In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels-Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973-that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age-the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat-are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami"s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase, of the trilogy of the Rat.