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. ( )

http://alookatabook.blogspot.com/2009...

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. ( )

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. ( )

Had to read it twice to really enjoy it. The first time I was lost. The second time was just as bizarre, but I could really follow the lives of these lost people. ( )

It feels a little bit like I'm the last person on earth discovering Murakami, but I'm really glad I finally have. I tend to like books that do what this one does; first establishing a normality, a sense of realism, then takes you by the hand and leads you into something completely different. Something odd and twisted and mysterious. Before you even know it, what started out as a lost cat, a dry well and a mobid neighbour girl, has turned into an epic battle between good and evil set in a Lynchean dreamscape of a hotel. With some stories from the Manchurian war thrown in for good measure. It's polyphonic, rich and winding.

What's special about this book though, is that Murakami keeps a very crisp and clear voice throughout. Even as the events in Toru Okada's life keep getting weirder and weirder, as the symbolic invades the mundane, the prose still stays available, accessable and exact. I'm surely not the only one thinking of Kafka's dry style as a comparison, but Murakami is much more emphatic and gentle. The mystery never becomes really nightmarish, there's more puzzlement than angst and the book leaves you with a good mix of questions and answers. It's one of those books that really bares thinking about afterwards, without making you feel shut out and stupid.

This was 740 pages well spent, and definitely not my last Murakami novel. ( )

Ich liebe dieses Buch. Es handelt von den Eheproblemen eines (Unter-)Durchschnittsbürgers, Orpheus' Gang in die Unterwelt, der Schlacht von Nomonhan und Pasta. Und davon, dass die wirklich entscheidenden Dinge, die unser aller Leben verändern möglicherweise direkt vor unseren Augen geschehen. Ohne dass wir sie überhaupt wahrnehmen.
Allerdings handelt es sich um eine Übersetzung aus dem Englischen einer Übersetzung aus dem Japanischen - warum auch immer. ( )

excellent however a bit drawn out. The portion set in mongolia is perhaps the best story I have ever read. ( )

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. ( )

Toru Okada, a 30 year old unemployed married man knows he has to look for a job and a 'new' direction for his life, but is unsure about what he wants to do. A series of small events, seemingly unrelated, disturb his orderly life -the disappearance of his cat, anonymous phone calls, a meeting with a medium- and culminate with the inexplicable disappearance of his wife, which signals the beginning of a new stage in his life. This is a typical Murakami novel in which we encounter many of the elements and topics which constitute his literary universe: a slightly alienated male character; a succession of mysterious, complex and attractive females; magical realism; siblings with unusual relationships; the coexistence of different realms of reality which share a surprising causal relation; the defiance of conventions... The story contains many curious characters which narrate their apparently unrelated lives, which get entangled at certain points during the book. It is a very engaging book, although it is a bit weaker towards the end. ( )

I listened to this on audio, and the writing flowed well. Descriptions were vivid (I'll admit, I skipped ahead on the torture part). The story, for me, felt fragmented and a little unbalanced--odd event after odd event, with no clear thread running through. There were areas I wished to know more about (the brother-in-law's weird and evil powers) and parts I didn't understand the significance of (what was up with the cat's tail? Why did the man need to be beaten up with the bat?)

I would like to read (or listen to) more by this author. There must be a reason people love his books, so perhaps I've judged unfairly. ( )

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is about a recently unemployed man and his struggles. He is sent in search of his wife’s cat that ran away. During his search he encounters many interesting people that help him in his search of the cat and himself. He soon discovers that his wife has not returned home and may not, according many people including his brother in law. It is then up to him to find himself in order to find his wife.

People speak highly of Murakami, and to some extent I see why. He clearly loves writing, and his style is fluid and fun. The protagonist gets interrupted by a strange phone call, which has you immediately wondering what is going on, and at the same time he is more worried about his spaghetti being slightly too soft! I can't do that justice - you have to read it to see how well that works.

But there are problems with this novel. The main one is that it seems to me that Murakami wrote it to a Japanese audience. In this book and also in "Kafka on the Shore" the author is speaking clearly about a Japanese failure to grapple with its own history of the second world war. And because this is a Japanese writer talking to a Japanese audience, one feels a little like an interloper when listening in!

The tales from the war are the best narrative in the book - and the only narrative that reaches a satisfactory conclusion. This is my second Murakami novel, and the second one where the author has created more threads than are found in Toru's spaghetti - and then unceremoniously dumps them all, leaving them unresolved.

It reminds me of conceptual art, where the concept comes not from the artist but the viewer. It is like the author is saying "over to you now. Bring what concepts you like into this book". Although it also comes over as "arghh, I am bored now. Time to stop writing"

This author is very popular right now amongst a 20-something literate readership. The wisdom of crowds suggests there is something here and you should read this work. But I never like the wisdom of crowds, and if there is something special in Murakami's work, I still haven't found it, so my recommendation is to leave this book alone (unless you want to be a trendy 20-something, in which case take it to a coffee shop where people can see you reading it). ( )

I loved this book! What a fascinating cast of characters from beginning to end. We find a likable sincere, Toru Okada, losing his job, his cat (Noboru Watanabe), and finally his wife (Kumiko) disappears. His brother-in-law / politician Noboru Wataya -( yes the cat is named after him) becomes central in the mystery of his wife's disappearance and an unusual form of help comes to him through two sisters/psychics, Malta and Creta Kano. A neighbor May Kasahara, an unusual teenager, defines for me the goodness of the main character, as he struggles through evil in an often dream like novel. Compelling and definitely worth reading. ( )

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami (1998)

Wind-up Bird Chronicle has been described as Murakami’s magnus opus. I am certainly not going to dispute that. My problem is, once you establish the criteria for rating a book as a five star read, what do you do when you find a book that goes beyond that? Are you forced to lower all your previously rated books so this one is clearly the best book you’ve ever read? Or do you in fact adopt a six star rating system, with Wind-up Bird Chronicle at the apex, even though such a system flies in the face of convention? Or have you become so ensnared with the experience of this work you are willing to accept a new reality where perfection is redefined? If you find yourself considering these things and re-evaluating how you look at a book, you will appreciate how this book may have you reconsidering how you regard your daily life.

While it is a polar opposite in style from Kris Saknussemm’s Zanesville, many similarities come to mind, mostly because both books deal with perceptions of the world and altered reality. Saknussemm’s work focuses on chemically altered perceptions and Murakami’s focuses on either mistaken perceptions or perception altered through purely mental manipulation. Murakami’s treatment of reality is taken from a variety of disparate sources and is reminiscent of a strange blend of Herman Hesse, New Age Philosophy, Aldus Huxley and Firesign Theatre.

If you’ve read Murakami before, many of his common themes are here: alternate realities coexisting on the same plane, the power of dreams, musical themes and ordinary people behaving in an exceptional manner. In this particular work, while the individual parts are exceptional in their own right, together, they are greater than the sum of the parts, greater even than the product of the individual parts.

If you enjoy pushing the boundaries of literary reality, this work will be a feast for you. This work has all the markings of a true literary classic in the making. It is too soon to see if Murakami has the staying power to be regarded in the same light as Hesse or Huxley, but I believe that 30, 40 or even 50 years from now, his books will still be discussed and Wind-up Bird Chronicle will be regarded as his masterpiece. ( )

This has to be the weirdest book I have ever read. A saga of a young Japanese unemployed husband who loses his wife to mysterious forces -- to try and summarize the plot any further would be fruitless. It would make no sense to someone who has never read it -- honestly, it makes no sense, period.

I have some incredibly mixed feelings about this work. At times I simply loathed it. Our protagoist, Mr. Okada, is approached by so many whack-jobs who say and do cryptic, nonsensical, and annoying things -- it drove me crazy. Many characters could have just been deleted without any ill effects on the novel, in my opinion. Yet there were times it was absolutely spellbinding: the Manchurian parts, the zoo, the Wind-Up bird's cry, Room 208, the well. Freaky! I also enjoyed the more traditional storytelling regarding Toru and Kumiko's relationship history.

The last ~ 100 pgs or so, I had reformed my negative opinions and was thouroughly enjoying, but then it ended and (for me, at least) there was so many loose ends and so many things I still didn't understand. Was I even meant to understand them? I don't know.

Overall, a very surreal bizarre reading experience that is part compelling artistry, but unfortunately part ridiculous twaddle. It does require patience and a mellow attitude. I definately will not forget this book - so in that sense - a success.

'Creeak-Creeak'. What the hell was that? ( )