Hear the Wind Sing

<p>In 1978 <b>Haruki Murakami</b> was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World but it was Norwegian Wood published in 1987 which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers were translated into many languages including English and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.<br><br>Murakami writes with admirable discipline producing ten pages a day after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races) works on translations and then reads listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music and they also seep into his novels and short stories providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 1Q84 and Men Without Women his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday of melancholy and humour continues to enchant readers ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.</p> <p><b><i>Hear the Wind Sing</i> is Murakami's first novel available for the first time in English outside Japan. </b><br><br> In <i>Hear the Wind Sing</i> the narrator is home from college on his summer break. He spends his time drinking beer and smoking in J’s Bar with the Rat listening to the radio thinking about writing and the women he has slept with and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. <br><br>The story of the narrator the Rat and J continues in <i>Pinball 1973</i>.</p> Murakami fans will no doubt delight in this new publication. For newcomers these early works are an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation Murakami’s way of making emotionally resonant images and symbols bump around on the page and in one’s mind remains fresh miraculously more than 35 years on <i>Wind/Pinball</i> is a fresh heart-warming dose of the Japanese master quintessential Murakami… an excellent introduction to a writer who has since become one of the most influential novelists of his generation This two-for-the-price-of-one hardback really is something special… The decorative covers are exquisite but it is the literature between them that cemented Murakami as one of the world’s most celebrated writers <p><b><i>Hear the Wind Sing</i> is Murakami's first novel available for the first time in English outside Japan. </b><br><br> In <i>Hear the Wind Sing</i> the narrator is home from college on his summer break. He spends his time drinking beer and smoking in J’s Bar with the Rat listening to the radio thinking about writing and the women he has slept with and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. <br><br>The story of the narrator the Rat and J continues in <i>Pinball 1973</i>.</p>