Hear The Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami (1979)

Hello!

Recently, I made the decision to attempt to read the entire works of some of the celebrated authors of history, in an effort to learn a thing or two about life and about writing. It is my wildest dream to one day become a writer too. I chose to begin with Murakami, an author I see mentioned on Reddit quite a bit. I had very little experience with Murakami thus far, and so I believed I would be learning about the man's style and evolution with a clean slate. His debut novela, Hear The Wind Sing (1979), would begin my first forray into the Japanese author and whatever universe he would start to build throughout the rest of his collection.

Immediately upon reading Hear The Wind Sing, I found myself treating the book less like a casual read, and more like a case study. After all, I was trying to investigate what makes Murakami- even early Murakami- so brilliant. His debut novela sees a college student return to his coastal Japanese province on summer break from a school located somewhere in big city Tokyo. He routinely drinks beer at J's Bar, listens to classic records, reconnects with his unpredictable friend "the Rat", and finds himself in this tentative connection with a troubled, young, 4-fingered woman enduring her own quiet trauma. On paper, almost "nothing happens", but the narrative Murakami weaves here is quite profound.

What appears to be a loose, vignette-style of storytelling begins to reveal itself as carefully constructed fragments as you progress through the narrative. I found myself conjuring up questions repeatedly, and often ones I have yet to find good answers for. Why does Murakami insist on the narrator recounting certain events of his life all of these years later? Events that often do not seem to have a definitive connection to the plot. Why the fictional, sterile author Derek Hartfield? What is Murakami signalling by framing the entire story as an act of imperfect recollection? Who is cutting onions as the DJ looks up towards the window of the little girl's window on a quiet summer night on the beach? I realized with eager fascination that the entire novel is a quiet meditation on how memory works in writing! In Murakami's case, memory does not act as a reliable archive, but as a selective, haunted reconstruction of events. This became a real knowledge point in my investigation.

How does the presence of music function as both an emotional anchor and an escape mechanism? Why does "the wind" feel less like a weather condition, and more like a conscious force carrying away meaning? What are we to make of the recurring motif of the incompleteness of missing fingers, unspoken histories, characters who sense they are living the wrong version of their lives? Questions I know part of the answers to, but feel like I haven't grasped the full meaning of.

There is a deep sense of existential drift here. The Rat and the narrator aren't raging against the machine, nor on some main quest. They feel like they are just...waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for clarity, for connection, for a sign that the prime of their lives has not already passed them by. In that waiting, Murakami seems to be exploring a very specific type of modern, postwar Japanese loneliness: The loneliness of young people who have everything they are supposed to want, and yet still feel hollow.

The relationship between the narrator and the Rat deserves special examination. Their late-night conversations at J’s Bar read like philosophical sparring disguised as casual banter. Is the Rat a voice for Murakami’s own emerging anxieties about purpose and authenticity? Or is he something more abstract like a chaos agent who both illuminates and deepens the narrator’s confusion? I couldn't help getting very subtle Fear and Loathing vibes during their scenes, as the Rat seems unpredictable like Dr. Gonzo while we hear the voices reminiscent of Raoul Duke in the narrator's mind. The story's female characters, though limited, also invite investigation. They appear as projections of male longing, yet they also carry an aura of abandonment that the men cannot penetrate. Is this a limitation of the young Murakami's writing, or an intentional reflection of how isolated these protagonists truly are?

I can confidently say that Hear The Wind Sing isn't Murakami at his peak technical ability. The narrative occasionally wanders, and the emotional payoff can feel muted at times. Yet these very flaws make this investigation more fascinating. It is like we are witnessing an artist discover his tools in public, testing his voice, his tone, and thematic obsessions that he would spend the next 40+ years refining. Finishing the book left me sitting quietly, replaying certain scenes the way the narrator replays his records. It made me wonder how many of my own summers have slipped away unnoticed, preserved only in fragments of songs and half-remembered conversations. Perhaps that is the quiet power of Hear The Wind Sing. It doesn’t force answers. It simply teaches you how to listen to the wind.

Pinball is next.

Favorite Passages: "Hartfield waged his fruitless battle for eight years and two months, and then he died. In June 1938, on a sunny Sunday morning, he jumped off the Empire State Building clutching a portrait of Adolf Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left. Few people noticed, though—he was as ignored in death as he had been in life."

"It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams. But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place."