The Rat trilogy starts with Hear The Wind Sing first published in 1979. The book (and Murakami's career) starts off with the observation, "There's no such thing as perfect writing..." Central to his understanding of good writing is the career of an obscure writer by the name of Derek Heartfield. The narrator informs us that, "His style is difficult, the stories impossible, and the themes infantile." Heartfield's weakness was, we are informed, that he "never got a clear picture of who he was fighting..." There is little evidence of fighting in this early stage of the series. We are introduced to the Rat, who is a regular at J's bar, drinking beer and eating peanuts. Essentially he is bored and rails against the rich... of whom he is one. Together with the narrator the Rat is a drifter unable to feel any substance in his life.
Despite not being a reader the Rat writes a novel of which the narrator says it has two points to recommend it, there is no sex scene and no-one dies. Following the sinking of their boat, a man and woman find themselves afloat in the ocean. The woman decides to swim and find an island... The Rat prefers to float and drink beer. The sense of ennui in the novel fills the lives of Murakami's characters. When the narrator puts a drunk girl from the bar to bed and stays overnight there is no sex scene but she doesn't believe him. It turns out eventually that she has had an abortion and her life is on hold. She is not the only one to struggle with life. The narrator describes the three girls he has slept with in his life, the last of which, a French major, hanged herself.
Seemingly untouched by these experiences, the novel is an amoral expose of the lives of young people who care little about what the reader make think about them. Murakami touches on the years of student protest in Tokyo during which the narrator himself was a student. His front teeth were bashed in by a riot policeman but rather than being an innocent victim he describes how he himself was involved in animal testing at the university and had killed "thirty-sex cats and kittens in two months." Numbers take on an added significance in the life of the narrator. Given the insubstantial nature of his life, the narrator says "putting a numerical value on everything would enable me to transmit something to others." He realises, however, that no-one else will be interested in how many cigarettes he smokes or the size of his penis. This strategy turns out to be a dead-end...The only things that matter to him are music and food.
When we get back to Derek Heartfield, his life seems to be a validation of the ennui in which the narrator and the Rat are trapped. The narrator crows about his "cynicism and derision and wit and paradox." Significantly he has written a book of short stories called, "The Wells of Mars." This is probably the start of Murakami's career as a writer. No-one has any idea of why these wells were dug. They avoided water and after tens of thousands of years "not one block was out of place after tens of thousands of years." As a result of following the well passages that were dug to "curve along the warp of time" a young space vagabond reaches the surface of the planet... This journey has apparently taken him a "good fifteen billion years." Conversing with the winds he asks if they have learnt anything... The response is a laugh after which the young space vagabond shoots himself. His death is no different to the indifference with which the Rat and the narrator arm themselves except in relation to music and food and the loyalty the Rat feels towards the Chinese barkeeper, J. From this point on, however, Murakami's characters will be drawn to wells into which they climb in order to discover something deep inside themselves.
The novel does conclude with a breezy DJ on the radio NEB pop request line who reads out a letter from a listener and momentarily drops his patter to tell his audience, "I Love You All" but the novel ends with the narrator moving back to Tokyo. The narrator subsequently takes a trip to America to visit the grave of Derek Heartfield and he leaves the reader with a pearl of wisdom courtesy of Heartfield, "Compared to the complexity of the universe, this world of ours is like the brain of a worm." That's much more like the real ending to this novel!
The second novel in the trilogy Pinball, 1973, starts with the narrator's confession that his love of people telling him stories about faraway places was "almost pathological." More significantly is his observation that, "It was as if they were tossing rocks down a dry well: they'd spill all kinds of different stories my way, and when they'd finished, they'd go home pretty much satisfied." Murakami's characters from the 'young space vagabond' onwards are all drawn to a well of some description. The impulse to pull the trigger being restricted, however, to Murakami's early fiction. In this novel there is also a return to reminiscences about the days of student unrest... In keeping with the story about the wells of Mars two of the people who share stories with him are from Saturn and Mars. One of them, the guy from Saturn, explains how heavy the gravity is and then how he is going to start a great revolution. In the meantime the narrator is given the best seat in order to listen to Haydn's Sonata in G Minor.
The narrator explains that at times he feels like he has been put together from two different puzzles... He tries to drink the problem away but often wakes up feeling worse. Then he wakes up one morning to find himself sleeping between two twins. The duality he experiences in his own consciousness is in this way given external representation which leads to a discussion about what names he should give them. He observes, "Where there's an entrance, there's got to be an exit." But of course there are exceptions like mouse traps. This leads to a story about a well... The well was in a small town where Naoko grew up... It was a region witrh freezing cold rain and a "table of sweet groundwater." Near the station lived a well digger who was an "ill-natured man of fifty or so, but when it came to digging wells he was a bona fide genius." When Naoko was seventeen the well-digger was killed by a train. After that sweet water wells were hard to come by in the town. The narrator notes, however, "I like wells, though. Every time I see a well, I can't resist tossing a rock in. There's nothing as soothing as the sound of a pebble hitting the water in a deep well." The narrator informs the reader that this story is also the story of the Rat and that "September, 1973, that's where the novel begins. That's the entrance." With a sense of foreboding he continues "We'll just hope there's an exit."
For the Rat it appears there is no exit, he left home when he went to university and then dropped out of university.. Murakami explains that the Rat had "... any number of reasons for dropping out. The wiring to those reasons had gotten impossibly tangled up, and when things heated up past a critical point, the fuse blew with a bang." The idea of wiring and fuses leads to the episode where a repairman comes to the narrator's apartment to change the switch panel. The repairman is of course impressed when he finds the twins in the narrator's bed and he asks the narrator later "... that must take some doing, eh?" The Rat of course cannot be so easily fixed... And as the repairman explains to the twins "if the mother dog dies, then the puppies die too." In the midst of the gathering gloom, the Rat is drawn to a beacon on the beach where he often went in childhood at dusk. Whilst he knows the path out there by heart he is always filled with loneliness on the way home. He knew a woman who lived near there but he lets this relationship go. Ultimately he feels that "whatever lay waiting 'out there' was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly make a dent in." Unlike the narrator, the Rat is not a 'survivor'.
In Hear the Wind Sing, the first book of the trilogy, the narrator confesses to having killed cats and kittens at the university. In Pinball, 1973 the narrator and the Rat have a discussion about a cat that had its paw crushed. Significantly the Rat seems unaware about the narrator's experiences at the university because he wants to know, '"Who'd want to do that to a cat's paw?" Significantly the narrator replies, "You said it. Not a reason in the world to crush a cat's paw... It's just senseless and cruel. But y'know, the world's full of that kind of mindless ill will." He seems to have forgotten his own 'mindless ill will'. He appears to have had a change of heart and at the twin's insistence, even the switch panel is given the last rites... The narrator hastily drawing on his knowledge of Kant to provide a prayer. He notes that "The obligation of philosophy is to eradicate illusions born of misunderstanding..." There is a sinister note, however, when he tells the office girl that he is late because he was "playing with a cat."
The title of the love comes from thre narrator's love of pinball and, in particular, a rare model called the 'Spaceship'. To introduce this part of the story the narrator tells us that, "On any given day, something claims our attention..." This leads to the observation that, "We're always digging wells in our heads. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth." In a sense we are as alien to ouselves and to each other as if we came from Saturn or Venus and the wells we were digging were on Mars... The twins arrive and inevitably they will leave. There is no explanation and those that look for an explanation, like the Rat, are destined to fail. The narrator is a 'survivor' because is content to observe things without making any real attempt to form any deep attachments... And even when he comes face to face with the piball machine he misses so much, he is confronted by the "familiar board. Deep blue space, a spilled-ink ultramarine. And in it, tiny white stars. Saturn, Venus, Mars... while in front there floated a pure-white spaceship." Significantly inside the spaceship a "family gathering appeared to be in progress." But the narrator walks away without even playing a game, his clothes smelling of dead chickens... The sense of alienation is overpowering.
At the end of the novel, the Rat leaves town. Sitting alone in his room, the Rat observed "his own body lose its physical presence, grow heavier then become numb."Having been drawn to the beacon since childhood he feels that there is "Nothing to explain to anyone anymore... No doubt the bottom of the sea is warmer, more peaceful and puiet than any town..." So while the narrator experiences his own sense of weightlessness in outer space, the Rat is being drawn to the bottom of the ocean.
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