I loved this book. LOVED it. It took me a while to really get into it, but once I had gotten about 30% I couldn't put it down. It was the first Murakami book I've read, and I can't wait to pick up more of his work. ( )

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One of the hardest things about reviewing Murakami’s work after reading it is finding a way to quantify and categorize the story into something coherent.

Let me just say this - I read it, all six hundred plus pages, and I liked it quite a bit. Still, I came off with the impression that I missed some things, which isn’t all that unusual seeing as that’s how every one of my post-read reactions has gone down with him.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about, amongst other things, a missing cat, a missing wife, a story-within-a-story about Japan’s creation of and involvement in Manchukuo, psychics, psychic prostitutes, morbid high school girls, a vaguely creepy scholar-cum-politician and a bird (species unknown) that has a call that sounds much like the winding of a spring.

There are also multiple references to Cutty Sark Scotch whisky, for really no reason I could fathom.

A fan of Murakami’s other works will find a lot to love in this giant whopper of a novel. Those put off by the sheer vagueness of his plots, though, will be driven up the wall. There’s a lot going on in this novel, but much of it feels separate from its other parts. There’s a slight feeling of interconnectedness between the characters and settings, even over large spans of chronological time, but there isn’t much in the narrative to back this up. The end result is a feeling of pieces of story floating alongside each other, nearly touching but never quite able. Which isn’t to say this is a bad book, or a book not worth reading. Really, quite the contrary. It’s a great book, a lot of fun to read, and the pages go by quickly without bogging readers down.

The trick to enjoying Murakami lies in the old adage “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” That really is the key to picking up and getting the most out of his books. There’s nothing ever concrete about them. Most of his plots can be boiled down to this short summary - A man, a completely average, somewhat slackerish man, meets some other people, goes some places, a ton of weird things happen and he comes back home. The end. Oh, and there will be references to jazz music, women’s ears (don’t ask) and brands of alcohol.

Don’t expect a plot that defines and explains everything and you should be all right. The Wind-Up Bird isn’t any different in structure than any of his other books (with the exception of South of the Border, West of the sun, which I loathed and blogged about elsewhere when I first read it last year or the year before), and isn’t about to go off giving readers concrete explanations about why things happen the way they do. They just happen. It’s all very organic and arty, I suppose, but for those who enjoy tangible stories with dramatic conclusions it’s going to be annoying. ( )

I read this book as it was selected for my book club. It was well-written: engaging, well paced, fairly clear and easy to read. It is "adapted" from Japanese, not directly translated, so some gaps or jumps may possibly be attributed to that fact. I didn't really enjoy it, however, simply because it is not a style or genre that I find interesting. I tend to get creeped out with a lot of supernatural, and don't have a natural curiosity for modern Japanese culture. It actually seemed like a Japanese Stephen King to me. I can handle some of it, but just don't really enjoy it. ( )

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 Murakami 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. ( )