I took a long look at my reflection in the window. My eyes were a bit hollow with fever. I could live with that. And my jaw was dark with five o’clock (five thirty, actually) shadow. I could live with that too. The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, the other responds. Nothing more. Neither waves. Neither looks back.

Another one of Murakami's earlier works, Pinball is just his second novel. Here, the narrator from Hear the Wind Sing describes his brief obsession with pinball. The book contains some of the elements that we eventually relate to as part of the Murakami aesthetic. The metaphor of the switch-board, the twins that mysteriously appeared, a girl who kills herself and some details about his friend Rat make up most of the novel.