Pinball (Haruki Murakami)

Reading Haruki Murakami's works is like seeing through the mist. At times you can't see anything at all, even though you have a hunch that something wonderful is out there. Other times the mist parts just enough to allow you a view of what's beyond--although you can never be really sure what it is, everything's so blur and all. Pinball--Murakami-sensei's second novel--is of the latter category.

The novel is about pinball. At least half of it is. The novel consists of two voices, first person's and third person's. Interestingly, the two stories run parallel to each other. It means that, despite taking place around the same time, these stories never come to a point where they intersect. (Flashback aside, that is.)

"I" spent his days by working for his translation company, fooling around with a pair of identical twins, and walking round the golf course. At one point he had an inexplicable urge to locate a particular Pinball machine, a three-flipper "Spaceship", with which he had had a brief period of "honeymoon". On the other hand a friend and fellow three-flipper Spaceship player, Nezumi (Rat in English) continued living uneventfully in his hometown, having an indefinable relationship with a woman, hanging out alone at J's Bar, and basically doing nothing.

You might be wondering, What the hell is it all about? What's the point in a story about people looking for a Pinball machine? I know better than to ask such question. I squint harder through the obscurity and vaguely see something within the seemingly trivial story. Suspended animation, that's what it's all about, even though--I hasten to add, again--I might be wrong.

I particularly love these lines from the book: "Pinball machines...won't lead you anywhere.... Replay, replay, replay.... So persistently you'd swear a game of pinball aspired to perpetuity. We ourselves will never know much of perpetuity. But we can get a faint inkling of what it's like. The object of pinball lies not in self-expression, but in self-revolt. Not in the expansion of the ego, but in its compression. Not in extractive analysis, but in inclusive subsumption."

You don't need a Pinball machine in order for that to happen, really. Sometimes you go on living without thinking, just going through the motions, that before you know it, you have lose yourself. That's what I call suspended animation. You're constantly doing something, but you're not really doing anything. (Still, I must confess, it's good to lose your self now and then. Playing video games--or pinball, for that matter--is a good way to achieve such sense of detachment.)

Sooner or later, some of us would have to decide whether to get out or to stick to it. The book ends with a breakthrough of some sort from both camps. "I" said goodbye to the three-flipper Spaceship and the twin girls, and Nezumi willed himself to leave his hometown because he "gotta go". For the time being, though, I'm still living in limbo, in the world of pinball.

Note: Try listening to Radiohead's "How to Disappear Completely" while reading Pinball. They make perfect match, I reckon.