Pinball, 1973

A nostalgic, jazz-soaked love-letter to a youth spent in pursuit of simple pleasures, from the Japan's most celebrated contemporary storyteller, Haruki Murakami

Haunted by memories of a doomed love affair, and living in something of a strange hiatus in Tokyo, Pinball, 1973's narrator finds himself dreaming of the days he used to wile away playing pinball in J's Bar. Until one day he embarks on a quest: to find the exact model of pinball machine he played years earlier - the infamous three-flipper Spaceship.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

About the author

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Product details

• Authors: Haruki Murakami
• Publisher: Vintage UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Release: 02.07.2026
• EAN: 9781529981032
• ISBN: 978-1-5299-8103-2
• No. of pages: 176
• Series: Brief Encounters
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Friendship, FICTION / Cultural Heritage, Tokyo, FICTION / Magical Realism, Fiction in translation, Magical Realism, FICTION / World Literature / Japan, Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Narrative theme: love / relationships