Bokelskere.no

Hear the Wind Sing is the first novel by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It first appeared in 1979. I chose this book because I participate in a Reading Challange on Facebook.

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, eating, 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 American writer Derek Hartfield as a primary influence, citing his pulp science fiction works, and quoting him at several points.