Pinball, 1973 Keeps the Conversation Going
Reading Note: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami
This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
Read after A Wild Sheep Chase, Pinball, 1973 offers the quieter pleasure of returning to an earlier Murakami. Its conversations sustain that pleasure through replies, pauses and small acts of attention.
The twins living with the unnamed narrator have made toast and coffee before the narrator gets very far with the question of their names. One tells him the names are nothing special; the other extends the evasion. When he presses for examples of what he might call them, the suggestions arrive in pairs:
“Left and Right,” said one. “Vertical and Horizontal,” said the other. “Up and Down.” “Front and Back.”
His own contribution, “Entrance and Exit,” gets a laugh, and he compares their alternating speech to “an FM stereo check,” which makes his hangover worse. Across the breakfast table, one voice starts something, another carries it a little further, and he tries to find his turn. We get to know the timing of their company while the names that might distinguish them remain withheld.
Later in the prologue, he visits a station connected with the memories of Naoko, the woman he loved who is now dead. Returning to the apartment, he answers the twins’ questions about where he has been, then smokes a cigarette while they keep quiet. Only after that pause does one ask whether he is sad; when he nods, the other suggests sleep, and he sleeps.
The doubled speech has acquired a different pace. At breakfast it crowds his aching head; now the twins leave enough silence for something to become perceptible. Neither demands a complete account of Naoko before responding to his exhaustion. Their answer is an action he can take at that moment, and the narrative moves from his solitary insistence that he has closed nothing to the simple fact of sleeping beside someone.
The twins’ games and gifts
The twins’ readiness to continue an exchange gives a telephone repairman’s explanation an unexpected afterlife. He has come to replace a switch-panel, the device joining telephone circuits. The narrator’s technical description leaves the twins baffled, so the repairman offers a mother dog and puppies: replace the mother before she dies, and the puppies can survive. The twins greet this account enthusiastically. After he leaves the old panel behind, they spend the day playing mother dog and puppy with it.
Several chapters later, the joke generates a request: could the narrator borrow a car? The twins want to give the switch-panel its last rites at a reservoir. A comparison used to explain a repair has become a game, and the game has acquired obligations that take all three of them out on a rainy Sunday.
Borrowing his business partner’s Volkswagen commits him to the request, while the twins bring coffee and cookies, dividing the three kinds so everyone gets a fair share. Even brushing the crumbs from their laps becomes something they do together. When they ask him to supply a prayer he has failed to prepare, his improvised use of Kant is accepted with the same readiness that greeted the repairman’s explanation; he throws the panel into the water, and the three stand looking across the reservoir.
The narrator, who initially returned to his newspaper on hearing the proposal, has now borrowed a car and supplied the prayer. There is tenderness in their willingness to follow a ridiculous premise far enough to give it an ending.
Such willingness is less secure when the twins offer a gift of their own. One evening the narrator comes home feverish, after looking at his reflection and wondering whether he will ever have anything to give anyone. They cook dinner, offer beer and music, then play Rubber Soul, bought with money they have saved. He blurts out that he does not remember buying it, shakes his head at their explanation, and the conversation falters.
“Silence” occupies a turn on the page, followed by the record being taken off, carefully brushed and put away while nobody speaks. His response has turned their gift into something they feel obliged to withdraw.
He explains that he is tired and irritable, then asks, “Let’s give it another listen.” The twins’ two voices elaborate the same retreat, each reassuring him that it is his house and he need not accommodate their taste. He repeats the invitation. They play both sides over coffee, and he loosens up a little. The shared music now depends on his making room for their choice, so the second playing contains an adjustment that the first lacked. Even the favorable outcome is measured: he still has a fever, and their next suggestion is that he get some sleep.
Reunion with the Spaceship machine
The search for his former pinball machine, a three-flipper Spaceship, takes the narrator to a warehouse once used for refrigerated chicken storage. Among the rows of old machines, his whistling briefly makes him feel better, though its echoes supply little company. When he reaches the machine he has been looking for, the encounter starts with a peculiar qualification: “So how’s tricks, I said. Or maybe I didn’t say it.”
Murakami leaves the status of that speech uncertain and proceeds with the conversation. The narrator touches the glass; the machine, addressed as female, appears to recognize him. They discuss sleepless nights, the cold, his translation work and the twins. They pause as if they were sitting in a coffee shop. The exchange keeps finding ordinary things for its impossible participants to ask about.
She asks for conversation: “Talk to me.” He tells her that the old game center has become a doughnut shop with terrible coffee. The complaint is so everyday that we briefly have the ease of two acquaintances catching up. He has crossed a strange warehouse to find her, and now he can pass on the sort of news someone might mention across a café table.
He declines to play a game. They remember the same best score, which he wants to preserve. Their reunion continues through questions and pauses, with a final request that he look after himself. That succession of small turns gives the machine an intimate presence even as the narrator’s initial uncertainty remains. We can experience the conversation without settling whether a separate voice has sounded in the warehouse.
Back at the apartment, his body still needs attention: he takes a long hot bath, the twins bring out a gas heater, and he heats canned onion soup. They check whether he is still cold, he finishes their crossword, and they fall asleep together. The “gentle closure” credited to the twins takes a practical form here, in the attention given to someone who has come home shaking.
We should keep the demands of such exchanges in view. When the narrator takes his young colleague to dinner, her fear of a life spent “assembling lousy roach traps and darning sweaters” receives compliments about her attractiveness and assurances that everything will work out. She falls silent. At the station she says that talking has taken a load off her, then asks once more whether he is really not lonely. Her train comes while he is still searching for a reply. The conversation has helped her, although its most difficult questions remain unanswered.
The Rat, the narrator’s friend back in their hometown, makes a keen objection when he announces his departure to J, the barkeeper who knows him well. J thinks he understands why the Rat must go and declines to ask. The Rat objects to understanding one another without questions or speaking one’s mind: he has remained in that condition too long. Against the relief of being accompanied, Murakami places the danger of an intimacy that has stopped asking anything.
The narrator’s comfort has limits of perspective, too. The twins initiate games, choose a record and decide when to leave, but much of what we know of them comes through their usefulness to him. Their own past stays inaccessible. The female machine offers another responsive presence organized around his memory. These encounters make companionship convincing while giving us little warrant to mistake his account for a fully reciprocal knowledge of the women.
At the twins’ departure, the alternating replies continue. He says he will be lonely without them; each answers that she will be lonely too. They play a few last rounds of password while waiting for the bus.
Afterward he returns to the apartment, listens to the Rubber Soul they have left, and makes coffee himself. The record that once required a second invitation can now be played alone.
We are left with company that has entered the texture of his day and with the absence of the people who made it possible.
Sources
Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973, translated by Alfred Birnbaum. References are to the prologue and chapters 3, 7, 11, 12, 22, 24 and 25. Birnbaum’s translation was published by Kodansha in 1985.
Ligaya Mishan, “Background Check,” The New Yorker, September 21, 2009. Mishan attributes “gentle closure” to the twins’ role in the narrator’s life.
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