Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami

(Strange events like this have happened at various junctures in my life.)

Much later, I found out that the writer Agota Kristof had written a number of wonderful novels in a style that had a very similar effect. Kristof was a Hungarian

Some people have said, “Your work has the feel of translation.” The precise meaning of that statement escapes me, but I think it hits the mark in one way, and entirely misses it in another.

Japanese differs from Tanizaki’s, as it does from Kawabata’s. That

Nevertheless, these two short works played an important role in what I have accomplished. They are totally irreplaceable, much like friends from long ago. It seems unlikely that we will ever get together again, but I will never forget their friendship. They were a crucial, precious presence in my life back then.

Sendagaya Elementary School. I always call up those sensations when I think about what it means to write a novel. Such tactile memories teach me to believe in that something I carry within me, and to dream of the possibilities it offers. How wonderful it is that those sensations still reside within me today.

All the same, writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.

Hartfield says this about good writing: “Writing is, in effect, the act of verifying the distance between us and the things surrounding us. What we need is not sensitivity but a measuring stick” (from What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, 1936).

to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it.

Pure art exists only in slave-owning societies. The Greeks had slaves to till their fields, prepare their meals, and row their galleys while they lay about on sun-splashed Mediterranean beaches, composing poems and grappling with mathematical equations. That’s what art is.

watched for five minutes, but when a commercial began he asked why there were no Johnny Hallyday records on the jukebox. “ ’Cause nobody likes him, that’s why,” I said. “Then what French singers do people like here?” “Adamo.”

“Okay, then Michel Polnareff.”

reading Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière. A great book. Anyway, I

in a copy of Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. “So

“He’s afraid. That you’ll make fun of him.” “I would never do that.” “Still, it looks like that sometimes. That’s how I’ve always seen it, anyway. You’re a sweet kid, but part of you seems—how should I put this?—above it all, like a Zen monk or something…It’s not really a criticism.”

I made a trip to the john. While washing up, I peeked at my face in the mirror. That bummed me out so much I had another beer.

But no one’s superman—in that way, we’re all weak. If we own things, we’re terrified we’ll lose them; if we’ve got nothing we worry it’ll be that way forever. We’re all the same. If you catch on to that early enough, you can try to make yourself stronger, even if only a little. It’s okay to fake it. Right? There are no truly strong people.

“What would be the point of writing a novel about things everyone already knows?”

The freezer compartment contained an ice tray, a quart of vanilla ice cream, and a package of frozen shrimp; the next section down held a carton of eggs, a box of butter, Camembert cheese, and a boneless ham; the level below that contained fish and chicken legs; the plastic crisper at the very bottom was stocked with tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus, lettuce, and grapefruit, while arranged on the inside of the door were three bottles each of cola and beer, and a carton of milk. I sat there leaning on the steering wheel, imagining the best order in which to polish off all that food. I was thwarted by the ice cream, far more than I could possibly manage, and the fatal absence of salad dressing.

“I guess a hundred years after my death no one will remember I ever existed.” “Probably not,” I said.

It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams. But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place.

“You like Tokyo?” “One place or another—it’s all the same to me.”

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?

and inhaled the smell of fresh grass. It was a fragrance from picnics long past; even the May breeze seemed to be reaching me from some distant time. When I listened carefully, I could hear skylarks singing overhead.

I finished my cigarette, stretched, and gazed up at the sky. I hadn’t looked at the sky for some time. In fact, it had been a long while since my eyes had rested on anything.

That was 1960, the year Bobby Vee sang “Rubber Ball.” It rained

Speaking of penal camps, I remember reading about one of them in a biography of Leon Trotsky.

How long did things go on like that? I walked on and on through a boundless silence. I went home every day after work to read the Critique of Pure Reason yet again and drink the twins’ delicious coffee.

Month after month, year after year, I sat alone at the bottom of a deep swimming pool. Warm water, gentle light, and silence. Then, more silence…

“So then it’s almost impossible to be friends with anyone?” That was 209. “That’s true,” I said. “It’s just about impossible to be friends.” This was my lifestyle in the 1970s. Prophesied by Dostoevsky, consolidated by yours truly.

One season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. You might run to the open door and call out, Wait, there’s something I forgot to tell you! But no one is there. When you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. If you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? I might pass the message along if I get the chance. No, that’s all right, you say. It’s no big deal. The sound of wind fills the room. No big deal. Just another season dead and gone. The rich university dropout and

When the Rat was in a better mood, he let on a bit more. “We just didn’t get along,” he would say, “me and school.” Then he would clam up.

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 ripples had passed, the quiet calm returned as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

I whistled the tune to Mildred Bailey’s “It’s So Peaceful in the Country” twice. The twins said they liked the song a lot. But we didn’t find a single golf ball.

Of course there were times (like when a call came in at 2 a.m.) when no one picked up. Like an elephant aware of its approaching death, the phone would ring like mad (the most I counted was thirty-two times) and then die. I use the word die literally. The moment the last ring had sailed down the long corridor and off into the black night, a hush settled over the building. It was an eerie silence. We all lay there in our beds, holding our breath, as we contemplated the dead call.

Each of us had all the troubles we could carry. They rained down on us from the sky, and we raced around in a frenzy to pick them up and stuff them in our pockets. Why we did that stumps me, even now. Maybe we thought they were something else.

Not a single person was trying to reach me, and even if they had been, they wouldn’t have said what I wanted to hear. Each of us had, to a greater or lesser degree, resolved to live according to his or her own system. If another person’s way of thinking was too different from mine, it made me mad; too close, and I got sad. That’s all there was to it.

was sitting on my bed looking out the window at the cabbage field next door. Glistening patches of snow were scattered across the black soil like puddles of water—all that remained of the last snow of the final cold snap of the year.

Would I ever find a place that was truly mine? Where might it be? I thought and thought, yet all that came to me was the cockpit of a twin-seater torpedo plane. But that was sheer idiocy. I mean, those things went out of date thirty years ago, right?

She went to the pool once a week and took the train to her viola lesson every Sunday night. The two of them got together once a week, on Saturday night. Then the Rat spent Sunday in a haze while she practiced playing Mozart.

Outside the window, a silent rain fell on the golf course. I had just finished my beer and Hans-Martin Linde had just played the last note of the Sonata in F Major when dinner was ready.

The cemetery stretched across a broad plateau near the crest of the mountain. Pathways of fine gravel crisscrossed the rows of graves, with trimmed azalea bushes scattered here and there like grazing sheep. Tall mercury lamps, curved like royal ferns, stood along the paths, casting their unnatural white light into every corner of the vast site.

With her eyes closed as though she were fast asleep, the woman leaned on the Rat; he could feel her pressing against his shoulder and side. It was a strange weight. In it he could sense the fullness of a woman’s existence: loving a man, bearing children, growing old and dying.

Back in his high school days when he was still too young to drive an automobile, he had whisked up and down the riverside road time and again, always with a different girl on the back of his 250cc motorbike. He had embraced each while looking down on the same lights of town. Many sweet scents filled his nostrils, only to vanish. Many dreams, many sorrows, many promises. Yet in the end nothing remained.

Each day was a carbon copy of the last. You needed a bookmark to tell one from the other.

Good style, clear argument, but you’re not saying anything. That was my problem.

“You’re right,” he said. “No point smashing a cat’s paw like that. She’s a sweet cat, too, no trouble to anyone. So what’s to be gained from mangling her paw? It was a senseless, evil thing to do. Still, evil like that is everywhere in this world, mountains of it. I can’t understand it, you can’t understand it. But it’s there, no question. You could say we’re surrounded by it.” With his eyes on his beer glass, the Rat shook his head one more time. “Well, it doesn’t make sense to me.” “That’s the best way to handle it. Admit that you don’t understand and leave it at that.”

“You know, J,” the Rat said, still looking at his glass, “I’ve lived twenty-five years, and I don’t feel like I’ve learned a damn thing.” J studied his fingertips for a minute. “I’ve been around for forty-five,” he said, “and all I know is this. We can learn from anything if we put in the effort. Right down to the most everyday, commonplace thing. I read somewhere that how we shave in the morning has its own philosophy, too. Otherwise, we couldn’t survive.”