Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing (1978)
NUMBER: 67
Genre: Fiction; Origin: Japan; Pages: 100
Satisfaction rating: 8.0
OVERVIEW:
Hear the Wind Sing takes place in 1970, following the 21 year old narrator for 19 days from August 8 to 28. The story covers the craft of writing, the Japanese student movement, and, like later Murakami novels, relationships and loss. The narrator’s close friend ‘the Rat’, around whom the trilogy of the Rat evolves, is a student and bar patron who expresses a general alienation towards society. The narrator describes the fictional American writer Derek Heartfield as a primary influence, citing his pulp science fiction work, and quoting him at several points.
MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:
Although short in length, Hear the Wind Sing is as fractured and disjointed as all Murakami works I’ve read so far. Far from a criticism this non-traditional approach to story structure proves to be the base for an engrossing first novella! In a departure from much of his later work Murakami doesn’t stray into the surreal territory that has become his trademark; still, the reoccurring themes of character isolation and confusion are as present as ever. I found the basic narrative to be similar to that of the main male and female protagonists in After Dark, Hardboiled Wonderland, Sputnik Sweetheart and the Wind-up Bird - an ordinary man is thrust into a strange series of events by a mysterious girl. But, no matter how many times Murakami explores this theme he find new territory, which is fine with me. In this case the narrative is broken by the character’s musings on writing a novel, one he is choosing to start long after the events that take place in the main story.
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