# AMREADING HARUKI MURAKAMI, WIND/PINBALL

Two short novels Murakami wrote them in the 70s. His mode of operation: When I got home late from work, I sat at my kitchen table and wrote. The desire to write felt like something that had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands…It was like a revelation. Or maybe “epiphany” is a better word.

The result was a kind of diary/philosophy of life.

BEING COOL.There was a time when everyone wanted to be cool. I decided to express only half of what I was really feeling. For the next several years this was how I behaved. At which point I discovered that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.

UNHAPPINESS.  It appeared as though time had stopped, as if all of a sudden its flow had been severed. He had no idea why things had changed. Nor did he know how to search for the severed end…He was s powerless and lonely as a winter fly stripped of its wings, or a river confronting the sea. An ill wind had arisen somewhere, and it was blowing the warm, familiar air that had embraced him to the other side of the planet.

THE CITY. I sniffed rain. A few autumn birds cut across the sky. The drone of the I was everywhere, a mix of countless sounds: subway trains, sizzling hamburgers, cars on elevated highways, automatic door opening and closing.

PINBALL MACHINE – THE MASTER.  He would insert one of the coins to start the machine, snap the plunger a few times, and then shoot a ball out onto the playfield in a bored sort of way. With that single ball he checked the magnets on all the bumpers, tested all the lanes, and knocked down the targets one by one. The drop target, the kick-out hole, the rotating target. Next, he set off all the bonus lights and then wrapped up the job by dispatching the ball into the exit drain with a look of complete disinterest. All in less time than it takes to smoke half a cigarette.