First published 1855
The narrator spends his days translating documents and his nights thinking about pinball. Not pinball in general. One specific machine, a Spaceship model he played obsessively years ago at a bar in Tokyo. He wants to find it again, though he cannot fully explain why. His apartment now holds two identical twin women who showed up one morning without explanation and sleep in his bed and eat his food and then, just as quietly, vanish. Meanwhile his memories keep pulling him back to the Japanese student protests and to Naoko, a girlfriend he has lost. Across town, his friend the Rat is living his own restless, directionless life, drinking in the same bars and circling the same dissatisfactions. The two storylines run in parallel, never quite touching. The narrator eventually tracks down the Spaceship machine in a storage facility outside the city. He sits with it. He says goodbye. What he is actually grieving is harder to name, but the scene makes it plain. Murakami builds a quiet story about young men who are already nostalgic for lives they are still living.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction, japanese-literature
Vibes: bittersweet, contemplative, introspective, meditative, melancholic
Tropes: aimless-youth, parallel-narratives, symbolic-objects, unreliable-memory
Setting: Tokyo, Japan
Period: 1973, 1970s
162 pages · Paperback · Vintage
Content warnings: depression