Pinball, 1973

The second book in Harkuki Murakami’s Rat trilogy, Pinball, 1973* again stars our unnamed narrator, The Rat, and J (who runs J’s Bar). Our narrator has a unique relationship with a three-flipper pinball machine, “Spaceship,” as well as with a pair of twin girls, also unnamed, but for a while 208 and 209.

This is another very short (179 pages of main text) book, so I finished it pretty quickly, too. Good thing, because that means I also don’t have to write a long post about it and can soon get to my piece on Mao II: A Novel*, which I’m love-love-LOVING! Every time I sit down to read, there’s something I want to write about. Luckily for you, as soon as I stand up I forget what it was, and I haven’t written any notes…. So that piece might be short, too. We’ll see…