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Characters & Synopsis
Main Characters The Nameless Protagonist, usually referred to as Boku (僕, a kanji meaning “I”) is an English-to-Japanese translator, running a small firm with his partner. He’s troubled by memories of his dead girlfriend, Naoko, and an obsession with a mysterious pinball machine
The Rat (鼠) is Boku’s longtime friend. Living in a town by the sea, he’s plagued by depression and what might be construed as alcoholism. He lives off an allowance provided by his parents and frequents J’s Bar.
J (ジェイ) is a Chinese bartender, the owner and operator of J’s Bar. Boku and the Rat are very fond of him and his establishment. In the course of the story, he comes to develop a strong friendship with the Rat. He hesitates to reveal information about himself, but gradually opens up to the Rat.
The Twins (双子) function, essentially, as one character in Pinball, 1973. To Boku, they seem completely identical. Everything about them, including their names, is a complete mystery. They live in his apartment, and he plays backgammon with them into the wee hours of the night.
Side Characters Boku’s partner (共同経営者) handles most of the business end of he and Boku’s translation business. His specialty is French. He’s a married father with a run-down Volkswagen.
The office girl (女の子) was hired for her amazing legs and her skills as a drink-mixer and cockroach trap-maker. [After the events of this novel, Boku goes on to marry her.]
The girl (女) is the Rat’s girlfriend. She works for an architectural firm, and is very concerned with how others view her.
Naoko (直子) was Boku’s girlfriend when he attended college.
The Spanish Lecturer (スペイン語の講師) is a Spanish language professor at a university, but devotes every spare moment to his pinball obsession. He keeps files detailing everything having to do with pinball.
Detailed Synopsis (spoiler warning!)* Boku, whose job is translating mind-numbingly dull documents from English into Japanese, spends his nights drinking and sleeping with random women. One morning, he awakens with a head-splitting hangover to discover identical twins in his bed. They make him breakfast, and refuse to reveal their names.
The Rat lives in a town by the sea. He occupies his time by drinking beer at J’s Bar and in his apartment. He has aspirations to become a writer, and in the classified ads of a newspaper, discovers someone selling a typewriter. He contacts the woman who posted the ad, and they eventually start dating.
Boku heads to a very small suburb in the hills to search for the dogs his deceased girlfriend Naoko described to him once in college. He expects them to be pacing the platform at the train station, but is disappointed when they don’t show. Eventually he sees one dog hanging out with some fishermen. He plays with it, then returns home to the Twins.
Meanwhile, the Rat becomes closer to his new girlfriend. They meet once a week, and he pitches around his apartment and drinks to kill time between their weekly meetings. She loves him, but he’s scared of commitment and what would happen to his freedom if they became serious.
Flashing back to his own days in the town by the sea, Boku recalls the Rat being a skilled pinball player. The Rat got an incredibly high score playing the Spaceship machine at J’s Bar. One day, a technician comes to inspect the machine, and Boku and the Rat are amazed by his skills. The Rat decides he wants to become a professional pinball player, but after this flashback, we hear no more about the Rat and pinball. Instead, Boku becomes obsessed with pinball in college, finding another Spaceship machine in Tokyo. He plays every day for over a month, spending all the money he earns at his part-time job. Eventually, he gets a score of 165,000 and is immensely satisfied. He returns later to find that the game center, to his tremendous dismay, has been replaced by a donut shop.
Back to the present. The Rat decides to break up with his girlfriend. To sever his relationship, all he has to do is not call her at the appointed time. So he doesn’t. He never speaks to her again, but continues to pine over her.
One day, a repairman comes to replace the telephone switchboard in Boku’s apartment. He’s amazed to meet ‘a man who sleeps with twins.’ He stays for breakfast, but leaves the old switchboard behind. The twins are impressed with it. It’s around this time when Boku becomes obsessed with finding the Spaceship machine, which disappeared along with the game center of his college days. He visits many game centers, asking the owners about the machine. He has no luck, until he eventually gets the phone number of a ‘pinball maniac,’ a professor who lectures about Spanish.
One day, the Rat walks into J’s Bar after closing time and talks to J. They listen to music, and the Rat learns that J is unable to drink even a single drop of alcohol. The Rat spends days drinking in his apartment, sometimes parking his car by the sea in a spot where he can stare at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. He develops insomnia, finding it increasingly difficult to sleep.
The Spanish Lecturer meets with Boku and tells him about the history of Gilbert and Sons, the company who manufactured Spaceship. He agrees to help Boku find the Spaceship machine, but tells him it was probably sold for scrap metal.
The Rat goes into J’s Bar again, only to find J despondent. We learn that J lives alone, his only company being his cat, who ‘talks to him.’ His cat returned home with a flattened paw, looking as if someone tortured it with a vice-clamp. The Rat and J lament about the cruelty of people.
The switchboard, Boku’s switchboard, ‘dies,’ and he and the Twins borrow Boku’s partner’s car to drive out to the reservoir to hold a mock funeral for it. In the pouring rain, Boku throws it into the water, where it sinks to the bottom.
After scouring the scrap yards, the Spanish Lecturer calls to tell Boku that the missing machine has been located, but he can’t tell him where it is, he has to show him. They take a taxi far into the countryside, where the Spanish Lecturer reveals that there is a certain collector with dozens and dozens of pinball machines. Leaving Boku in a dark field in sight of a decommissioned chicken slaughterhouse, they part paths. Boku enters the freezing slaughterhouse and finds nearly eighty pinball machines lined up. Among them, he discovers his beloved Spaceship. He finds the switch to turn the machines on, but doesn’t play it. He speaks to the machine as if it were Naoko, finally getting his chance to say good-bye.
The Rat, sitting in his car in the cemetery above his town, stares at a map, trying to find a random place to travel to in order to begin his new life. He thinks about how nice it would be to drive his car into the ocean, a place where he could sleep.**
Boku returns home and showers, taking a long time to recover his warmth after being in the freezing slaughterhouse. He goes to sleep, as always, snuggled between the twins. Eventually, he escorts them to the bus station, and they ‘return to where they came from.’
*the chronology in this summary is slightly distorted in order to both combine the alternating storylines, and to condense them into a shorter story.
**we can assume the Rat doesn’t die in this book, as he appears in later books in the 'series'.
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