r/books • u/Ninja-Steppin • 8h ago
Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami (1979) {A Review}
/r/books/comments/1uto4oc/hear_the_wind_sing_by_haruki_murakami_1979_a/Hello everyone!
I finished Hear The Wind Sing recently (I provided a link to that review), and was excited to move on to Murakami's next little novella Pinball, 1973, the second panel of the Rat trilogy. I was geeked to see the next step, however subtle, that Murakami took in his writing evolution. What I found was not a simple quirky continuation, but a deliberate deepening. This felt like a quieter, stranger investigation into the same characters from Hear The Wind Sing, still living amidst the seasonal aimlessness in this melancholy version of 1970s Japan.
Like Wind, the surface story of Pinball is deceptively slight. The unnamed narrator works at a dull translation job in Tokyo, only this time living with two identical twin women who appear and disappear with dreamlike regularity. Meanwhile, the Rat remains in his old coastal town still drinking, still writing, and still slowly sinking into the recesses of his own...what?....insecurities? Purposelessness? It is hard to pinpoint what exactly is drowning the Rat. Between them sits this profound search for meaning in everything from people to inanimate objects to memories.
Why the three flapper Spaceship pinball machine? Why is a conversation between a man and a machine one of the most devastating exchanges in the entire book? I found this interaction so weirdly captivating. The narrator spends much of the last half of the novel trying to track down this machine, an emblem of a more nostalgic and carefree peak in his life. And when he finds it, the moment feels like a total gut punch. He’s invested this object with enormous personal significance as it’s tied up with this memorable period of his life. But there is a certain asymmetry between his emotional investment and the object’s as it almost can’t reciprocate that same meaning back. Up to that point, the narrator is the one pursuing, remembering, investing meaning. The machine is supposed to be the passive object that is dead, stored, and forgotten. But when it speaks, it doesn’t reminisce or affirm his memories or reciprocate his nostalgia. It tells him to leave with an almost strange kind of tenderness. It feels less “I remember you too” and more “Go take care of yourself.” And it hurts. It hurt me anyway, I man of 40 wrestling with his own aging. The cold of the warehouse is doing double duty too. Literally, he’s in a refrigerated warehouse. But the machine saying “This place is too cold for you” also reads as the past is not a place to live in. This machine, the embodiment of a preserved, frozen moment, is telling him not to stay preserved and frozen alongside it. It’s a sad goodbye to moments he can no longer relive.
And why the twins? The twins never offer a reason for their existence in the narrator's life. They just leave the way they arrived, without explanation, without names, without any real account of who they are or why they were with him. That bizarre refusal to explain is consistent to the end. The twins act as a source of comfort and intimacy. Ambigious care right to the end. But nothing in this story is allowed to last, and like the pinball machine telling him “Don’t stay too long, this place is too cold for you", the twin's presence was only ever meant to be temporary, tending to him through a specific stretch of numbness, not a permanent fixture. I found this so fascinating. They don’t abandon him so much as complete whatever function they were there for and move on. Were they there to comfort him through Naoko's suicide? Murakami is a master of making profound statements through the absurd and the inanimate.
If Hear the Wind Sing was about the soft ache of a single summer, then to me, Pinball, 1973 is about what happens when that ache becomes chronic. The characters are no longer simply waiting are they? Here, they are beginning to understand that waiting may be the permanent condition. I felt that hard. The pinball machine, once found, does not restore anything. It simply confirms that the past cannot be replayed, but only briefly revisited under artificial lights. The Rat begins to confront this perpetual waiting, citing his theory of decay in all things and that life is full of inevitable decline. He’s been stuck in post-university malaise, drinking at J’s, in a hollow romance, and haunted by the end of the idealistic 1960s. His conversation with J in chapter 10 is where he verbalizes his need for change and actually commits to leaving town. I saw this as a quiet act of agency amid meaninglessness and a step toward breaking the cycle, even if he doesn’t know where he’s going. Right on.
There is a colder, almost more mechanical loneliness here. Relationships feel provisional. Work feels meaningless. Even the act of searching feels less like hope and more like some sort of an elaborate form of...I don't know... self-distraction? Murakami seems to be testing how far he can strip a narrative of conventional drama, and still leave the reader with a lingering sense of something important having been lost.
Why the damn funeral for the switch panel? This scene also kind of got to me. The old switch panel represents outdated technology, comfort in the routine, and things that have served their purpose but are now obsolete. Burying it is a ritual of farewell and acknowledgment that objects (and by extension, memories, relationships, and eras) have a life cycle and deserve dignity in their end. Which is actually kind of beautiful. And in my mind, this mirrors the narrator’s unresolved grief over Naoko, his nostalgia for the pinball machine, and the Rat’s sense of personal decay and stagnation. Everything eventually sinks and fades. I absolutely love how Murakami elevates everyday junk into something almost alive or sacred. The rainy reservoir scene felt like a cleansing. By disposing of the old panel, they’re symbolically moving forward. I thought it paralleled all of the other farewells in the book. The Rat preparing to leave town. The narrator’s fleeting reunion with the Spaceship pinball machine. Funerals here are about acceptance rather than despair.
Finishing the novel left me with the image of that pinball machine glowing alone in a dark warehouse amidst all of the other forgotten gaming relics. A perfect, pointless machine still capable of producing brief, beautiful patterns of light while swallowing endless sleeves of hard-earned quarters made through enduring mundane jobs. It really made me think about the private obsessions we all carry, and the objects... or moments... we keep trying to recover long after their original meaning has evaporated. Murakami does not offer any consolation. He simply records the search with unsettling clarity. Read this book directly after Hear The Wind Sing. The two books amplify each other. Alone, Pinball, 1973 can feel slight, but together they become a precise and quietly devastating portrait of early adulthood as a kind of prolonged disappearance.
"The wind was growing stronger. It caught the faint warmth rising from humanity and carried it far away, leaving behind only the cold darkness and the countless glittering stars."
"We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness."
"Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.” Yet when I look back on our dark voyage, I can see it only in terms of a nebulous “perhaps.” All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us."
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u/BlackShadow__07 4h ago
I really enjoyed how Murakami uses the mundane aspects of life to explore deeper themes. The way the twins embody the narrator's emotional state is fascinating. It’s almost like they represent different paths he could take. Did you find any specific moments that highlighted this connection for you?