hear the wind sing
(風の歌を聴け Kaze no uta okike)

First published in Japan by Kodansha (1979)

Translated by Alfred Birnbaum

Published in English in 1987 by Kodansha English Library (Japan)

buy from amazon.com

synopsis

The first book in the "Trilogy of the Rat" series, it is followed by Pinball 1973 (1979) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)

The writer recalls the days of his early twenties. The biology student passed his summer vacation aimlessly back at his home town. There are episodes about his childhood and his three girls whose names and faces have long been forgotten. Amid the bar scenes of cigarettes, french fries and beers, there was still extra space for his favourite author and the chunks of his philosophies.

Hear the Wind Sing was never released in any English-speaking countries, but a translation was sold in Japan as a way to improve one's English reading skills, complete with a glossary in the back with the harder words defined in Japanese.

This book also quite easy to obtain though eBay or the Japanese Amazon site

reviews / articles

Wikipedia page on the novel

librarything.com page on the novel

The Portland Mercury review by John Motley

Cultural snow review by Tim Footman

Interesting review by Ted Mahsun

Ben Peek review on livejournal.com

Bookfox review by John Foxx

Brief description of the novel from archidose.org

lost in translation review by Patrick McCoy

Early Murakami - Ronin on Empty article on Hear and Pinball

Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture by Michael Seats - chapter on HTWS - except available from Google Book Search :

This book offers a new approach to dealing with Murakami's radical narrative project by demonstrating how his first and later trilogies utilize the structure of the simulacrum, a second-order representation, to develop a complex critique of contemporary Japanese culture. This critique is mirrored in the practices of current media-entertainment technologies which allow Murakami's works, and their critical/promotional meta-texts, to cohere under the rubric of the so-called 'Murakami Phenomenon.' Published 2006, Lexington Books, ISBN 0739107852

Memory, hybridity, and creative alliance in Haruki Murakami's fiction - an essay by Amy Ty Lai, which explores the use of animals in Haruki Murakami's fiction (inc HWTS)