer & smoking in J`s Bar with the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing & the women he has slept with, & pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later, in Pinball, 1973, he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator & live with indistinguishable twin girls, but the Rat has remained behind, despite his efforts to leave both the town & 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.