It is strange how this book took my atention from the very beginning. Its about the life of Toru Okada when some bizarre events start to happen. It's difficult to tell if each passage is an illusion or a dream, or if it is really happening, and this is the most exciting thing in the book to me. Some may say it leaves a lot untold, but my opinion is that it is the author's style, to let the reader image. The war narratives were the best parts in my opinion. They are so detailed, sound so real. ( )

My review is here: http://moosplace.blogspot.com/2009/01... ( )

This is by far Murakami's best book. Its rich with characters and plot! It is layered in so many ways and dreamlike in its descriptions. A must read for all readers!! ( )

Murakami is world famous for his story-telling and prose, his metaphysical realities and the way he plays with concepts, roles, characters and places. I’ve now read three of his books and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s some of the most cleverly written rubbish I’ve ever experienced.

I did enjoy some bits. The opening chapter and the narrative of Mamiya’s experiences in WW2 simply because that’s a period of history I know something about from a Japanese perspective. Er… that’s it.

As there was in Kafka on the Shore, there’s more gore and sex. There’s more psychosis and mystical spirituality. There’s more parallel story-telling and worlds within worlds.

What there isn’t more of is any meaning or clarity.

I was advised by someone called Fiver in a comment on my Kafka review that I should be reading for themes and then it would make more sense. I listened humbly to Fiver despite them taking me for a bit of a literary plonker as I listened to this book and found that yep, there were indeed tons of themes.

There’s the reccuring well theme, themes based on wartime experience, going through walls, dreams, sexual fantasies, marriage/relationships, cats (again!), jealousy, politics…. Great. So, I’ve got a list of themes Fiver, now what?

If the point in writing is simply to be read, he’s a genius. If it is to engage the reader’s life (not just their mind or imagination) and leave them different for the reading, he’s a failure.

This is on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Well, quite frankly, I’d die happy if I didn’t read any more of him. ( )

Murakami is among my very favourite authors and, critically at least, this is often regarded as one of his very finest novels, so I had high hopes for it.

At over 600 pages, I think this is Murakami's longest book to date. This is a rambling novel, both in terms of the glacial pace at which events unfold and its digressions into the past. My guess is those past events are meant to provide echoes of those in the book's present, but with the ever mysterious Murakami I couldn't be certain.

Describing the plot is difficult; this novel is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. Toru Okada is a typical Murakami narrator - unemployed, apathetic and swept along by the increasingly bizarre happenings around him. Even the goadings of teenage neighbour May Kasahara don't seem to get a rise out of him.

The novel opens with the disappearance of the Okadas' cat, named after Toru's politician brother-in-law Noboru Wataya, a man whom the normally laid back Toru hates with a passion. After initial searches prove fruitless Kumiko, Toru's wife, brings in a clairvoyant, Malta Kano, to help. Then, more seriously, Kumiko also vanishes. At the same time, Toru is receiving anonymous 'phone calls from a woman who claims to know him well.

Throw in the grisly stories about Malta Kano's one time prostitute sister Creta and, war veteran Lieutenant Mamiya's tales of his time on the Mongolia/Manchuria border in the 1930s Sino-Japanese war and subsequent imprisonment, Toru's increasingly explicit dreams and the strangle blue patch on his cheek that appears from nowhere, the silent Cinnamon Akahasa and his wealthy mother Nutmeg, the apparent possessor of spiritual powers and witness of a massacre of zoo animals during the same war and you have a novel full of tangled threads that sort of resolve themselves in a denouement in the mysterious Room 208.

Perhaps the novel's reputation rests on the fact that this is the most Murakami-esque of Murakami novels. The atmosphere of a Murakami story is not quite like those by any other writer I've come across - apparently simple prose describing hauntingly surreal worlds of mystery, unease and tension and full of philosophizing characters - and, of the five books of his I've read, this is the most extreme example I've come across so far.

I can't tell you even a week after finishing it if "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" is a work of profound genius or self-indulgence. Possibly, it is both. ( )