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

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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, First Person Singular and The City and Its Uncertain Walls 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.

Theodore (Ted) Goossen has translated the work
of many Japanese writers, most notably Naoya
Shiga, Haruki Murakami, and Hiromi Kawakami.
He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese
Short Stories (1997) and the co-editor and founder, with Motoyuki Shibata, of the annual
literary journal Monkey Business (now Monkey:
new writing from Japan), which, since 2011, has
introduced a new generation of Japanese writers to English-speaking readers. Essays and stories by, as well as interviews with, Murakami are a staple of every issue.