Characters & Synopsis Main Characters The Nameless Protagonist, usually referred to as Boku (, a kanji meaning I) is an English-to-Japanese translator,

running a small firm with his partner. Hes troubled by memories of his dead girlfriend, Naoko, and an obsession with a mysterious pinball machine The Rat () is Bokus longtime friend. Living in a town by the sea, hes plagued by depression and what might be construed as alcoholism. He lives off an allowance provided by his parents and frequents Js Bar. J () is a Chinese bartender, the owner and operator of Js Bar. Boku and the Rat are very fond of him and his establishment. In the course of the story, he comes to develop a strong friendship with the Rat. He hesitates to reveal information about himself, but gradually opens up to the Rat. The Twins () function, essentially, as one character in Pinball, 1973. To Boku, they seem completely identical. Everything about them, including their names, is a complete mystery. They live in his apartment, and he plays backgammon with them into the wee hours of the night. Side Characters Bokus partner () handles most of the business end of he and Bokus translation business. His specialty is French. Hes a married father with a run-down Volkswagen. The office girl () was hired for her amazing legs and her skills as a drink-mixer and cockroach trap-maker. [After the events of this novel, Boku goes on to marry her.] The girl () is the Rats girlfriend. She works for an architectural firm, and is very concerned with how others view her. Naoko () was Bokus girlfriend when he attended college. The Spanish Lecturer () is a Spanish language professor at a university, but devotes every spare moment to his pinball obsession. He keeps files detailing everything having to do with pinball.

Detailed Synopsis (spoiler warning!)* Boku, whose job is translating mind-numbingly dull documents from English into Japanese, spends his nights drinking and sleeping with random women. One morning, he awakens with a head-splitting hangover to discover identical twins in his bed. They make him breakfast, and refuse to reveal their names. The Rat lives in a town by the sea. He occupies his time by drinking beer at Js Bar and in his apartment. He has aspirations to become a writer, and in the classified ads of a newspaper, discovers someone selling a typewriter. He contacts the woman who posted the ad, and they eventually start dating. Boku heads to a very small suburb in the hills to search for the dogs his deceased girlfriend Naoko described to him once in college. He expects them to be pacing the platform at the train station, but is disappointed when they dont show. Eventually he sees one dog hanging out with some fishermen. He plays with it, then returns home to the Twins. Meanwhile, the Rat becomes closer to his new girlfriend. They meet once a week, and he pitches around his apartment and drinks to kill time between their weekly meetings. She loves him, but hes scared of commitment and what would happen to his freedom if they became serious. Flashing back to his own days in the town by the sea, Boku recalls the Rat being a skilled pinball player. The Rat got an incredibly high score playing the Spaceship machine at Js Bar. One day, a technician comes to inspect the machine, and Boku and the Rat are amazed by his skills. The Rat decides he wants to become a professional pinball player, but after this flashback, we hear no more about the Rat and pinball. Instead, Boku becomes obsessed with pinball in college, finding another Spaceship machine in Tokyo. He plays every day for over a month, spending all the money he earns at his part-time job. Eventually, he gets a score of 165,000 and is immensely satisfied. He returns later to find that the game center, to his tremendous dismay, has been replaced by a donut shop. Back to the present. The Rat decides to break up with his girlfriend. To sever his relationship, all he has to do is not call her at the appointed time. So he doesnt. He never speaks to her again, but continues to pine over her.

One day, a repairman comes to replace the telephone switchboard in Bokus apartment. Hes amazed to meet a man who sleeps with twins. He stays for breakfast, but leaves the old switchboard behind. The twins are impressed with it. Its around this time when Boku becomes obsessed with finding the Spaceship machine, which disappeared along with the game center of his college days. He visits many game centers, asking the owners about the machine. He has no luck, until he eventually gets the phone number of a pinball maniac, a professor who lectures about Spanish. One day, the Rat walks into Js Bar after closing time and talks to J. They listen to music, and the Rat learns that J is unable to drink even a single drop of alcohol. The Rat spends days drinking in his apartment, sometimes parking his car by the sea in a spot where he can stare at his ex-girlfriends apartment. He develops insomnia, finding it increasingly difficult to sleep. The Spanish Lecturer meets with Boku and tells him about the history of Gilbert and Sons, the company who manufactured Spaceship. He agrees to help Boku find the Spaceship machine, but tells him it was probably sold for scrap metal. The Rat goes into Js Bar again, only to find J despondent. We learn that J lives alone, his only company being his cat, who talks to him. His cat returned home with a flattened paw, looking as if someone tortured it with a vice-clamp. The Rat and J lament about the cruelty of people. The switchboard, Bokus switchboard, dies, and he and the Twins borrow Bokus partners car to drive out to the reservoir to hold a mock funeral for it. In the pouring rain, Boku throws it into the water, where it sinks to the bottom. After scouring the scrap yards, the Spanish Lecturer calls to tell Boku that the missing machine has been located, but he c ant tell him where it is, he has to show him. They take a taxi far into the countryside, where the Spanish Lecturer reveals that there is a certain collector with dozens and dozens of pinball machines. Leaving Boku in a dark field in sight of a decommissioned chicken slaughterhouse, they part paths. Boku enters the freezing slaughterhouse and finds nearly eighty pinball machines lined up. Among them, he discovers his beloved Spaceship. He finds the switch to turn the machines on, but doesnt play it. He speaks to the machine as if it were Naoko, finally getting his chance to say good-bye. The Rat, sitting in his car in the cemetery above his town, stares at a map, trying to find a random place to travel to in order to begin his new life. He thinks about how nice it would be to drive his car into the ocean, a place where he could sleep.** Boku returns home and showers, taking a long time to recover his warmth after being in the freezing slaughterhouse. He goes to sleep, as always, snuggled between the twins. Eventually, he escorts them to the bus station, and they return to where they came from.

*the chronology in this summary is slightly distorted in order to both combine the alternating storylines, and to condense them into a shorter story. **we can assume the Rat doesnt die in this book, as he appears in later books in the 'series'.

Hear the Wind Sing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hear the Wind Sing

cover of English edition Author(s) Haruki Murakami Original title Kaze no uta o kike

Translator Alfred Birnbaum Country Japan

Language Japanese Genre(s) Surreal novel Publisher Kodansha Publication date July 1979

Published in English February 1987 Media type Pages Print (Paperback)

165 pp (US)

201 pp (JP) ISBN ISBN 4-06-186026-7 (US 1st edition)

ISBN 4-06-116367-1 (JP 1st edition) OCLC Number Followed by 21379479 Pinball, 1973

Hear the Wind Sing ( Kaze no uta o kike?) is the first novel by Japanese author, Haruki Murakami; it first appeared in the June 1979 issue of Gunzo, one of the most influential literary magazines in Japan. It is the first book in the "Trilogy of the Rat" series, which is followed by Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). An English translation by Alfred Birnbaum appeared in 1987. All three books in the Trilogy of the Rat have been translated into English, but Hear The Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, the first two books in the trilogy, were never widely distributed in the English-speaking world, having only been published in Japan by Kodansha under their Kodansha English Library branding, and both only as A6-sized pocketbooks. [edit]Themes

The author thought of the images of the story while watching the Tokyo Yakult Swallows at Meiji Jingu Stadium; he wrote it an hour at a time every night for four months; this became his first novel. When he submitted it for the first time to Japanese literary magazines such as Gunzo, the title was Happy Birthday, and White Christmas. The story takes place in 1970 over a period of nineteen days between August 8 and August 28, and is narrated by a 21-year-old unnamed man. The story contains forty small chapters amounting to 130-pages. The story covers the craft of writing, the Japanese student movement, and, like later Murakami novels, relationships and loss. Like later novels, cooking, eating and drinking, and listening to western music are regularly described. The narrator's close friend 'the Rat', around whom the trilogy of the Rat evolves, is a student and bar patron who expresses a general alienation towards society. The narrator describes the fictional American writer Derek Heartfield as a primary influence, citing his pulp science fiction works, and quoting him at several points.

Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing

One of my Loyal Readers, knowing of my penchant for all things Murakami, was able to procure an English copy of Hear the Wind Sing from a drugstore in Tokyo. The novella is perfectly pocket-sized, at four by six inches, and extremely slim, with 127 pages a format I would like to see more in the States as a way to encourage portable reading. Hear the Wind Sing, along with Pinball 1973, are two early Murakami novels that arent available in English, so I consider myself lucky to have a copy of one of them (and if anyone wants to send me Pinball 1973, I will reciprocate with all the publicity love I can muster). When given the novella, I was looking forward to seeing what Murakami themes were present at a nascent stage of his writing career. Since so many of his other novels have shared themes (classical music, cats, coincidence that is actually fate), I wondered if many of these were already formed when he was just beginning to publish, or whether he had progressively developed them as hed grown as a writer.

One aspect of Murakami that has certainly not changed over the years although he certainly has refined it is his tendency to use animals in his stories. The animal that appears most frequently is a cat inThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a search for a missing cat launches the protagonist on a neighborhood odyssey, while in Kafka on the Shore, a character is cat-telepathic. Thats not to say that other animals dont drop into the story, just that a single animal often plays a pivotal role in the narrative and its often a cat. Even his book titles reflect the preoccupation with animals, with mentions of birds, sheep, and elephan ts. When Murakami wrote Hear the Wind Sing, it seemed he had latched onto the notion that animals were key for his fiction, because he gave us a virtual menagerie, but hadnt quite decided that for narrative reasons it might be better to give a single animal a key and recurrent role. So t his story moves through someone writing about elephants, a car crashing near a monkey cage, lyrics about giraffes, a story of a man-eating leopard, a psychologists parable about a rabbit and a billy goat, a cow painted on a car hood, a character named The Rat, and the biologist protagonist who dissects cats. Those are just the main references, and all in 127 very small pages. There are also a number of similarities with Murakamis later work that dont need excessive explanation: The protagonist is identical to most of Murakamis later protagonists male, rather isolated, laconic, operating on cruise control, and jobless. The girl that becomes the protagonists girlfriend has a twin a familiar motif to the doppelganger-happy Murakami. There is even a couple-page bit on Martian wells on that transport you through time, which will be familiar to readers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. One of the things absent from Hear the Wind Sing, though not the most remarkable thing, is plot. If youre wondering why I didnt give the plot up far sooner such as in the third paragraph it was because there wasnt much of a summary to give. The book is about eighteen days in a boys life before he returns to college, and although events occur, they dont seem very significant (although they are interesting). Each passage in the book is brok en by trios of asterisks or a numbered heading, and each passage seems like an anecdote that follows the last chronologically but not in terms of escalating conflict. There are mysteries that are never solved, such as a high school girlfriend that he borrowed an Elvis record from and never returned, and relationships that dont do anything. His relationships with The Rat, his friend, and the love affair with the nine-fingered girl, are not so much resolved as they are abruptly broken off as he resumes his schooling. The lack of plot felt odd because Murakami novels and short stories usually have a fairly strong plot, even if in some of his longer books like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he will venture off to a side-story for a while. Kafka on the Shore is plotted precisely and tightly. Even Dance, Dance, Dance and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World give the protagonist a single problem, a quest to solve that problem, and a solution at the end. Which tells me that at an early stage of his career Murakami had an excellent grasp on characterization, prose, and relationships, but his talents for structuring a storyline came later. The most striking absence in the story is the magical realism for which Murakami is so well known. He remains, without much genre-blurring, in the concrete real of bars and bedrooms, cars and restaurants, and doesnt step outside to mess with characters shadow selves or discover parallel universes. In fact, the only hint of something outside "realism" is when the protagonist feels his "body overflowing with some strange energy" after sleeping on the beach with the Rat. Yet this energy is never brought up again. The lack of magical realism, interlaced with a number of familiar themes, makes the novella seem simultaneously Murakamiesque and Un-Murakami.

It is worth a read, especially youre a die-hard Murakami fan, but your only chance to land it might be inter-library loans in the US (and thats a long shot). As far as details to help you on your quest, it was translated by Alfred Birnbaum and published by the Kodansha English Library (originally designed to teach the Japanese how to read in English which is why the last forty pages have an English/Japanese translation key). It was originally published 1979, but translated in 1987. Good Luck finding it, although Murakami doesnt believe in luck, only fate so heres hoping youre destined.

A Wild Sheep Chase Haruki Murakami A sheep with a star shaped mark on its back and possibly nefarious designs for the human race. A girl with supernaturally dazzling ears and a sixth sense. A dying right-wing power broker. A narrator haunted by a whales penis. A slurring dwarf in a sheep outfit. What could they all have to do with each other? Why, theyre all part of the plot of one of Haruki Murakamis earliest novels, A Wild Sheep Chase. Naturally. Of course, we start with a typical Murakami narrator. Think Philip Marlowe with preference for bar stool philosophy, and pit his nonchalance and cynicism against Carrolls Wonderland. This narrator is also joint owner of a translating and advertising business, and has a girlfriend whom he describes as having ears that are so beautiful that they transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness who is a part time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specialising in ear shots, and a call girl in a discreet intimate friendsonly club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.

The narrator is recently divorced and going through the motions of life until a strange man in a black suit, who represents The Boss, a major right-wing figure, makes him an offer he cant refuse: find the sheep with the star shaped mark on its back, or his life will be destroyed. Thus begins (da da dum!) a wild sheep chase. While it should be obvious that I deeply enjoy Murakami novels from the sheer number Ive reviewed on this site (hes my most read author), I have to confess that Ive previously dismissed the idea that they have serious underlying themes. When I reached the end of A Wild Sheep Chase, I had a strong suspicion that there was alot more going on under the surface. So I read it again, this time taking notes on the characters, recurring motifs and themes. But it wasnt until I was almost finished writing up the first draft of this book review, dismissing Murakamis magic realism as merel y fun smoke and mirrors, that I finally got it.

At its heart, A Wild Sheep Chase is a defiant declaration of humanism against the forces that have shaped twentieth century Japan, a celebration of the little guy, the simple life, and good old mediocrity. This interpretation emerged when I examined the lives of a trinity of characters whose life histories are briefly recounted in the text: The Boss, the Sheep Professor, and an Ainu (Hokkaidos indigenous people) youth. Central to these characters lives are sheep, and in the case of the former two, the titular supernatural sheep with the star on his back, who enters peoples bodies and works its will through them Trust me, this stuff makes sense in the context of the novel. Kind of. Not really. The Boss was a mediocre right wing youth until he was possessed by the sheep whilst in prison. He emerges as a new man, with charisma, a solid ideology, powers of speech making to command a passionate response, political savvy, decisiveness, and above all the ability to steer society by using the weaknesses of the masses of leverage. Using gold and silver plundered from Japanese occupied Manchuria, he builds a powerful underground kingdom that controls [p]olitics, finance, mass communications, the bureaucracy, culture, all sorts o f things you could never dream of. Hes also linked to war crimes and drugs. Then theres the Sheep Professor. As a child, he was a scholastic prodigy with an unusual passion for agricultural administration. He graduated at the top of his class at Tokyo University (Segoi! Todai!) and entered the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. He looks set to fulfil his promise until, while conducting field work in Korea, he is possessed by the sheep. His superiors are understandably perturbed by his claims of having a sheep inside him (yes, his superiors also question the dodginess of that phrasing), and he is sent back to Japan in disgrace, with the sheep hitching a ride. The sheep then abandons him, leaving him sheepless, and he enters the story an old man, a filthy, embittered, shut in with a monomaniacal obsession for ovine, hunting for the supernatural sheep like Ahab hunting Moby Dick, which is referenced multiple times in the novel. Finally, theres an unnamed Ainu youth, who, at the turn of the 19th century, drew on native lore, not to mention his blood and sweat, to help a band of Japanese settlers survive the harsh conditions in Hokkaido, and establish Junitaki-cho, a town central to the plot. He takes a Japanese wife and name, and becomes a shepherd after he is gifted sheep by the government. Unbeknownst to him, the sheep are intended to produce thermal wool for soldiers in the Russo-Japanese war. When, in a cruel irony, his eldest son is killed in that same war, he becomes embittered and dies alone, heralding the decline of his town. What do all of these stories have in common? Wars, specifically wars of Imperial Japanese expansion, are pivotal in all of them. The three men are all extraordinary. Theyre cautionary tales: the Sheep Professor and the Ainu youth become old, isolated and embittered, while the Boss is just an out-and-out bad guy. And of course, theres sheep. Sheep are central in the downfall of the Ainu youth. The supernatural sheep drives the Boss build a vast evil empire, while it ruins the Sheep Professors prospects, leaving him an insane recluse. Contrast the stories of the three great men above with out hero, the narrator. He is completely without ambition and believes the story of his life is so utterly orderly, you might doze off in the middle of it. He refuses an offer of worldly success ba sed on a hunch, then leaves a successful business without blinking an eye. And he casually gives away what is probably the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, he seems so disconnected from the world that a reader can be forgiven that nothing is important to him. But I believe that the characters close to him act, in a way, as aspects of his personality. His business partner expresses uncomfortableness with how quickly their company has grown, and wants to go back to basics. The Sheep Man (too much to explain. And Im sure those who havent read the book have tuned out by now anyway) explicitly says that he fled to the mountains to escape war. And [MAJOR SPOILER] The Rat, who is most heavily implied to be an aspect of the narrator, would rather kill himself than be possessed by the sheep. Significantly, he says:

I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicad as if I like these things, why should I apologise. The same with having a beer with you This also puts all of Murakamis focus on the minutiae of mundane life cooking, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, travelling on a train into a different light, and Id venture to say that theres an element of Buddhist philosophy influencing the author, albeit an unconventional beer and sex and cigarette friendly type strain of Buddhism. Put simply, the bad guys or tragic figures stand for ambition, imperialist expansion, and war, whilst the good guys just want to quietly go about their lives without having to buy into the whole mess.

Its also worth noting that the symbol of dangerous ambition is an introduced animal, livestock that was brought to Japan during the Meiji era, when Japan was scrambling to Westernise and modernise, and it wouldnt be a stretch to suggest that the author feels, consciously or unconsciously, that the corruption that has taken hold in Japan is a result of foreign influence. This is the deepest analysis Ive done of a Murakami text, and theres alot more buried in A Wild Sheep Chase, especially in relation to the elastic nature of time in the novel, and the conspicuous absence of names. But I need to save some fun for next time. And t he insight Ive gained here will definitely add to my reading of Murakami in the future, and cause me to go back and reread books Ive already read. Oh, the book is good, by the way. Recommended.