Light and shadow of the 'Spaceship'.　-Murakami Asahido- Hi-ho

        I had previously owned one pinball machine, privately, almost a decade ago. After I wrote the novel Pinball in 1973, I was able to acquire it due to some minor circumstances. The details of the circumstances are rather lengthy, so I won't go into them, but I got it anyway. It was free. I sent a bottle of the wild turkey to the person who stood between me and it, and that was the end of it.
The machine was a very old type called a 'spaceship'. Because it was old, it didn't use computers or transistors, the numbers were not digital, but a primitive drum that rotated, the flippers were only two, the number of points was at most five digits, and anyway it was a very ordinary orthodox machine. I think it was probably made between the late 1950s and early 1960s. The boundary between "vintage" and "ponkotsu" is, as is the case with many of these types of products, infinitely unclear. If you like it, it's vintage, if you don't like it, it's a piece of junk. it's just a matter of how you feel about it.

But I liked this machine at first sight. The first reason is that the concept of the machine is not ostentatious. In any case, there are no extra devices, to the extent that it is not even attractive. If you light all the nine-letter lamps (S, P, A, C, E, S, H, I, P) in a vertical line, you get a bonus score, and if you hit the ball as hard as you can into the ball pile (I suppose it is correct to say that you smash the ball) another ball comes out and you can play two-ball. That's the only rule. It's very, very, very simple. You don't have to think about anything else extra.

Secondly, this was a really simple and physical machine in terms of structure. When you stood in front of it, you could see at a glance all that the machine meant. The lovely machine was made of glass, wood, springs, metal, rubber, and beanbags, with decent materials that we can grasp daily. Even someone like me, who was not familiar with mechanical structures, could roughly understand how it worked. In audio terms, it was similar to the old tube amplifiers of a century ago. It is simple, big, small, and inefficient in terms of performance. But at any rate, I can understand the principle. I personally like this kind of machine. I have a liking for them. To put it more exaggeratedly, it is emotionally moving. But there is something about it that is sad, like a dying dinosaur.

I was writing a novel and running a shop (a bar of sorts) at the time, and at first, I had this machine in my shop. But we don't let the customers touch them. I will never allow them to touch it. After work, I just play it myself with a drink. Nightcap pinball at 1 am. I switch off the lights and darken the shop. Outside the window, I can see the lights of the skyscrapers of Shinjuku. The place is quiet. An old Sarah Vaughan record is playing. I pour a beer into a glass, put an ashtray in my hand, and light a cigarette (ah, I used to smoke cigarettes back then, too. Fifty a day), I pressed the free-play button as much as I wanted and played to my heart's content alone, shuffling, rattling, paco, kankon kankon, beep, beep, beep, beep, until I was done. In the pale darkness, the blue lamps lit up one by one, S, P, A, C, E, in that order. I slapped the ball with the flippers with all my might and bounced it back. A ball bounces around in the kick-out triangle, making a realistic thumping sound and slowly coming down towards the flipper. The flipper receives it, traps it with all sorts of love secrets, transfers it, and plays it back again. It was a very intimate process. I think there was indeed a kind of small exchange of hearts there. Me, exhausted from my two professions, and the outdated 'spaceship'.

I play a few video games, but no matter how much I get into video games, I have never been able to feel this kind of intimacy. It is a very high level of neural wear. We are confronted with the screen through the impenetrable labyrinth of the computer black box. Nervous and strangely expressionless music keeps playing in the background. There is no solid, simple, physical response, no "thud". Perhaps I am out of date. But I still remember with great nostalgia the time when I was alone in a shop after closing at midnight and kept on flapping the flipper button. Unfortunately, there are no machines like that in any game centres nowadays. Sometimes I try the new pinball machines, but they are too complicated for me and too busy. I don't have time to sip a drink or light a cigarette before the ball comes down to the flippers. Hey, it's just a game, I always think. Why do I have to be so busy going here and there? Why do I have to make those stupid sound effects all the time? When I quit the shop and became a full-time writer, I took the Spaceship home with me.

The house I was living in at the time had a small basement, so I put the machine there and sometimes when I got tired of working, I would go downstairs and play. But strangely enough, the intimacy of that post-closing nightcap pinball session never came back. I don't know why either. But something was different. Yes, the air was different. I don't know why. The type of game had changed slightly, maybe. In the end, I got rid of the machines when I moved next time. The grand piano and pinball machine were not suitable household goods for the move. They were heavy and took up a lot of space. There were a lot of breakdowns in the last few years. I read the pinball maintenance book I bought when I went to the USA and tried my best to maintain the machine, but it seemed to have reached the end of its useful life. I happened to know someone who was an expert in this kind of machine and he said he would take it back if he could, so I asked him to take it back. The sight of a pinball machine being taken away is somewhat sad. When I took it out into the sun, I found it to be a dingy, outdated-looking machine. It looked like an old horse with a bad coat. It took three of us to haul it onto the back of a small truck. I wondered why it was so heavy at all. It was as heavy as the shadow of my own, or someone else's, past that I didn't know.

And that was the last time a pinball machine disappeared from our home.
I believe that to own a pinball machine personally is to carry a certain weight on one's shoulders. Personally and experientially, I think so. Owning a pinball machine is totally different from owning video software. It strangely absorbs the owner's way of life and daily thoughts and becomes heavier and heavier. That is the habit of that ridiculously large and ridiculously heavy dinosaur-like machine. But a certain kind of person is (probably) irresistibly attracted to such things at certain times. Personally, empirically, I think so.