Great Instincts May Be What We Call Talent
On Haruki Murakami’s ‘Hear the Wind Sing’ (1979) & ‘Pinball, 1973’ (1980)
‘If you’re the sort of guy who raids the refrigerators of silent kitchens at three o’clock in the morning, you can only write accordingly. That’s who I am.’ (Hear the Wind Sing, 7)
How it all started
I find the story of how Murakami wrote his first two novels more interesting than the books themselves.
Murakami tells it something like this. Tokyo. 1978. Murakami is at a baseball game in Jingu Stadium - Yakult Swallows vs Hiroshima Carp. Season opening. He is having a beer on the grass and enjoying the sunny afternoon. He’s a fan of the Swallows, but there’s little expectation of them going far this season judging by their past performance. Yet, when their first batter takes to the field, he hits a clean double, starting a streak that will lead the Swallows to winning the season. The satisfying crack of the bat meeting the ball reverberates far across the stadium and strikes a deep chord within Murakami. Now he knows. He can write a novel.
At that time, Murakami was 29 and running a bar, The Peter Cat, with his wife. They had debt, they were working hard and barely balancing their finances. He describes the thought that reached him on that stadium as a revelation, as something descending onto him. Very much like his future characters, his life was set on a new course by a foreign element and Murakami chose to listen and embrace it.
That same day he purchased writing materials and started working on his novel. He wrote at his kitchen table for one hour in the early mornings after the bar closed. Months passed and the words piled up. He finished the first draft, read it, didn’t like it, scrapped it, experimented to find his voice and wrote it again. Ten months later, the 100-page Hear the Wind Sing was finished. Without further edits, Murakami sent the only copy of the manuscript to Gunzo Magazine. A few more months passed and he forgot about it. Then he got a call. The novel was shortlisted for Gunzo’s literary contest. Then it won.
Pinball, 1973 was written the following year as a sequel. Murakami calls these first two novels his ‘kitchen table novels’, with ‘love mingled with a bit of embarrassment’ (xvii). In fact, he considers his career as a novelist to have started only with his third book, A Wild Sheep Chase. For a while, he was even reluctant to have these first two novels translated into English. That would’ve been a loss, I believe, since both are critical to understanding anything that came after.
What the novels are about
The content of these first two novels is as bizarre as Murakami’s start in writing. Basically, they follow the narrator ‘I’ and his friend ‘Rat’, as they go about drinking, meeting women and having strange experiences. Random things happen to them and they rarely reflect or acknowledge their weirdness. For instance, in Pinball, 1973, the narrator wakes up with a pair of identical twin sisters in his bed who all of a sudden live with him as if they always had. Or when the phone company replaces the switch panel inside the narrator’s flat, the old switch panel is turned into a character that is mourned and then buried. That level of weird. But mostly it’s the characters smoking, drinking beer and going through these sort of experiences as if they were the most normal of things.
Overall, it's of little importance what actually happens in the books. Since there is no narrative arc per se or plot to follow, there is little value in concentrating on the actual events in the book (FYI plot summary at bottom of this page). It’s also challenging to pin down what the novels are ‘about’. Loneliness, I guess, and the continuous search for the things that we develop an obsession for. Murakami’s characters in general have a great ability to focus on things and follow them to the world’s end. They know how to accept chance and the lack of control we have over life, handling this with a healthier detachment than any human I’ve ever met. This always makes me wonder to what extent the continuous thread that runs through the characters is part of Murakami’s personal fabric as well. Maybe, like other authors, he’s writing about himself.
Why the ‘love mingled with a bit of embarrassment’
By the conventional yet highly debatable way we define ‘great’ in literature, these are not great novels. The storylines are random, there’s quite a lack of consistency in the characters’ behaviour and there isn’t a coherent theme that emerges from the page. There’s little if any plot. The pacing is strange, with the narrative accelerating towards the end in a direction rather meant to explain the titles of the novels than whatever is going on with the characters. There are paragraphs that come after each other without any connection between them. Tenses switch without any obvious reason. Some back stories lack a clear purpose. There are whole sections which make little sense as to why they would even be part of the novel, almost to the extent that they seem to be unrelated notes forgotten in the text.
If anything, these first two novels are rather an exercise in writing than self-standing novels. Whenever I read them, I imagine young Murakami sitting down at the end of the day at his kitchen table and writing whatever came to his head that was remotely related to the story. There was no outline, no point to get across and no conventions mattered.
Is any of this a problem? Not necessarily. In the end, asking what a great novel is means asking what great art is. One could opt for a freer definition, that of art being boundless self-expression, thus incontestable and perfect in and of itself. By this definition, an intentional line drawn in the sand could be considered art. If the line was straight enough, it might even be called ‘great’ art.
If we choose to look at it this way, literary clumsiness could be considered an artistic choice. Especially so when judged against a constantly shifting standard. But so we could say about somebody playing the violin for the first time. Regardless of how much intention they would put into playing, the resulting screeching sounds could be a new form of music that we are not accustomed to hearing, or they could just be rubbish.
Where you choose to draw the line is a personal choice. The fact is, Hear the Wind Sing won the Gunzo Magazine prize in Japan at the time. Maybe today, in an English-language literary contest, the book would have a slim chance of seeing the light of day. I believe even Murakami said this somewhere. I could be wrong. I can’t seem to find the quote.
Yet, while the result might not be impressive, it’s humbling. It shows that everybody starts somewhere and what matters is how committed you are to gradually building the construction you started. Your first book might be like that and so the second. But you can only make so many mistakes by the time you reach your fourteenth. It reminds me of the advice Ray Bradbury would give his writing students, telling them they should write a short story every week. He argued this way they’ll achieve two things. First, they’ll have 52 stories by the end of the year, a respectable effort in and of itself. And second, some of the stories might actually be good – claiming the impossibility of writing 52 bad stories one after the other. I guess that’s one practical application of the law of big numbers in literature.
What makes these novels great
There is a flicker inside these novels that one finds hard to ignore. Whichever way I think about it, Murakami possesses early in his writing career something that sets him on the right track. It helps me to think of it as instinct.
Instinct is difficult to define, but let’s agree on the following terminology.
Whenever we sit down to do something, we aspire to bring the best of ourselves to it. Whatever comes next is a consequence of preparation, external circumstances and who we are as people. Preparation is whatever we have done before to improve our ability to deal with the task at hand, like deliberately practicing an instrument. External circumstances are opportunities and distractions over which we exercise limited control, like a fortunate meeting or unfortunately being interrupted. The last element, who we are as people, is the actual fabric of our personality and the result of all the experiences we had to date. It’s our ability to bear silence, to listen to the voices around us, to empathise, feel and observe. It’s our temperament, our weaknesses and our strengths. The consequence of who we are is what I like to understand as instinct. It’s our effortless response to the world based on who we are as people.
You can see this instinct play out in Murakami’s first two novels along several dimensions. I’ll pick three of them.
First, for something written in 1979, by someone without any writing experience, the novels allow themselves enormous freedom with form. Murakami takes seriously the idea that the writing process can just be an unloading of the mind, which bit by bit crystallises naturally into shape. He plays with the size of chapters, with the point in the book where he declares the novel officially starts, with how the ending is meant to work, as well as with the limited importance that he gives to plot. There are hand drawings of a T-shirt in the novel and pieces of a radio show bearing little to no connection to the rest of the story. There are several narrative threads in the novel involving ‘I’, the protagonist, most of which last for a few pages or even a few paragraphs. Whenever the story did not take off naturally, Murakami just allowed it to die.
While in a heavy-edited novel these parts might never see the light of day, in this case they give the novels a distinct voice and they allow Murakami space for experimentation to improve his writing. They are a playground for a young author.
Similarly, freedom of form also shows in how Murakami approached the re-write for Hear the Wind Sing. After reading the first draft, Murakami was left unimpressed, claiming his attempt was boring and left him cold. It sounded too much like ‘literature’, referring to the literature at that time in Japan. So, he scrapped the first draft and tried writing directly in English despite having only a limited command of the language. This exercise forced him to bare down the language and simplify his thinking. Bit by bit, he found a rhythm. He then translated the text to Japanese and this stripped down, essentialist, carefree style became his own.
Second, Murakami shows a great ability to connect with and listen to the voice inside of him. One example is the emergence of the elements and symbols that will dominate the rest of his literature. Those who have read any novel by Murakami will have already identified the mesmerising presence of a few motifs in his work: music (almost exclusively jazz and classical), wells, cats and solitary characters detailing out their mundane tasks.
At this point it doesn’t matter what the symbols stand for (we will discuss that in the coming weeks), but that they show themselves so early on. If I could, I’d try to convince you that we all have themes, symbols, recurrent motifs crawling under our skin, waiting to be heard. These are elements we exercise little control over and yet, they define us. They may be cryptic at times, or just odd, but they keep on coming back. Young Murakami heard his and brought them forward.
This ability shows itself also when, consciously or unconsciously, Murakami uses the little life experience he had at that point to turn himself into a better writer. It might just be my personal belief that the reason why the dialogue is generally good in these debut novels is because Murakami spent a large part of his twenties managing a bar, a great environment to overhear conversations, see odd characters interact and internalise the natural rhythms of their voices. It’s also no wonder that a bar is where a large chunk of both novels takes place.
Third and last, there is one aspect of Murakami that I find most fascinating and which is best reflected in these two novels - his loose grip on life.
Murakami wrote a novel because it dawned on him that he could. He took almost a year to finish it and then he sent his only copy out to Gunzo magazine. Gunzo did not return unsuccessful manuscripts. Were it not for the novel to win the prize, it would’ve been lost forever and, so claims Murakami, he might’ve never become a writer. That seemingly did not stress Murakami who went ahead to manage his bar, forgetting about the submission, until many months later when he received a call from the magazine.
Every time I read this part it makes me wonder - who writes a book just because it occurred to them that they could, then exercises so little attachment to send out the only existing copy and later on forgets about it? Really, does it put the universe into motion to send your intellectual offspring into the dark corners of the world or is it objectively negligent? As much as I want to believe the former, rationally I’m pushed towards the latter.
But it’s not negligence. It’s expectations management layered with a more relaxed approach to life. It makes me think of a kite, kept close, yet not suffocating close so it collapses to the ground. It’s desiring something yet not allowing our obsession for them to cloud our judgement. It’s allowing life to flow, which is something we could all probably take away from this.
Even the idea of sending out something unedited, in its ‘natural’ form, is fascinating. There is something romantic about the thought that something can be beautiful even without being polished. We can recognise the beauty in the imperfections because it allows us to more transparently see the courage that lies behind it. Incompleteness works because it resonates with something deep within us, maybe with the parts of us that we feel are missing.
In fact, Murakami never makes anything sound or feel laboured. Not his life, nor his characters. Instead, the lightness with which he judges his actions carries over to his characters. Or maybe the other way around. ‘Things’ happen out of the blue and they change his life. As a response, both writer and characters go with the flow, follow the signs (as blurry as they might appear) and spend little time on incessant self-questioning. That’s not because they’ve learned to trust the signs, but rather because they are so mesmerised with living that they do not second guess reality as it unfolds.
What if talent is just great instincts
So, what do these instincts amount to? As I write this, I cannot help but wonder whether in fact they are what we commonly call talent.
Yet, talent, I never believed in. Probably, because I never thought I had any. But also because I find the idea of talent a lazy excuse for inaction. Something in me resists the thought that some people are born suited for some tasks while others don’t even stand a chance of competing with them (athletics aside, where size and build may play a more obvious role). Instead, I choose to believe that every moment of every day we take actions that both show who we are and define who we are becoming. Actions that bring us closer to our self-defined finish line, regardless of where others may have started along a similar course.
Thinking about Murakami and his start as a writer, I do have to accept that the freedom he allowed himself, his looseness and ability to bear the quiet of his own mind might not show in every person running a bar and thinking of writing a novel. And still, that doesn’t mean that Murakami started off as a better writer. He just started with a stronger headlamp guiding him through the darkness. It was his will, not his ability, that pushed him forward. Is this still talent or does it better qualify as an instinct?
And does it even matter? If instincts are innate though, the same way we claim talent to be, then there is little to take away from all of this. We might want to approach a creative pursuit with a similar freedom of form, but we might not be able to do it as effectively. Knowing how something works or seeing somebody do it is not the same as being able to do it yourself. Which explains both the volume of self-help literature and how helpless we all still are.
Still, if there’s one thing to learn from this, is that we should not neglect our own instincts, sharp or blunt as they might be. In a world where all of us are hungry for external advice, there’s a lot to learn from just listening quietly for our voice. There’s immense beauty in connecting so intensely with something within yourself that it blooms under your eyes and all you need to do is quieten yourself enough for it to pour out. To me, that’s as close to religion as anything can get to – just this idea that within your depths there are things that your mind is not even aware of. That you can let yourself be guided by a deeper layer of your own self. Listening to instincts in this way may even raise the question of who is actually creating. If instincts are less of a conscious response, then that voice nudging us in the right direction may in fact be the real author.
However, instincts are sometimes wrong and there’s little that can be done to improve them. If anything, purposeful actions while pursuing a goal may refine our instincts insignificantly, slowly, like water grinding stones into sand. And since it’s all so out of our control, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Instinct may just be that initial boost that many of us need to get out of our seats and start in the right direction. But maybe we can do without it and with patience, we will all find our way home. The last thing we should do is to force it, find the five ways to self-improve it, and strangle it with both our hands until life oozes out of it.
All in all, it’s surprising to me to read that Murakami was embarrassed by these earlier works. He shouldn’t be. These novels are great because they are simple, honest and reflective of the man who wrote them at that point in his life. In fact, I am grateful that they are out there, within everyone’s reach. They are an education for any reader that as humans we learn and evolve and improve. They provide a live example of someone on his path to mastery. They teach us how important it is to listen to that voice inside of us and how not to cling too tightly onto things.
We should close here. This has grown too long. Go ahead and read them yourself. For lack of a better ending, I’ll leave you with young Murakami himself in Hear the Wind Sing, describing succinctly how we all might feel on a gloomy day, exercising our own looseness: ‘Her arms tightened again around my back. I could feel her breast pressing against the pit of my stomach. I was dying for a beer’ (92).
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Note: I chose to look at these two novels together not only because they are currently published together, but because they are both short, similar and distinct from all those that follow. All page numbering for references are based on the First Vintage International Edition, May 2016.
Plot summary (adapted from the highly reliable source Wikipedia, spoilers included)
Hear the Wind Sing - The narrator is a student at a university in Tokyo in 1970 who returns to his seaside hometown in Niigata for summer vacation. He frequents J's bar with his friend "Rat" and spends time drinking beer obsessively. One day, he comes across a girl lying on the floor in the washroom of the bar and carries her home. The girl has no left little finger. Later, he runs into the girl by chance in the record store where she worked. After that, she starts calling him and they hang out a few times. Meanwhile, Rat is clearly troubled about some woman but does not disclose the details. One day, the girl without a finger meets the narrator at a restaurant near the harbor and later that night she revealed she just had an abortion. When he comes back from university next winter, the girl had left the record store and her apartment. The narrator is married now and living in Tokyo.
Pinball, 1973 - The plot centers on the narrator's brief but intense obsession with pinball, his life as a freelance translator, and his later efforts to reunite with the old pinball machine that he used to play. He describes living with a pair of identical unnamed female twins, who mysteriously appear in his apartment one morning, and disappear at the end of the book. Interspersed with the narrative are his memories of the Japanese student movement, and of his old girlfriend Naoko, who hanged herself. The plot alternates between describing the life of the narrator and that of his friend, Rat.