Part of The Rat
First published 1980
The narrator works as a freelance translator in Tokyo, splitting his days between small jobs and the company of two identical twins who turned up in his apartment one morning without explanation. He never asked them to come. He does not ask them to leave. Between translation assignments, his mind keeps returning to a specific pinball machine, a Spaceship model he played obsessively years ago. He decides to find it. That search pulls him backward through memory, to the Japanese student movement, to a woman named Naoko who is gone now. Running parallel to all of this is the life of his friend the Rat, drifting through his own restlessness in a provincial town. The twins will vanish just as quietly as they arrived. The machine will be found in a cold storage room, decommissioned and still. The narrator sits with it a while. Murakami builds the whole novel out of small, exact details, a specific brand of beer, the hum of a machine, the weight of a morning, and lets the loneliness accumulate without ever naming it directly.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, japanese-literature
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, introspective, meditative, melancholic, nostalgic
Tropes: mysterious-visitors, parallel-narratives, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Tokyo, Japan
Period: 1973
215 pages · Paperback · Kodansha International Ltd.