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Loading... The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (original 1995; edition 1998)by Haruki Murakami
Work InformationThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1995)
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This was my first Murakami novel. I liked some parts of it a lot. Especially the first half of the story - a fascinating blend of reality and fantasy. What is real, and what is a dream? But I don't think the different elements of the novel came together and formed a coherent story. All the WWII stuff with harrowing stories, the young girl's ramblings, hiding in the well, etc. What's the connection? I liked Creta Kano and her back story, but she suddenly disappeared from the story without explanation. Well, overall, I liked the feeling it created of loneliness and the inability to know what reality is. It was a refreshing getaway from the real world, but I didn't have that edge-of-your-seat-must-read-on feeling that most people describe about it. It was more like a not-really-sure-whats-going-on-so-read-till-its-over kind of feeling. It did get me thinking about who my alternate reality arch-nemesis might be, havn't come up with anything yet.
By the book's midway point, the novelist-juggler has tossed so many balls into the air that he inevitably misses a few on the way down. Visionary artists aren't always neat: who reads Kafka for his tight construction? In ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up. Mr. Murakami seems to have tried to write a book with the esthetic heft and vision of, say, Don DeLillo's ''Underworld'' or Salman Rushdie's ''The Moor's Last Sigh,'' he is only intermittently successful. ''Wind-Up Bird'' has some powerful scenes of antic comedy and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a satisfying, fully fashioned novel. In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book. Is contained inContainsHas the adaptationHas as a reference guide/companionAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fantasy.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:A "dreamlike and compellingâ? tour de force (Chicago Tribune)â??an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japanâ??s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wifeâ??s missing catâ??and then for his wife as wellâ??in a netherworld beneath the cityâ??s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakamiâ??s most accla No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)895.635Literature Literature of other languages Asian (east and south east) languages Japanese Japanese fiction 1945–2000LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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First off, the book has absolutely no substance. I have no clear idea what I gained by reading it (not even in the abstract), and nothing that happens in the book is meaningful in any way. This is not to say that the sentences are not well constructed or even that other people might not get anything out of it, just that for me this book was just a blank. It felt like it was trying very hard to be a horoscope, so that whoever read it would see exactly what they wanted to see in the extremely vague prose.
Ultimately, it felt almost offensive to me as a reader. It's so self indulgent and Murakami's style in the book seems to exude his confidence in the fact that he could literally write anything and people would gobble it up. For roughly the first half of the book, this style was fine. The book was surreal, but still had some logical storyline and basic sense of continuity. Somewhere around the middle a full year gets skipped and the book goes completely off the rails. Every chapter after that felt completely random, and I sensed that Murakami really wanted me to feel awed by his literary prowess when I was instead just bothered and frustrated by the fact that every sentence created more questions than it answered. It was only really at this point that I realized that the book was never really going to be concluded in any convincing way, and it's possible that that was part of what detracted from my enjoyment of it the most.
Overall, not a book I'd recommend mostly because I don't understand it (and am quite sure it can't actually be understood, since I'd be surprised if Murakami even had any idea what it was "really about"). I found Murakami's style in the more realist setting of Norwegian Wood more convincing and appealing, and if his other books are more like this (which I fear/have heard they are), I will probably stay away.
Also, what's with women in his books randomly getting naked in the moonlight? Definitely a strange recurring pattern. ( )