Hear the Wind Sing

1979 novel by Haruki Murakami

Hear the Wind Sing (風の歌を聴け) is the first novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It first appeared in the June 1979 issue of Gunzo, and in book form the next month. The novel was adapted by Japanese director Kazuki Ōmori in a 1981 film distributed by Art Theatre Guild. An English translation by Alfred Birnbaum appeared in 1987. It is the first book in the so called "Trilogy of the Rat" series of independent novels, followed by Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), before the later epilogue Dance Dance Dance (1988). All four books in the series have been translated into English, but Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (which are realist novels slightly differing from the author's later style) were never widely distributed in the English speaking world, having only been published in Japan by Kodansha under their Kodansha English Library branding (for English Foreign Language learners), and both only as A6 sized pocketbooks. This was due to Murakami viewing the two novels as "works from his immature period". An omnibus English edition of Murakami's first two novels (Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973), under the title Wind/Pinball, with translations by Prof. Ted Goossen of York University, was released in the United States in August, 2015.

The title "Hear the Wind Sing" came from the last sentence of Truman Capote's short story "Shut a Final Door" "Think of nothing things, think of wind." However, the title of the novel submitted to the Gunzo Literature Prize committee was "Happy Birthday and White Christmas". The old title appears at the top of the cover page of the published book in small fonts.

On Apr 1 1978, the author suddenly had the ideas of a story while he was watching an NPB baseball game of Yakult Swallows at Meiji Jingu Stadium. The inspiration struck when the first batter Dave Hilton hit a double in the 1st inning. Murakami was running a Jazz cafe at the time. He took 1 hour each night to write the novel and finished it in 4 months. It was his debut novel. The story takes place in 1970 over a period of nineteen days between August 8 and August 28, and is narrated by a 21 year old unnamed man. The story contains forty small chapters amounting to 130 pages. The story covers the craft of writing, the Japanese student movement, and, like later Murakami novels, relationships and loss. Like later novels, cooking, eating and drinking, and listening to western music are regularly described. The narrator's close friend 'the Rat', around whom the trilogy of the Rat evolves, is a student and bar patron who expresses a general alienation towards society. The narrator describes the (fictional) American writer Derek Hartfield as a primary influence, citing his pulp science fiction works, and quoting him at several points.

Feeling writing as a terribly painful task, the narrator re tells the story of his 1970 summer. He was a student at a university in Tokyo then, and returned to his seaside hometown in Kobe for summer vacation. That spring, a girl he dated at the university died by suicide. During the summer vacation, he frequented J's bar with his friend "the Rat" and spent much time drinking beer obsessively. One day, he came across a girl lying on the floor in the washroom of the bar and carried her home. The girl had no left little finger. Later, he ran into the girl by chance in the record store where she worked. After that, she started calling him and they hung out a few times. Meanwhile, Rat was clearly troubled about some woman but he did not disclose the details. One day, the girl without a little finger met the narrator at a restaurant near the harbor. They took a walk in the dusk along the warehouse street. She told him, "When I sit there alone, I can hear a lot of people coming to talk to me " That night, at her apartment, she revealed she just had an abortion. When he came back in the winter, the girl had left the record store and her apartment. The narrator is married now and living in Tokyo. Rat is still writing novels and sends his manuscripts to the narrator every Christmas.