Wind/ Pinball
Play sample
  • Published: 21 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529957747
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $26.00

Wind/ Pinball

Two Novels

Formats & editions
Paperback
21 Oct 2025
Paperback
16 May 2016
EBook
4 Aug 2015
Audiobook
11 Mar 2021
Pre-order from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Book Hero Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

Discover Haruki Murakami's first two novels.

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novel - here they are together in one edition.

Now I think it’s time to tell my story.

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novels. Home from college on his summer break, the narrator spends his time drinking beer and smoking with his friend nicknamed the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls. But the Rat has remained behind. Haunted by memories of the past, the narrator embarks upon a quest to find the exact model of pinball machine he and the Rat had enjoyed playing years earlier: the three-flipper Spaceship.

‘Quintessential Murakami…an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation’ Guardian

‘Murakami’s way of making emotionally resonant images and symbols bump around on the page, and in one’s mind, remains fresh’ Evening Standard

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
  • Published: 21 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529957747
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $26.00
Categories:

About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood
Birthday Girl
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
After Dark
First Person Singular
Birthday Stories
Absolutely on Music
See all

Praise for Wind/ Pinball

This two-for-the-price-of-one hardback really is something special… The decorative covers are exquisite, but it is the literature between them that cemented Murakami as one of the world’s most celebrated writers

Dan Lewis, Travel Guide

Wind/Pinball is a fresh, heart-warming dose of the Japanese master

Economist

Murakami fans will no doubt delight in this new publication. For newcomers, these early works are an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation

Hannah Beckerman, Observer

quintessential Murakami… an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation

Guardian, Hannah Beckerman

Murakami’s way of making emotionally resonant images and symbols bump around on the page, and in one’s mind, remains fresh, miraculously, more than 35 years on

Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Evening Standard

Early Murakami isn’t Murakami-in-the-making, it’s already and entirely Murakami

Ian Sansom, Guardian

bizarre and often surreal, these stories act as an intriguing exploration into Murakami’s wacky mind and thought processes

Herald

Wind/Pinball makes a great introduction to Murakami for new readers, and is a real treat for long-time fans

Brendan Wright, Nudge

From the very beginning, it seems, Murakami has had the ability to make a story in which nothing happens seem completely irresistible. And to make almost any degree of bizarreness seem completely natural

Skinny

To read a Murakami book is to feel comforted by the familiarity and predictability of its strangeness. These are Murakami’s two earliest novels and so, like archaeological artefacts, they detail the early construction of his now-famous style.

Claire Kohda Hazelton, The Times Literary Supplement

Both are honest and witty novels, colourfully written as ever, and come highly recommended to Murakami fans.

Luke Owain Boult, Buzz

The introduction alone makes Wind Pinball worth reading… Two perfectly shaped novellas, as experimental and pleasantly offbeat as they are easy to enjoy in Ted Goosen’s crystalline translation… Both tales showcase the loneliness and erotic pull that paint the sets of so many of Murakami’s surreal stages.

Nora Mahony, Irish Times