Hear the Wind Sing [In Japanese].

MURAKAMI, Haruki.

Item Number: 45024

Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979.

First Japanese edition of the author’s first book. Small octavo, original cloth. Signed by Haruki Murakami on the front free endpaper. Fine in a fine dust jacket, with the rare wrap-around band.

On Apr 1, 1978, the Haruki Murakami suddenly had the ideas of a story while he was watching a baseball game of Yakult Swallows at Meiji Jingu Stadium. The inspiration struck when the first batter Dave Hilton hit a double in the 1st inning. Murakami was running a Jazz cafe at the time. He took 1 hour each night to write the novel and finished it in 4 months. It was his debut novel. 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, cooking, eating and 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 novel was adapted by Japanese director Kazuki Ōmori in a 1981 film distributed by Art Theatre Guild. An English translation by Alfred Birnbaum appeared in 1987.