I'm really glad I decided to read this book after "Hear the Wind Sing." It's almost like watching a bird take flight for the first time, developing into something miraculous. This book is different from some of the later Murakami works I've read, but there is even more of what I've really come to get into than "Hear the Wind Sing." You can really see Murakami's style develop. I do note a beautiful, mournful note in this book. It penetrates and reverberates through you for a while afterward. A mu...

Really more of a novella than a novel, with the flavor of Murakami's short fiction. One of his hapless protagonists puzzles through his confusion about the empty spaces in his life for a while, then the book ends. I enjoyed the first-person POV chapters much more than the third person sections about The Rat (this book is the second in the author's "Trilogy of the Rat"). It's not thrilling reading, but you get the idea that there is a lot to unpack here, and a great deal of insight into the aimle...

There may not be a certain story in this novel. Bt the book is full of Surrealism. Atmosphere of the description is also depressing. Vintage Murakami. I love the Rat, J’s bar and the narrator’s chemistry.

Buy as a used paperback on Amazon starting at $72 or read for free online as a PDF here: http://www.betz.lu/media/users/charel...I wouldn't recommend this as a good entry point if you've never read any of his other writing, but I'd definitely recommend it to established fans. It feels a bit directionless and floats around in a dreamlike way, but I enjoyed the dream. I think it's less like Norweigan Wood (I read somewhere that it was similar but to me it isn't at all) and more like Kafka on The S...

Haruki Murakami tends to write two kinds of novel: ones with a story and ones without; Pinball, 1973 is unfortunately the latter. A translator with twin live-in girlfriends (I know, just humour the author’s sad wish fulfilment fantasy) develops an obsession with pinball, specifically a pinball machine called Spaceship. One day his machine disappears. He half-heartedly goes looking for it…. zzz… This is part of Murakami’s Rat series where a character called The Rat appears. It’s even more underwh...

Ah, what a ride! This is the second book in Haruki Murakami's "The Rat" tetralogy, and the fourth I read. I love this guy's writing! While reading these books, I kept wondering what it is that I love so much. It's not that there's this awesome plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat. In fact, there's not much of a plot at all. The story just goes along without a whole lot happening, and yet these books are mesmerizing and un-put-downable. I couldn't seem to pinpoint what it is about these b...

I took a long look at my reflection in the window. My eyes were a bit hollow with fever. I could live with that. And my jaw was dark with five o’clock (five thirty, actually) shadow. I could live with that too. The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, th...

'Pinball, 1973' is not a particularly engrossing novel. There are still the following good reasons to read it.1. It is short, simple and a quick-read.2. Its Murakami-ness. The novel itself is not as strong as his later novels, yet a flavor of familiar Murakami elements is present which grew and developed into his later work. The seeds which were planted here, blossomed into the novels which we love and respect. There is a beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking nameless narrator who is detached and apa...

The second short novel opens with an unnamed protagonist again. He is pondering what his life was like ten years earlier. Remembering how he used to love to hear people’s stories. The main narrative starts with the unnamed protagonist waking up to find two female twins in his bed. Guess what? They don’t have names either. We don’t know where they came from or why. They know next to nothing about the world, but I think after reading the first novel, this is par for the course. Murakami seems to e...

I read this after A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance. At the time, it was INCREDIBLY hard to find in English or French translation (as was the first of the series Hear the Wind Sing!) I finally found it in a PDF I believe and loved it. It has some of the same characters as the later books and - although early Murakami - has the stylistic idioms that became part and parcel to Murakami's writing later on. I believe this book and Hear the Wind Sing are now available in a single volume. I woul...

“So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.” ― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973Like Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing (The Rat, #1), 'Pinball, 1973' (The Rat, #2) contains many of those elements that would define Murakami's fiction in the future. In someways this novel is both a story of loneliness and a love story between the protagonist and a specific Pinball machine. 'Hear the Wind Sing' seems to show early signs of Norwegian Wood, b...

Have I not read A Wild Sheep Chase last year, I would probably find this book less engaging than any other of Murakami's later works. But this one is a prefect chain in the evolution from "slice of life" of Hear the Wind Sing to the bonkers of the Wild Sheep. And it's as always cozy, funny and warm in the only possible Murakamish way. Still, I prefer my Murakami with more supernatural to the story. No ice, but well shaken, so to say. 3,5.P.S. Fun fact - Rubber Soul is the only album by The Beatl...

"It’s like Tennessee Williams said. The past and the present, we might say, “go like this.”
The future is a “maybe.”
Yet when we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us this far, we only come up with another indefinite “maybe.” The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by."This is Murakami's second book. Like its predecessor, this one is also nostalgic, in a whole different way though. I also found it darker and a bit tr...

As with Hear the Wind Sing, this book traveled from Japan to New Orleans in November via my son and then traveled back to Japan with me the following month, because it's small and lightweight, easily fitting in my carry-on, though this one I read on a JR train and not on the plane."Pinball" is a slightly more complex story than Hear the Wind Sing (though it's somewhat of a sequel) with hints of what's to come in the last of the Rat trilogy, the even better A Wild Sheep Chase. (With its twin sist...

It is probably just my fault reading this right after HM's first novel, but the normal bag of tricks just didn't work for me. And maybe I am just cranky from too much air travel, but his one-dimensional female characters that only exist in the orbit of the men really started to irritate me (none of the females in this book were given names).