Don't Discuss Murakami Before Reading This Book: Hear the Wind Sing

If there is one book to read before you start discussing Haruki Murakami, we think it is Hear the Wind Sing, his debut novel. Short, spare and a little strange, it contains the seeds of nearly everything he wrote afterwards. Here is how it was born, why it divided critics, and what you will find inside.

A novel born at the kitchen table

The story of its beginning is already a piece of Murakami legend. At 29, Murakami was running the jazz bar Peter Cat when he went to a baseball game, and something in him decided that he could write a novel. On his way home, he stopped at the Kinokuniya bookstore, bought a fountain pen and manuscript paper, and began that very week. After closing the bar each night, he went back to a small apartment nearby and wrote at the kitchen table, for himself and no one else. You can read more about this moment in How Murakami went from Jazz Bar Owner to World-Renown Author in One Day.

The novel follows a narrator, a university student in Tokyo, who returns to his hometown by the sea for a summer break. He spends most of his time drinking beer at J's Bar with a friend who goes by the nickname “the Rat.” One night he finds a drunk young woman lying in the bathroom of the bar and takes her home. A fragile friendship follows, and underneath it grows a quiet, unexplained loneliness. Beer comes up so often in the book that one reader we know counted it 61 times, which makes this a very good read for a warm afternoon.

A prize, and a divided reception

The manuscript won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1979 and launched his career. The critics were less united. Some championed its fresh style, while others felt it did not belong to the traditional Japanese novel. Plenty of people around him said, in effect, that they could have written something like that themselves.

Murakami has said that if he had not won the prize, he might never have written another novel, and that if he had, the process would have been very different. That makes the book feel even more precious. He seems to have poured everything he had into it. Style can be polished over years, but the mood of a book and the identity of its author are not easily built in a short time.

It also hints at a belief that Murakami has repeated over the years: that almost anyone who can write a sentence, with a pen and a notebook to hand, can try to write a novel. Unlike becoming a concert pianist, it needs no professional training. A first line reads like a manifesto, the idea that no perfect sentence exists, just as no perfect despair does.

Why it is the root of everything

Hear the Wind Sing is the first of the early “Rat” trilogy. It is full of Murakami elements: the music he loves, his taste for drinks, references to American writers, and an urban sensibility quite different from many Japanese authors. The plot is plain and the characters can feel distant, but look closely and each relationship carries symbolism, and the emotional lines between people are drawn with great restraint.

As you read, you can see where later work comes from. A single word in this novel became a later essay, a sentence grew into a short story, and a paragraph was reborn as a full-length novel. For many fans, this is the prototype of Murakami's whole world.

To keep going, try the book Murakami drops everything to read. Harukists, have you read Hear the Wind Sing? Was it your first Murakami, or did you come to it later?