Pinball - Haruki Murakami

Today I finished the book Pinball by Haruki Murakami. I believe this was the second novel Murakami had ever written. The book was subtle in content but it gave me a very interesting perspective on how the main character deals with the monotonous rhythms of everyday life: through pinball.

Jay Rubin wrote in his book “Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words,” that Murakami’s characters will often be swept away by a “parade of trivia” amidst their ordinary lives. In Pinball, the main character encounters a pinball machine named three flipper Spaceship. He becomes attracted to the machine for a while; he also becomes very skilled, scoring higher than six digits. However, the pinball machine disappears one day, and the main character embarks on a journey to find it.

I think this story shows that the monotony of everyday life (in the case of the main character, it is his translating job) can be broken through something as trivial as a pinball machine. While the main character is attracted to the game, he is not obsessed. He can detach himself from it. At the climax of the story when he finally finds one of the machines, he simply lets go. He does not even play for one last time. He wants to preserve the memory that he had with it.

Murakami wrote in Pinball “[e]ach day was a carbon copy of the last. You needed a bookmark to tell one from the other.” I often thought about doing something extraordinary to create a bookmark for each day. But it is hard to do something extraordinary sometimes. Some days, you can’t help but let yourself be swept away by the ordinariness of everything. It doesn’t bother me though. Perhaps I don’t need something big to differentiate one day to the other. Or at least, that is not the proper way to think about how to make the best out of everyday. Pinball seems to say that you just need something trivial in your life to add spice to it. But at the same time, you should not be too attached to it. Treat it with some detachment and you will truly reap the benefits of a fleeting amenity.