Pinball, 1973 (1980) (The Rat, #2) by Haruki Murakami

Both this and Hear The Wind Sing (Murakami's first two novels, which he wrote while owning and operating a jazz club for a living) are nowhere near as poor as I felt I'd been led to believe. Hearing Murakami speak about them in interviews, you'd have thought they were both terrible. And this is not quite so in my opinion.

Pinball, 1973 dials down the Vonnegut-aping of its predecessor and seems a far more focused approach as well. Murakami was slowly finding his voice and made significant progress with this effort. The book is also far more beautiful than Murakami's first even though it feels like he isn't trying as hard and is just going with the flow more often. I found certain excerpts profound.

Murakami captures the feeling of being existentially lost exceptionally in the Rat's chapters and I really enjoyed them. I enjoyed those of the nameless protagonist substantially less, though Murakami's fluid, enjoyable prose kept me reading. The twins come off as a shameless example of wish fulfillment and I found them hokey, but I thought the protagonists interactions with his co-worker were quite charming and genuine and I found the minutiae of his translation job oddly compelling. The pinball portions were presented in an interesting manner, though I'm a layman with no prior interest in the game.

This is an enjoyable read but I still feel like Murakami doesn't quite tie things together enough to feel like a cohesive novel. Murakami meanders about in passages that are little more than glorified journal entries. So far my experience with Murakami has indicated that his books are often made up of superb quality parts that don't necessarily come together as well as they could. This book doesn't even attempt to. Readers criticize Murakami's contrived MacGuffins but at least they drive the narrative forward. His first two novels, though they touch on some intriguing ideas, seem to start nowhere and go nowhere.

That said, you can see when comparing this book and his first that his ideas, themes, and motifs, though small now, are building like a snowball rolling downhill and gradually taking on mass as they become bigger, more complex, more developed, and thus more compelling, as they are in future books. And not only do the vignettes get better, but the books feel more cohesive as well.

Pinball, 1973 is just okay. It's flawed, but still better than I expected.

⭐⭐

My read-through of Murakami's entire oeuvre continues with A Wild Sheep Chase next, and I'm really looking forward to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Dance Dance Dance, both of which I've heard very good things about. (I've already read Norwegian Wood , my introduction to Murakami, which is why I'll be skipping that though it was published between Hard-Boiled and Dance)

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

The Rat spent many tranquil afternoons settled in his rattan chair. When he began to drift off, he could feel time pass through his body like gently flowing water. As he sat, hours, days, weeks went by. Occasionally, ripples of emotion would lap against his heart as if to remind him of something. When that happened, he closed his eyes, clamped his heart shut, and waited for the emotions to recede. It was only a brief sensation, like the shadows that signal the coming of night. Once the ripple had passed, the quiet calm returned as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

When the sun went down, and touches of blue filtered into the fading afterglow, an orange lamp would light up in the knob of the bell and slowly begin to revolve. The beacon always pinpointed the onset of nightfall exactly. Against the most gorgeous sunsets or in dim drizzling mist, the beacon was ever true to its appointed moment: that precise instant in the alchemy of light and dark when darkness tipped the scales.