First published 2016
It is summer, and the narrator is back home from college with nowhere to be and nothing urgent to do. He settles into a routine at J's Bar, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes alongside his friend the Rat. The radio plays. Time passes. He thinks about the women he has slept with, turns the idea of writing over in his mind, and starts spending time with a girl who is missing one finger. Nobody is in crisis, exactly, but nobody is quite at ease either. The narrator watches his own life from a slight distance, as if he is already trying to decide what kind of story it might become. The Rat drinks and talks and seems to be working something out too, though he never quite gets there. J runs the bar and keeps the glasses full. The summer holds them all in place. This is Haruki Murakami's first novel, published in Japan decades ago and now available in English for the first time outside Japan. The story of the narrator, the Rat, and J picks up again in Pinball, 1973.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, coming-of-age, contemporary, slice-of-life
Vibes: atmospheric, contemplative, introspective, meditative, melancholic
Tropes: found-family, slice-of-life, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Japan, J's Bar
Period: Summer, 1970s
176 pages · Paperback · Random House UK
Content warnings: alcohol-abuse