Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami: Summary, Characters, Key Moments & Review

Pinball, 1973 is one of those Murakami books that speaks more quietly than his later novels. Yet, it already carries his unmistakable rhythm: loneliness without tragedy, the strange without mystical grandiosity, and an everyday life in which a sudden sense of emptiness begins to show through.

It’s a continuation of the early novella Hear the Wind Sing, and here the narrator is no longer simply reminiscing about summer and bar-room conversations. Instead, he’s trying to feel out what can fill a life when, on the surface, everything is in place—yet inside, it seems as though one essential piece is missing.

Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami, book cover.

Murakami sets the story in the everyday city life of the early 1970s: work, apartments, bars, music, and chance encounters. Yet behind that backdrop, something else gradually comes into focus—a strange pull toward things that can’t be explained rationally: toward a memory, toward a vanished sensation, toward a game that suddenly turns into a symbol.

Pinball, 1973, reads like a brief, precise conversation about growing up. About the moment when a person understands with real clarity that time is moving on, and the familiar supports may not be enough to hold them anymore.

Pinball, 1973 – Summary & Plot Overview

The events of Pinball, 1973 unfold some time after Hear the Wind Sing. The narrator is the same unnamed young man, now living in Tokyo, working, and trying to stay afloat within the familiar routines of adult life. From the outside, everything seems neatly arranged: there’s a job, there’s a daily rhythm, there are well-worn routes from place to place.

But inside, a strange sense of disconnection keeps growing— as if he’s only partially present in his own life, while the rest of him has gone missing somewhere and can’t be found. This becomes the book’s central pulse. Murakami isn’t showing a dramatic catastrophe; he’s capturing a subtle, almost ordinary feeling of emptiness that slowly pushes the hero to look for some kind of foothold.

The protagonist doesn’t live alone. Two twin girls appear in his apartment—unnamed, and more like strange companions or symbols than “ordinary” characters in a realistic novel. They behave calmly and naturally, as if their presence needs no explanation.

That’s Murakami’s distinctive move: the unusual slips into everyday life without declaring war on common sense. The twins make the hero’s daily routine softer and stranger at the same time. They cook, they talk, they come and go as if they belong not only to the room, but to some inner space within him as well. Their presence doesn’t solve his problems, but it creates a particular hush around him—one in which it becomes easier to hear his own thoughts.

In parallel, we follow Rat—the narrator’s friend, already familiar from the previous story. Rat lives separately, but he remains an important figure. His fate holds another dimension of the same theme: trying to understand what life is worth when familiar desires no longer work, or turn out to be false.

In Pinball, 1973, he goes through a period of inner confusion and alienation, but he expresses it in his own way—through actions and abrupt decisions, through a desire to break away from what’s familiar, change his surroundings, cut ties. There is more restlessness in him than in the narrator, and that’s why their dialogue—even when it isn’t spoken directly—creates the book’s tension. One is trying to keep himself together; the other seems unable to see any point in holding on to something that feels empty.

The plot unfolds as a chain of episodes where external action often gives way to an inner drift. The protagonist doesn’t rush into an adventure, doesn’t make grand plans, and doesn’t uncover any dramatic secrets. Instead, he observes himself, the people around him, and the way his days are put together.

Yet little by little, an image appears in his life that begins to draw all his attention: a pinball machine. It isn’t just an object from the past. For him, it becomes something like a beacon—a symbol of a time when he still felt whole, or at least more alive. What matters is that this isn’t a lofty metaphor or a romantic ideal. Pinball is simple, even a little ridiculous, and that’s precisely why it feels honest. He isn’t clinging to some abstract “dream,” but to a concrete object that holds a lost sensation inside it.

Once, he played one particular machine—so familiar he remembers it down to the smallest detail—and now he wants to find it again. The idea seems irrational, but Murakami treats it with respect. Sometimes what a person needs isn’t advice, or a new goal, or the “right” motivation, but a chance to restore a connection to the past through something tangible.

The narrator begins his search. He learns that machines like this disappear: they’re replaced by newer models, and the old ones are hauled away, dismantled, sold off. The search turns into a strange journey through the city and its outskirts—through game halls and warehouses, through places where objects outlive human feelings. And the farther he goes, the clearer it becomes: this isn’t only about a mechanism of steel balls and blinking lights, but about an attempt to prove to himself that the past hasn’t dissolved completely.

Along the way, the protagonist meets people who help him—or simply happen to be nearby—but the main focus still remains on his inner state. He lives suspended between “I have to” and “I don’t know.” His job doesn’t bring real satisfaction, but it gives shape to his days. Conversations don’t offer a deep sense of closeness, yet they protect him from absolute emptiness.

Even the twins, who feel like a warm presence, don’t become salvation. They are more like a reminder that there is a life that can be calm, unexplained, and never fully understood. Against this background, the search for the pinball machine begins to look almost like an act of faith: if he finds it, maybe he’ll find the part of himself that went missing, too.

Rat’s storyline moves differently. It’s as if he’s trying to break out of his own inner cage—out of his surroundings, his habits, his expectations. What he feels is tinted with a sharper sense of meaninglessness. He watches himself and realizes that even comfort and outward “normality” can become a trap.

There’s no direct moral in the book, but there is a clear feeling: the characters are standing on the edge of an age when the old lightness has already slipped away, and a new support has not yet taken shape. That’s what makes the narration so recognizable. It isn’t about heroic feats, but about what so many people go through quietly and alone.

The story’s climax comes when the protagonist finally finds the machine he’s been looking for. The scene is written without fireworks: there’s no sense of the world changing in an instant, no loud triumph. On the contrary, Murakami shows how the fulfillment of a small, private wish can be both joyful and sad at once.

He gets to play again, to hear the familiar sounds, to watch the ball move— and for a moment, to feel that the thread of time hasn’t snapped. But along with that comes an understanding: even a recovered object can’t bring the past back in full. It can only help you see what’s missing and why you cling so tightly to certain symbols.

That’s exactly what makes Pinball, 1973 distinctive as a story. You can summarize it quite simply: the narrator lives and works, the twins appear in his apartment, his friend Rat goes through an inner crisis, and the narrator searches for an old pinball machine and finally finds it. But the meaning of the book isn’t in the facts—it’s in the mood, and in the way it traces a movement from emptiness toward an attempt to fill that emptiness with something honest, however small.

Murakami bets on half-tones. He doesn’t explain everything to the end, and he doesn’t turn the oddness into a puzzle that must be solved. Instead, he leaves room for feeling. The reader watches ordinary days suddenly become fragile, sees a person start looking for himself not through sweeping change, but through small details, and senses how the past can support you and hurt you at the same time.

Pinball, 1973 isn’t a story about a man finding a machine—it’s about how he tries to regain a sense of connection to life. In that sense, the plot works like a gentle parable about growing up: when you already understand that the world isn’t obligated to give you answers, yet you keep asking questions anyway—sometimes through music, sometimes through late-night conversations, and sometimes through a strange, almost childish game that suddenly becomes the most serious symbol of your time.

Major characters

The Narrator

The main character of Pinball, 1973 remains unnamed, and that isn’t an accident—it’s part of Murakami’s way of looking at things. He’s like someone without a fixed role, who hasn’t yet decided who he’ll become next, and therefore isn’t even anchored by a name. Outwardly, his life seems fairly stable: he lives in Tokyo, has a job, knows how to keep his distance, and doesn’t dramatize.

But inside, he is constantly accompanied by a sense of lack—as if an important part of life left too early, leaving behind a space. He doesn’t try to explain his feelings out loud, and he doesn’t hunt for the “right” words. Instead, he listens closely to what is happening inside him. His search for the pinball machine isn’t a whim or a quirky obsession; it’s a way to restore coherence—to prove that the past hasn’t dissolved, that he is still capable of truly wanting something, and of truly remembering.

This kind of hero is typical of early Murakami: calm, observant, slightly detached—and precisely for that reason, deeply recognizable.

Rat

Rat is the narrator’s friend and one of the book’s central voices. Unlike the protagonist—who mostly “holds on” and tries to live by inertia—Rat experiences the inner fracture more sharply and painfully. There is more raw honesty in him: he doesn’t want to pretend that everything is fine, and he can’t soothe himself with convenient explanations.

He senses that comfort, routine, even friendship itself can become a cage if meaning has already drained away inside. Rat is constantly balancing between the urge to disappear and the urge to be heard, and that tension is what makes him feel so alive. He doesn’t turn into a “novel philosopher.” He’s simply a person trying to shrug off other people’s expectations and figure out where his own life actually is.

Through Rat, Murakami shows a different kind of growing up: not calm and observant, but sharp—sometimes even destructive—yet honest.

The Twins

The two twin girls who appear in the narrator’s life are the novella’s most enigmatic figures. They aren’t given names, they have no detailed backstory, and they never try to explain where they came from or where they disappear to. Yet their role matters: they create a space of calm everyday life around the protagonist, where strangeness doesn’t frighten and doesn’t need to be justified.

The twins live alongside him lightly—cooking, talking, filling the apartment with a presence that doesn’t press on him and doesn’t demand commitment. In that sense, they become something more than simple characters. They feel like quiet support, like a gentle order that arises on its own when a person especially needs something to lean on.

At the same time, there’s a sense of unreality in them, almost a symbolic quality. It’s as if they appear on the border between life and the narrator’s inner world, helping him get through a period when he himself doesn’t fully understand what, exactly, he’s searching for.

The Pinball Machine

Although it isn’t a person, the pinball machine in Pinball, 1973 effectively becomes a character—the story and emotional weight it carries are that strong. For the narrator, it isn’t just an old arcade game, but a fixed point tied to a feeling of wholeness he once had. He remembers a specific machine—its sound, its mechanics, even the mood that would settle over him while he played.

By searching for it, he seems to be feeling for a thread that connects who he is now with who he used to be. The machine becomes a symbol of memory, of a strange loyalty to himself, and of a desire to recover not an event, but a state of being. What matters is that Murakami chooses pinball for this—something simple, urban, almost accidental. Because of that, the symbol feels honest: the narrator isn’t clinging to some lofty dream, but to a small detail that unexpectedly turns out to be the most precise one.

Key Moments & Memorable Scenes

In Pinball, 1973, the strongest moments rarely look like “events” in the usual sense. Murakami builds the novella out of scenes that stay with you not because of action, but because of the way the protagonist’s inner state shows through them.

One such thread is the very appearance of the twins in the narrator’s apartment. Their presence feels almost like a natural part of the household: no big introduction, no explanations, no attempt to turn it into romantic intrigue. It’s precisely this quiet strangeness that makes the episodes with them so memorable. The twins create a sense of soft, domestic stillness, yet at the same time, they remind you that the narrator isn’t living in a stable reality, but in a space where anything can suddenly disappear without leaving a trace.

Another important layer of scenes is connected to Rat. His inner crisis shows itself in brief conversations and half-hints, and that’s why it can hit harder than any direct confession. What matters isn’t that he “talks about the meaning of life,” but how his distance from the world is felt—as if he can no longer belong to the familiar circle, yet doesn’t know where to go instead.

These episodes become an emotional counterpoint to the narrator’s calmness. Against the story’s even tone, Rat comes through like a nervous impulse, showing that alienation can be not only quiet but painfully sharp.

The most vivid and symbolically charged thread is the search for the pinball machine. What stays with you isn’t only the fact that the narrator is looking for a specific machine, but the tone of the search itself—as if he’s following an object that holds his former sensitivity inside it.

Murakami shows the city through the “places where things live”: arcades, warehouses, spaces where the past is stored not in people’s memory, but in mechanisms and objects that have outlasted their era. In these scenes, you feel Murakami’s familiar mix of precision and gentle absurdity: the narrator acts rationally, yet the motive behind his search is almost irrational.

The climactic scene is the moment when the machine is finally found, and the narrator plays again. It’s written with great restraint, without any flashy “revelation,” and that’s what makes it feel more honest. What returns through the game isn’t a happy past, but its echo: familiar sounds, the ball’s movement, the accustomed mechanics.

And with that comes a double feeling—joy at the contact, and sadness at the realization that time has still passed. The scene lingers as a precise portrait of growing up: you can recover an object, but you can’t recover your former self. And yet even that brief touch is sometimes enough to feel that the connection to life hasn’t been cut.

Why You Should Read “Pinball, 1973”?

Pinball, 1973 is worth reading if you’re drawn to fiction that works not through dramatic twists, but through mood and precise observation. It’s a short novella in which Murakami is already recognizable, yet he hasn’t fully become the “major novelist” known for large-scale plot structures.

Everything here is intimate: a handful of characters, ordinary streets, conversations, music, the feeling of a city you can live in for years and still feel slightly out of place. That very closeness is what makes the text distinctive. It reads like a quiet record of a period in life when, outwardly, everything is fine—yet inside, a question appears that you can’t keep postponing.

The book grips you because it speaks about growing up without moralizing. The protagonist doesn’t go on a heroic journey, and he doesn’t receive ready-made answers. He simply begins to feel a void and tries to fill it with what seems real—memory, habit, a strange game that unexpectedly becomes important.

It’s easy to recognize yourself in that. Sometimes what a person needs isn’t a new “goal,” but proof that they’re still capable of wanting and remembering—that their feelings aren’t an act, and not just background noise. The pinball machine in the novella is exactly that kind of anchor: a simple object that suddenly manages to hold the inner thread in place.

Another reason to read it is Murakami’s distinctive “strangeness without mysticism.” The twins who appear in the narrator’s life don’t turn the story into fantasy, but they add a faint shift in reality. This strangeness isn’t frightening and doesn’t demand a solution; it simply underlines that a person’s inner world can be non-linear and hard to explain.

Murakami knows how to portray loneliness in a way that doesn’t feel like a pose or a tragedy. It becomes part of city life—quiet, familiar, sometimes even cozy, yet still something that calls for an honest look.

Finally, Pinball, 1973 works beautifully as an entry point into early Murakami and as a bridge to his more mature books. You can already hear the themes that will later unfold on a larger scale: loss, memory, the blurred line between the real and the inner world, music as a way of holding yourself together.

At the same time, the novella reads easily and leaves an aftertaste that’s hard to reduce to a single formula—not a “conclusion,” but a feeling that you’ve listened a little more closely to your own life. Sometimes it’s precisely books like this that turn out to be the most accurate, because they speak about what matters in a quiet voice.