jamesjustjames 's review for:

Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami

4.0

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“On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favourite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are walls, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.”
Pinball is Haruki Murakami’s follow up novel to Hear the Wind Sing. It was published in 1980. My copy clocks in at 162 pages. Pinball isn’t perhaps as strong as its predecessor but it is certainly weirder and that’s a good thing. Set three years after Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball follows our narrator and his friend The Rat as they live their lives hundreds of miles apart from each other. Murakami does an incredible job of portraying depression and loneliness and those feelings we all get inside when we know something is wrong but can’t but our fingers in it. Pinball is an obsession in the latter half of this novel and the very act of interacting with a pinball machine is romanticised and characterised in a weird and wonderful way. My edition of Pinball came with Hear the Wind Sing and I read them both in one sitting, they’re that readable. To me, Murakami’s work, any of his work, is like gulping down a glass of cold water on a hot day, it quenches my need for a heartwarming character piece which is totally alive and that I have only ever found from the master Haruki Murakami.