Hear the Wind Sing

Haruki Murakami's 1979 debut novel — written in a jazz bar after hours — which introduced the Murakami style: an unnamed narrator, jazz and American pop culture references, a dreamy melancholy, and the sense of something unnamed just below the surface of ordinary life.

Establishes Murakami's fundamental style in its simplest form — the debut that showed the pattern all subsequent novels would elaborate — making it the point of origin for understanding how his aesthetic developed.