‘The Trilogy of the Rat’ series includes Murakami’s first books: Hear the Wind Sing, and Pinball, 1973 as well as A Wild Sheep Chase.
Hear the Wind Sing 風の歌を聴け Kaze no uta o kike)
First published in Japanese in 1979.
Translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1985, and again by Ted Goossen in 2015.
Pinball, 1973 1973年のピンボール (Sen-Kyūhyaku-Nanajū-San-Nen no Pinbōru)
First published in Japanese in 1980.
Translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1983 and again by Ted Goossen in 2015.
Apparently, Murakami wasn’t so hot on having the English translations of either of these books for sale because he felt these very early works of his weren’t well-formed enough and lacked polish. Most people would agree with this, but if you’re a Murakami fan, you’ll want to read them anyway. Our suggestion is that you read other novels of his first, then come back to these earlier two. With a new-found perspective, you’ll be glad you waited! Hint: These two novels are often sold as a set nowadays.
Cheapest
Amazon JP sells both Pinball and Hear the Wind Sing as a package on Kindle for 650 yen
translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1989
This is the last of the Trilogy of the Rat and the novel won the Noma Literary Award for new writers.
BOA Favorite Quotes:
“The cat was anything but cute. Rather, he weighed in at the opposite end of the scale, his fur was scruffy like an old, threadbare carpet, the tip of his tail was bent at a sixty-degree angle, his teeth were yellowed, his right eye oozed pus from a wound three years before so by now he could hardly see.”
When the narrator leaves his cat in the care of someone else, he has specific instructions:
“Don’t feed him fatty meat. He throws it all up. His teeth are bad, so no hard foods. In the morning, he gets milk and canned cat food, in the evening a handful of dried fish or meat or cheese snacks. Also please change his litter box daily. He doesn’t like it dirty. He often gets diarrhea, but if it doesn’t go away after two days the vet will have some medicine to give him.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド (Sekai no owari to hādo-boirudo wandārando)
First published in Japanese in 1985. Winner of the prestigious Tanizaki Prize.
Translated into English by Alfred Brinbaum in 1991.
Book Description:
In this novel, Murakami digs deep into the concept of two worlds, one being a hardboiled wonderland and the other being the end of the world. The town represents the inner mind and the 35-year-old protagonist must choose his own individual autonomy over the enemy trying to control him. He has only one and a half days before his consciousness leaves the present world and inhabits the world of his subconscious. As a subplot, the narrator falls in love with a librarian (of course! Murakami loves libraries). There is also an interesting adaptation of the mythical Japanese kappa, who appear in this story as “INKlings” (an acronym for Infra-Nocturnal Kappa) who live in the sewers.
Translated into English by Alfred Brinbaum in 1989, then again in 2000 by Jay Rubin.
“Until the publication of Norwegian Wood in 1987, Murakami had enjoyed the psychological and material satisfaction of writing for a solid, faithful readership of perhaps 100,000. But the intrusion on his private life of sudden fame sent the normally unflappable author into a mild depression and the closest thing to writer’s block he had experienced since his debut. For seven months during the latter part of 1988, owing to what he called ‘the after-effects of uproar over Norwegian Wood,’ he was unable to write, though he remained productive as a translator.” —Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.
The short-story that led to Norwegian Wood was “Firefly” which you can read in his short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
A film adaptation, directed by Tran Anh Hung, was released in 2010.
First published in Japanese in 1988 as ダンス・ダンス・ダンス (Dansu Dansu Dansu)
Translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1994
“Dance, Dance, Dance is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase and thus is an extra installment to the Trilogy of the Rat (which includes Pinball 1974, Hear the Wind Sing and A Wild Sheep Chase).
“…..Dance, Dance, Dance really brings to a fine point Murakami’s attack on late-model capitalism, which fuels and drives forward the “Japan, Inc.”model. Later novels deal with different collective narratives, but most have something to do with control over the ability or right or simply willingness of the individual to continue developing his or her own inner narrative.” —Carl Mathew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Hauki Murakami.
Other stories include: “The Second Bakery Attack,” “The Kangaroo Communiqué,” “Sleep,” “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” “The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds,” “Lederhosen,” “The Little Green Monster,” “Family Affair,” “A Window,” “TV People,” “The Dancing Dwarf,” “The Last Lawn of the Afernoon,” “The Silence,” and “The Elephant Vanishes.”
South of the Border, West of the Sun国境の南、太陽の西 (Kokkyō no Minami, Taiyō no Nishi)
First published in Japanese by Kodansha in 1992.
Translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 1999.
Review from Amazon
In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man’s life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami’s trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets:
“When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.”
Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat “King” Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. —Simon Leake
First published in Japanese in 1994-1995 (in 3 books) as ねじまき鳥クロニクル (Nejimakitori Kuronikuru)
Translated into English by Jay Rubin in 1997
Murakami “stayed in Cambridge for two years and was still there in 1994 when the first two volumes of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle were published in Japan. It was from Cambridge that he travelled to Manchuria and Mongolia, and it was in Cambridge that he completed the final volume of the novel…..Writing the Wind-up Bird Chronicle had been a particularly intense experience, he said, to the point of keeping him up all hours and throwing out his routine. He spoke about the sense of impending death that struck him when he turned 40 and his desire to write with full concentration while he still could, be he also spoke about his growing sense of responsibility to Japan.” —Jay Rubin, Murakami and the Music of Words
However, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does feature a previously published short story within its covers. The short-story collection The Elephant Vanishes contains an essay called “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which went on to become the opening scene of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Note: If you enjoy audio books, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a winner. The characters of the evil Mr. Ushikawa and 16-year-old May Kasahara are memorable and very well done.
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
First published in Japanese in 1997–1998 (as two books) under the name アンダーグラウンド (Andāguraundo)
Translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel in 2000
Note from the BOA Editor: I’ll never forget the morning of March 21, 1995 when I was on my way to teach at university in Okayama, Japan. Every street corner in the city had a policeman standing erect, silent, observing. I didn’t have a TV in my apartment and I certainly didn’t have internet in my abode in 1995. It wasn’t until I reached the university that I learned of the sarin gas attack the previous day. In Tokyo, over 650 kilometers away, 13 people had been killed and thousands injured. At high commute time on the subways, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, led by Shōko Asahara (sentenced to death, and executed in 2018), poisoned subway passengers by releasing liquid sarin gas in the subway cars. Naturally, this terrorist attack on their own soil was a shock to the Japanese. For the next week or so, the rest of Japan was on red-alert for any further suspicious activity; even the police in Okayama were omnipresent.
Just like most people know where they were when they heard Princess Diana was killed, John Lennon was shot, or when the Twin Towers were targeted in the 9-11 terrorist attack, most Japanese people know where they were when the Sarin Gas Incident happened in Tokyo’s subway. In his book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Haruki Murakami interviews survivors of this incident. This is one of Murakami’s few non-fiction books. To me, this book offers a rare glimpse of the true nature of the Japanese.
Book Description:
Haruki Murakami talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of the event.
From the Introduction:
“The Japanese media had bombarded us with so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators—the ‘attackers’—forming such a slick, seductive narrative that the average citizen—the ‘victim’—was an afterthought … which is why I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognise that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama.
Furthermore, I had a hunch that we needed to see a true picture of all the survivors, whether they were severely traumatized or not, in order to better grasp the whole incident.”
First published in Japanese in 1999 as スプートニクの恋人 (Supūtoniku no Koibito).
Translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 2001.
Sputnik Sweetheart was born from the short story “Man-Eating Cats” that can be found in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection of short stories. Much of the story takes place in Greece.
Book Description
Part romance, part detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart tells the story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited love.
K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments. At least, that is, until she meets an older woman to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party—and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous visions. Subtle and haunting, Sputnik Sweetheart is a profound meditation on human longing.
Cheapest: This book is available for under $6 from both Amazon and Apple Books. Use the links on the left by clicking “Where to Buy.”
