Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami review – super-elliptical pop-noir

Two early short novels, translated into English for the first time, reveal a fully formed writer laying the foundation for his future themes

Magical, mystical and magnificent? Messy, middling and monotonous? Whatever. It doesn’t matter what you think, because the publication of these two early novels by Haruki Murakami is only going to further enhance his reputation.

Murakami has reached that stage – 40-plus years into a stellar career – where he is unassailable, where the early work and the juvenilia are read in the vast bright burning light of the later work, which lends it all a lovely lambent glow. Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Pinball, 1973 (1980) – commercially available here in English translation, by Ted Goosen, for the first time – could be absolute drivel and still people would find interesting things to say about them, how they prefigure certain themes, how they indicate the early development of a distinctive style and how they therefore justify themselves as the beginning rather than an end, a false start, or a complete waste of time by a total no-hoper. Fortunately, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are not drivel. Early Murakami isn’t Murakami-in-the-making, it’s already and entirely Murakami.

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