NB Spoilers below - but I personally think reading this novel will help from knowing where you're travelling.

The Wind up Bird Chronicle is largely the story of Toru Okada, an unemployed law graduate. While the novel starts trivially enough with a first sentence about pasta and music, the action rapidly descends into bizarre, surreal twists, and a descent from Toru's relatively normal life to one of catastrophes and, ultimately, violence. The house cat has disappeared, soon to be followed by an adulterous wife. Toru, throughout this, feels aimless to the point of pathology, but some part of him constantly strives to put the pieces back together, especially in reconnecting with his wife. Much of the novel involves a blind striving for this reunion, interweaved with disturbing dreams, visions, connections with the second world war, and hints of supernatural violence and abuse.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is not a perfect novel. The middle section drags somewhat, and the whole book could have been trimmed and edited quite a bit. However, there are some incredibly gripping set pieces, especially involving the past. The two gruesome sections involving Lieutenant Mamiya especially (1st involving a human skinning during a covert mission, and second involving the same torturer taking over a prisoner of war camp in Siberia) are electric - impossible to put down. There are also many wonderful little details that bring the characters to life. Some of the characters have unbelievably real voices, especially the teenage May Kasahara, who has an incredibly authentic adolescent personality, highly redolent of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

At first sight, one of the weakest characters is the main narrator, Toru. He seems so passive as almost to be a vacuum at times. Although he strives to find his estranged wife, this mainly involves sitting around doing nothing, or simply following the instructions from other people. His abnormal absence of any form of volition conjures up a tense, dreamlike atmosphere, as if he's trapped in his world, with little wiggle room to escape from fate. This passivity also enhances the entire dreamlike feel of the novel, with reality bending in unexpected and sometimes dramatic ways (semi-dreams in a vast hotel are again incredibly gripping), and the theme of dreams or visions quite prevalent throughout.

The surreality of the novel serves two main functions. First, it provides a voice, an emotional vocabulary that Toru himself lacks. For instance, his habit of staying at the bottom of a dry well on one level very evocatively, touchingly captures the sense of despair he must be feeling, despite impressions of numbness, at the way his life is falling apart. Second, it creates a new mythology, only loosely connected to that of our own culture. The well is also a place for Toru, for instance, by force of will, to push himself into the core of things, and to give him the opportunity to interact on an entirely mental level with all those other characters that matter in the novel. It is this second function of the surreal language that probably most infuriates people - and I personally believe Kafka went too far with other novels, such as Kafka on the Shore - but in this one he hasn't overdone it, and has weaved together everything so closely that it really does work.

The novel shouldn't be read in any way literally, like some classic painting. Instead, it should be viewed as a semi-abstract expressionist painting, where much of the work has to be done by the viewer. We can have fun with this, using our imagination to tell the hidden story, to join this with that, and create our own ideas and mythology from it. From my own experience, it seemed to me that the core of the novel was a kind of mental battle between good and evil, with Toru's brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, a kind of devil-like character, along with Boris the torturer, while Nutmeg's father, and her whole family, and especially Toru, are supernaturally good, healing characters. Sex can be exploited by both sides in opposite ways, but it is an energy that comes at the core of the power at each side's disposal. Kumiko is also Creta Kano, and May Kasahara, and there are multiple, fighting sides to them all, as Kumiko desperately struggles to rid herself of the evil within her family. There is much more I keep spotting over the days that I think about this, but I don't want to spoil the fun for you. Suffice to say that there is a wonderful, playful richness to the novel, absent from non-surreal novels, and also largely absent from other, more crudely surreal ones.

This long novel dazzles with its originality on almost every page, even if it frustrates also with its occasional turgid passages. It asks us to read in quite a different way to what we're used to, and those willing to take the plunge will find it extremely rewarding, and will be haunted by the novel for many days to come. ( )

Murakami's storytelling cannot be compared to the vast majority of authors currently on the market. The way this story is spun together is completely compelling and I found the book hard to put down. The plot is very intricate, and I don't think that I fully understood what was going on in the first read. I will definitely be picking this book up again at some point in the future. ( )

A very well written novel, though at some points I had trouble suspending my disbelief. ( )

I'm going to be haunted by this book for some time and I don't know why. I'm not really sure what this book is about. I may not even know what really happens in the story but I keep thinking about it.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami tells the story of Toru Okada who is looking for his wife's missing cat. But this is just a McGuffin, to borrow Hitchcock's term, to throw the reader off track from the real story. Or maybe it's the key to everything that happens afterwards.

Okada lives a rather secluded life in a Tokyo suburb with his wife who is the breadwinner. Okada spends his days trying to figure out how to spend his days. His search for himself is interrupted by three events, the missing cat, the disappearance of his wife, and a phone call from a strange woman.

The novel becomes a sort of detective story as Okada looks for the cat, tries to get his wife to return and to figure out who the woman that keeps calling him is. Soon several women enter Okada's life and the story takes a turn towards David Lynch territory. The first woman, Malta Kano and her sister Creta Kano are both sort of psychics who give Okada clues to both his past and his future. They are strangely involved with both his wife and his brother-in-law, and may have the ability to find the missing cat. The mother-son team whom Okada calls Nutmeg and Cinnamon find Okada has psychic abilities himself and use these to further their own goals. The neighbor girl May Kinsahara traps Okada in a well on a friendly whim and sets in motion a series of events that end with the possibility that Okada has murdered his brother-in-law, a powerful up-and-coming politician. All of these events seem to be connected to what happened to Okada's friend Mr. Honda in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and after.

Confused? I certainly was at many points while reading The Wind-up Bird Chronicle but I felt compelled to continue reading. Haruki Marakami is certainly a wonderful story teller. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle he keeps several story threads going throughout the novel, giving the reader just enough to keep you interested, without telling you what is really going on, which actually makes you more interested. Along with the story telling, there are many scenes and images that haunt the reader: a man who goes into a well to find a good spot to think and ends up trapped there for days, a massacre in a zoo in occupied China, an internet conversation between a man and what he believes is his lost wife.

I admit that I am still trying to figure it all out, puzzle it all together. I will be for several days at least. For that reason, I am giving The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami five out of five stars. ( )

I fell in love with Murakami's writing after I read this book. I had never read anything to compare to it. What would you do if your life suddenly stopped and strange things started happening?

I would later learn that all of his work involves a strange events happening to an ordinary man. There is usually a mysterious woman and other symbols that hint at what is happening to the psyche of the main character. But the real story is about an inner journey that we need to take but usually avoid until something strange forces us to deal with it. ( )