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".
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