The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
by Haruki Murakami
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Book Summary Information
Author: Haruki MurakamiEdition: Paperback
Published: 1998-09-01
ISBN: 0679775439
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
Book Review: A Story with no Destination
Summary: 3 Stars
I can't ever remember reading a book that, on the one hand, describes so well the inanimate things, and yet, on the other hand, provides so little information about the characters themselves. Six hundred pages of "I don't know how I feel" or "There is no way I can explain it."
Toru Okada's (the main character) lacks a spine because his attitude toward life is one of surrender -- he's generally reactive, not proactive. We know virtually nothing about his wife, Kumiko, even though she is central to the story. We never find out why her brother, Noboru Wataya, is such a nasty SOB. We wonder what drives Malta and Creta Kano, who simply disappear from the story. May Kasahara, Toru's 16-year-old neighbor, is like a dog that chases its tail -- she'll still be a flake when she's 50 years old. Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka -- oops, same thing -- 100 questions about who they are, but only a couple of answers.
Leaving a little something to the reader's imagination advances a story; leaving huge holes for the reader to fill in makes for a story that never reaches a destination. It's kind of like the comment: if you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else. And that's how I feel about this book.
I understand that there is a battle between the defilers and the defilees. But I have no idea how the hostility began or how/if it was definitively resolved. The stories told by Lieutenant Mamiya are the best part of the book. In a word, they are fantastic.
I had hoped for a strong ending that would clean up this mess. Oh well, wishful thinking.
Summary of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake
Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat.??Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.??As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.
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