Flipping Through Pages #24 - Pinball (A Book Review)

Hi my wonderful Three Flipper Spaceship.

“On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them."

The masterful sequel to Hear The Wind Sing, Pinball is a story of a search. But then isn't that what our life always is?

The search? For something, anything, that makes us try to make sense of this chaotic thing called a life? Is it a wish fulfilment fantasy of living in with twins? Or drowning yourself in beer and intriguing women?

With the narrator and the Rat parting ways last time, their stories diverge in interesting fashion.

Both have what seem like satisfying lives, but both mourning a loss they cannot understand. For the narrator, it’s a pinball machine while for the Rat, it's an understanding that he might be changing into someone he is not.

The narrator especially essays into the ridiculous and I feel this is more Murakami showing that nothing can make up for that hole you have in your heart, that all the ‘twins’ dream sequences could not bring one joy unless one finds their own thing. And finds closure with it - and leaves me broken in some way.

This seems to be the author’s first exploration into magical realism, as the setting grows more and more surreal and metaphorical even as the emotions remain firmly rooted to reality. Rat gets a bigger romantic exploration of his own, and is left fundamentally scarred and changed through it.

I found some interesting angles to looking at the relationship between the Rat and J the bartender, and I wonder if that will bear fruit in some future story.

And then I realize it's Murakami. And hope life finds a way – cause the author leaves it to life so often.

For the first story (Wind), please go here.

So I give it 9.5 out of 10

+Exploration of identity and purpose

+Rat gets a well defined story and nice fleshing out

+The magical realism element is raw and interesting

-Murakami could have used better motifs for the exploration element