The Poetics of the Vanishing Moment: Transience and Ephemerality in Haruki Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing

Abstract

Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) introduces themes of transience and ephemerality that would later define his literary career. This article examines Murakami’s poetics of the vanishing moment, focusing on the fragile relationships, fading summers, and elusive memories that shape the novel’s deceptively simple narrative. Through the narrator’s detached voice and his encounters with the Rat and the girl missing a finger, Murakami highlights the impermanence of youth and human connection. The novel’s fragmented form, shifting between anecdotes, reflections, and unrealized desires echoes the fleeting nature of experience itself. Music, especially the jazz records woven throughout, functions as a temporary site of shared emotion, underscoring the beauty of moments that vanish as quickly as they appear. By rendering these passing instants in spare prose, Murakami imbues them with quiet melancholy, foreshadowing his later explorations of memory, loss, and nostalgia.