Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami

This is the second book Murakami ever wrote, although for some reason I thought it was the first. Hear the Wind Sing is the first one and it is even shorter than this one, while both are shorter than even the shortest Murakami novel I've read so far - After Dark. 

As usual with Murakami, the novel is narrated from a first-person perspective by an unnamed narrator, however this is the second book of the "Rat Trilogy" so the Rat was already introduced in the previous book and in this one he is sleeping with a girl that he bought some stuff from, but is actually infatuated with another girl who lives in an apartment next to a beach and gets beach sand in her balcony.

J is also here, the Chinese owner of a bar where the narrator and the Rat go often. J is in his forties and usually doesn't volunteer information about himself, seeing as non-Japanese Asians in Japan cannot become citizens.  

The narrator works as a translator with a friend of his, him doing the English translations and the friend doing French.  He drinks often and sleeps with girls, eventually waking up in between twin girls who stay in his apartment for the duration of the novel, but whose real names we never learn.

The narrator start playing pinball on this very specific machine that he calls Spaceship, but eventually the arcade place is closed and the machine taken away, but he spends years trying to track it until he finally succeeds.  He tracks a collector who bought the machine from scrap and has it along with over 50 others in an abandoned chicken refrigeration warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo. When he finally finds the Spaceship, he just talks to her as if to a woman, but doesn't play.

The twins eventually decide to leave and the narrator continues with his life. People call this kind of novel "a slice of life".

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

 This is also one of the shorter Murakami novels, although he mostly writes very long ones, like his last one Killing Commendatore.  At around 200 pages it is just a little bit longer than After Dark, which was so far the shortest novel I read by Murakami.  Sputnik is related to the Russian satellite, but also on mispronunciation of Beatnik by Miu, the love interest of Sumire, a college-age girl who realizes she is a lesbian, or at least in love with an adult women, as Miu is near 40, if the two can be equalized.

 The unnamed narrator in first person, as usual with Murakami, at least we have the first letter of his name - K, tells the story of the book, mostly about his unrequited love for Sumire.  They went to college together and although K became a teacher, a reasonable job with a future, Sumire dropped out and wanted to become a writer, living in a tiny old apartment, with nearly no possessions or clothing or food.  Sumire calls K on the phone almost every night at 3am and they talk until the morning.  K wants Sumire sexually and romantically, but she has never shown any sign of such interest in him, only platonic, though thorough friendship.

Sumire falls in love with Miu, who is Zainichi Korean, which is significant for those who know the background.  They travel around the world, K wondering how to come physically closer to Sumire (while sleeping with other women), while Sumire wondering how to start a physical relationship with Miu, who in turn had something unnatural happen to her 14 years ago which left her with her hair all white and unable to have sexual desire or physical sex. 

The novel is about loneliness and the transformation of that loneliness into something less painful.  Loneliness can be present even when one is surrounded by other people and doing all the social activities and relationships a "normal" human is expected to be doing.  

Sumire eventually disappears on a small Greek island the night after she makes a physical advance towards Mui whose body rejects her.  K goes to the island to help Mui where she tells him her story and Sumire's story while they were together. Nobody can find Sumire or her body anywhere and eventually both K and Miu go back to Japan.

The book emphasizes that even when great events and great pain and loss happens in people's life, eventually they still go to the everyday routine and try to forget or ignore the pain as best they can, looking outwardly normal and well-adapted.

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

 This is the last book Murakami published (2017) and is one of the largest he wrote. It is more on a meta-level having to do with Ideas and Metaphors (and the scary, dangerous Double-Metaphors).  Descriptions of the book insist on relating it to "The Man in the White Subaru", but that is just one of the side threads, and these people who wrote the descriptions either did not read the entire book, or didn't understand it. 

The main character is a painter who makes a living painting commercial portraits for executives, which require very little creativity.  His wife of 6 years leaves him for another man and he moves out.  First he drives around Northern Japan, where he meets The Man with the White Subaru and the skinny girl who wants him to choke her during sex.

Eventually he settles in the abandoned house on a top of a mountain of the great Japanese painter Tomohiko Amada where he discovers an unknown painting of his called "Killing Commendatore." After hearing a bell at night and excavating a Buddhist pit on the property, he is visited by an Idea in the form of 2-foot Commendatore who eventually has the main character kill him in front of the near-comatose Tomohiko Amada (who was tortured by Nazis/SS in Austria during the Anschluss).  

There is a Menshiki character involved, who lives in a huge white mansion across from the main character, drives Jaguars and has some kind of a shady past.  He bought the mansion to observe a 13-year old girl living across the house, Mariye, who might or might not be his biological daughter.  Menshiki joins the main character in exploring the pit, and then having him paint his portrait and the portrait of Mariye, in order to get closer to her. 

Things get hairy with lots of twists and turns, as in most Murakami books, there is even a fantastic trip underground through the "Path of the Metaphor", however eventually many things get unresolved.  We never learn who is the Man in the White Subaru or the girl in the love hotel who likes choking during sex.  We never learn what happens with Menshiki and Mariye, and the main character getting back with his former/estranged wife Yuzu who had a child by another man is very unpersuasive. 

It seems that the book is more of an exploration of Ideas and Metaphors and the creative process, rather than a book about characters and their lives.  The best parts are those that remind of the Wind-Up bird chronicle, like the pit and the going through the tunnel to be reborn in the pit itself.  It is quite a long book and some parts are really meta to such a level to be almost unreadable, which is very rare with Murakami's books.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

 The best thing about this book is that I got introduced to Curtis Fuller and his amazing composition "Five Spot After Dark".  I also listened to other albums by him, and although the completely Free Style Jazz is not exactly my style, he has some amazing compositions like his rendition of "Besame Mucho" which sounds amazing on a trombone and "Autumn Leaves" which is also great.  I never knew that Jazz Trombone could sound this good, and I thank Murakami for introducing me.  Murakami owned a Jazz cafe in Tokyo for many years, and his depth and breadth of knowledge of Jazz, but also Classical, Opera and Rock classics like Bruce Springsteen is mind-boggling.  I learned more about American and European music from Murakami than from any other American or European author.

This is one of the shortest books Murakami wrote, and arguable one of the weakest one, content-wise.  The plot is very undetermined.  It all happens during one single night in Tokyo, every chapter happening at a different hour of the night.  Two sisters, Eri and Mari are the main characters, so to speak.  One is a beauty while the other is a nerd.  One is asleep during most of the book and some weird things happen with the TV in the room which is not her room, while the other is spending the night around Tokyo, waiting for the first morning trains to start running.

There is a love hotel manager, who is an interesting character, but too little time is spent on her.  There is an aspiring trombonist who practices most of the night, a 19 year old Chinese prostitute who gets beaten up and Chinese mafia in Japan involvement with a night office worker (salariman) who has a secret life on the side.  The parts about the sleeping Eri are probably the weakest. The perspective is not first-person, as in most of Murakami's books, but more like a movie expositions, with descriptions of the camera movement and angles, which, although new, did not work for me.

Ultimately, the book is a love poem to Tokyo at Night, the city where Murakami spent most of his life, although he was born in Kyoto.  The characters are much more forgettable than in his other books, but if one takes Tokyo to be the main character of the book, than things make more sense on a certain meta-level.