The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

The Short of It:

A wildly imaginative work. Quite possibly the most interesting literary experience I’ve had. Ever.

The Rest of It:

If I had to sum this book up with one sentence, I’d say this:

Nothing, is as it seems.

Toru Okada is a normal guy. But when his cat goes missing, and then his wife Kumiko follows shortly thereafter, what at first seems normal suddenly becomes surreal and odd. So odd, that Toru apends time in an abandoned well to sort it all out.

In the mean time, he meets a cast of very strange characters:

•May Kasahara – a young neighbor girl who thinks about death a lot. She has a very matter-of-fact way of talking and acts as a sounding board for Toru.

•Noboru Wataya – the brother of Kumiko. Toru cannot stand show more him as his political ideals differ from his. He’s also a bully when it comes to his sister Kumiko. The lost cat is also named after him, which is odd in and of itself given that Kumiko and Toru really do not like the guy.

•Lieutenant Mamiya – an officer who witnessed the brutal death of a another officer. He is scarred over that event and has spent his own time down in a well. He has been tasked with carrying out a request in a will which is what brings him to Toru.

•Malta Kano – acts as a medium. Kumiko hires her to help them find their cat. She sees things, but she’s not all that clear when she translates it to those who need the information.

•Creta Kano – Creta is Malta’s sister. She too, has a talent but her talent is unpracticed and involves inhabiting people’s minds. She is also called a “prostitute of the mind” and gets to know Toru quite well.

•Nutmeg Akasaka – the businesswoman who first sees Toru while observing people in the city. She is attracted to the blueblack mark on his face. A mark that her father also bore many years ago. Later, she makes him a proposition that he finds hard to refuse.

•Cinammon Akasaka – the son of Nutmeg. He does not speak but uses a strange form of sign language to communicate. He carries out the wishes of his mother but is exceptionally good at what he does and what he does involves looking out for Toru on many levels.

•The Wind-Up Bird – a bird that only certain characters hear. This bird makes a screeching noise and when Toru hears it, he is immediately reminded of a spring and how it needs to be wound in order to keep the world going. If you pay attention while reading, the appearance of the bird can clue you in to what is going on at that point in time.

There isn’t a right or wrong way to describe this book. The story is simple, but the things that happen within the story beg to be discussed. The personalities of the characters, their history and how they all play their own part in the story is what makes a Murakami book an “experience” more than just a good read. It’s walks a crazy fine line between what’s normal and what’s not and throws in bits and pieces to shake you up and to jolt you back into reality, or what you think is reality. It’s the type of book that will have you asking questions for days, but somehow Murakami manages to bring it all together by those last few pages. Not to say that your questions have been fully answered. No, can’t say that. But I can say that as a reader, I was satisfied when I turned that last page.

Murakami’s writing is very accessible and simple to follow. Most first-time readers feel intimidated by what they’ve heard about him, but the writing is not complex. The meaning behind what is written though, can boggle the mind, but not in a bad way. His books have a palate cleansing effect which I find very pleasing. He challenges you to think outside of the box and if you give in to it, usually you’re rewarded with a positive reading experience. Usually. There are those that are completely turned off by the oddness of it, and I understand that too. Murakami is not for everyone but what a reading experience it is!

Reading this book was like taking two Benadryls, drinking a couple glasses of wine and then having one heck of a strange dream afterward. You wake, but you don’t wake and you sort of like it that way.

As with his other novels, this book shares many of the same themes but mostly alienation and loneliness. There are some graphic depictions of sex and rape but not as much as some of his other novels. There is also a particularly gruesome act of violence but it’s brief and not drawn out so I found it tolerable although some of the other readers in the read-along found it hard to read.

Compared to his other books, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is probably one of my favorites. It’s right up there with Kafka on the Shore but I found it much easier to follow than Kafka. It’s long. Over 600 pages long but much of it reads very quickly. In the six weeks that we had to finish the book, I think most finished well before the deadline. However, it was maybe 50 pages too long. I understand that two chapters were removed from the English translation and that they had to do with Toru’s relationship with Creta. I know it would have made the book longer but I wish I had those chapters now.

If you are intrigued and want to give it a try, do so with an open mind and give yourself plenty of time to absorb what you’ve read. It also doesn’t hurt to take a week or two when done to just ponder the story. I found it very hard to focus on other books after finishing Wind-Up.

For more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter. show less

Murakami is a genius. He manages to create a different, dream-like labyrinth that is anchored in our world. Everything felt surreal like a Salvador Dali painting. Everything felt like dream-like sequences but you're not asleep. At times "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" feels like "Inception" wherein you're in dream world and you can bend reality. However, some things are too VAGUE or OPEN-ENDED, wherein you just have to use your imagination. A lot of unanswered mysteries that you just like to unfold. I want to go down a well and go to that hotel just to unravel the mysteries that can't put me to sleep at night. Only several authors can make me lay awake at night, I hate it and I love it at the same time. :)

Here is a story that names are not show more that important. But even if the character's names are hard to remember (because Japanese names are used) they're gonna stick to you even in your sleep. Murakami reminds me of Butch Dalisay (a Filipino writer) not because they have writing style (they don't) but because they're both obsessed with personal histories. They use several chapters/paragraphs just to show where a certain character came from even if its a minor character. And coincidentally, I love HISTORY, hehe.

He also reminds me of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabelle Allende, both are writers of magic realism. But Murakami's novels have a different kind of magic. I always loved magic realism books.

I also love the way Murakami embedded history in this book specifically the Russian-Japanese war. This war, in a way, was close to Pinoy's heart because for a brief time we have been occupied by the Japanese. The Japanese were cruel to us. But through Murakami's book you would see the war through Japanese eyes. The soldiers were demoralized and tired of it too. I'm not offering some sympathy but I can say "quits na kami". If you love historical fiction, romance and magic you'll surely love this. show less

Every time I read Murakami it shakes me up. Not always in the same way, but I don't think I've ever put down a book of his unaffected.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle isn't an easy or straightforward book -At times you have almost no idea what's going on, or where things are going. Even so, it's an extremely compelling read, like a puzzle that needs solving it drives you on, trying to make the pieces match. When you're done (or when I was, at least) You're left with the feeling that everything you've read actually do match up - you're jut not sure as to how. Almost everything seems laden with symbolism: baseball bats, cats, the act of smoking or eating, every piece of music... it's a trip into the personal mythological world of the author, show more but with no map provided. show less

I want to start off this review by saying that I’m no stranger to Murakami, but perhaps I am when it comes to some of his more surreal novels. I’ve read Norwegian Wood, After Dark and after the quake but The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is the biggest Murakami I’ve tackled to date.
Murakami has one of the most beautiful ways with words that I’ve ever seen (although I suppose Jay Rubin, the English translator helps to maintain the beauty in English) and his prose paints perfectly detailed pictures in your mind. This book is no exception and I could picture everything – Toru’s, the well, May Kasahara and Kumiko as I read.
The plot starts out in a linear fashion – Toru is recently unemployed and his wife, Kumiko, is upset that their show more cat has gone missing. The search puts him in touch with the quirky teen May Kasahara and the odd Malta and Creta Kano. Over Toru looms the figure of Kumiko’s brother, Noboru Wataya (which also happens to be the cat’s name).
Everything starts going a bit surreal after that. Why does Toru go down the well after the Lieutenant mentions his experience? Why do Malta and Creta disappear halfway through the book? What exactly is going on with Nutmeg and Cinnamon? What’s the significance of the woman on the phone? Is there any significance?
I am of a fairly scientific mind and it threw me a little to try and justify all of Toru’s adventures in reality and tie up all the loose ends- which isn’t possible I think, you need to wonder and discuss this book. Toru’s character frustrated me in that he was so passive of almost everything- being trapped in the well and joining Nutmeg and Cinnamon. His fixation on Kumiko was also a bit strange but I guess it was sweet that he was willing to wait for her no matter what.
May Kasahara was my favourite character. Her ability to blurt out morbid and strange thoughts as well as take anything in her stride was uplifting. I’d love to mind out how she ended up.
This book was mesmerizing and although at times I wanted to put it down because I couldn’t figure it out, it wasn’t possible. I think the trick is not to force it to be linear and just accept that you can’t explain anything. Rather like life, really. show less

This book sucked me into its web of strangeness. It has a hypnotic quality that makes it different from anything else I have read. Some parts are very gruesome and disturbing which was quite upsetting. However, I had to continue. There seemed to be no choice about that!
The novel consists of several layers of stories within stories and dreams within reality as well as some episodes where it is difficult to be sure what is real and what is a dream. The stories are linked in bizarre and obscure ways - through a well or water, or through a voice in a telephone or several other ways. The characters telling these stories are each the hero (or villain)of their tale and all are fascinating.
What an imagination! An amazing book.

It's been a really long time since a book captivated me so much I grew impatient with real life. With a two-hour train trip coming up, I found myself actually looking forward to it, simply so that I could sit motionlessly and guiltlessly and devour the rest of Murakami's fabulous world. This was definitely one of those books that I was sorry to see end.

What is it about these diffident, slightly hapless, determinedly directionless narrators? Someone like Strethers from James' The Ambassadors, or Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby) really sucks me in. Toru Okada, a thirty-year old unemployed legal assistant, is the opposite of the stereotypical salaryman; his only dilemma is how to fill in the hours stretching endlessly before show more him each day: should he cook spaghetti bolognaise? read a book? go shopping? Instead, it's his wife, Kumiko, who is the breadwinner, and the obligatory pants-wearer, ringing him up to delegate tasks to him which only rival each other in mundanity: pick up the laundry, buy the toilet paper, find the cat.

Then the mystery begins - and once it begins, it multiplies and folds in upon itself. An anonymous woman rings the house, who insists not only that Toru knows her well - "Ten minutes, please. That's all we need to understand each other" - but that Toru know her very well: "Try picturing me. From my voice. Imagine what I'm like. Where I am. How I'm dressed."

Toru has scarcely any time to work this one out before Kumiko sends him in pursuit of their missing cat, Notoru Wataya, a feline saddled with the appallingly weighty name of Kumiko's brother-in-law, a Machiavellian politician rising through the ranks. To find the cat, Toru leaps into the blocked-off alley behind their house, where he meets the mercurial May Kasahara, an enigmatic sixteen-year old with a pronounced limp and a two-inch scar on her cheek. May cheerfully assumes command over the somewhat apathetic Toru, dubbing him "Mr Wind-up Bird", after the particular bird-call he hears echo in the neighbourhood, a call which sounds like the springs of the world are being wound up: "Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighbourhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world."

Springs in a mechanical sense - for much of the novel concerns the idea of life and fate; life as a great machine, which some hidden higher power is preparing - but for what? But springs also work in the geographical sense, for the flow of water is integral to the plot of the book, drawing together the dry well Toru finds in an abandoned house backing on to the blocked-off alleyway; the warnings of their mystical family friend, Mr Honda; the religious austerities of clairvoyant Malta Kano whom Kumiko employs to find their cat. And then Kumiko herself goes missing.

Toru's search for Kumiko will take him deep into the historical depths of Manchukuo, the ill-fated Japanese settlement at the heart of Mainland China; into a dreamlike world where the women in his life endlessly segue into another; into utter darkness at the bottom of a dried-up well; and ultimately, most irrevocably, into the mysterious, pitch-black Room 208. Through all of this reverberates the call of the wind-up bird.

Murakami traverses a dazzling array of landscapes in his sprawling novel. His world is rich and resonant with the stories of many characters - and I haven't even managed to yet find a place for Cinnamon and Nutmeg Asakasa, whose spiritual powers will be of huge influence on Toru. Here the reader will find, labyrinthine and Pynchon-like, a troubling range of echoes and references gathering momentum into an increasingly claustrophobic world. In the end, the mysteries can only be solved by coming to grips with the obscure figure of Noboru Wataya (the man, not the cat) and the ineluctable pull towards Room 208 where Toru keeps returning in trance: here he will confront an unknown assailant in a confrontation that will enmesh them all.

Transformation is at the heart of what I admire most about Murakami - from the quiet, almost innocuous way he is able to take his protagonist from cooking spaghetti and ironing shirts to the brutalities of the Sino-Russian border in WWII and the metaphysical depths of the dried-up well. He is entirely equal both to the expression of the mundane to the expression of the ineffable. Here is Toru trying to rationalise his antagonism towards his brother-in-law Noboru Wataya:

It was like a persistent low-grade fever. I never had a television in the house, but by some uncanny coincidence, whenever I glanced at a TV somewhere, he would be on it, making some pronouncement. If I flipped through the pages of a magazine in a doctor's waiting room, there would be a picture of Noboru Wataya, with an article he had written. I felt as if Noboru Wataya were lying in wait for me just around every corner in the known world.
OK, let's face it. I hated the guy.

Now here's Toru, sitting in self-imposed exile at the bottom of the well:

It felt extremely strange not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, though I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed. To cope with that, I woould clear my throat now and then, or run my hand over my face. That way, my ears could check on the existnece of my voice, my hand could check on the existence of my face, and my face could check on the existence of my hand.
Despite these efforts, my body began to lose its density and weight, the sand gradually being washed away by flowing water. I felt as if a fierce and wordless tug-of-war were going on inside me, a contest in which my mind was slowly dragging my body into its own territory. The darkness was disrupting the proper balance between the two. The thought struck me that my own body was a mere provisional husk that had been prepared for my mind by a rearrangement of the signs known as chromosomes. If the signs were rearraned yet again, I would find myself inside a wholly different body than before. "Prostitute of the mind"...

And, for powerful writing, don't even get me started on Boris and his Mongolian. I think I'll remember that scene for life.

One word of warning, though. If you're looking for a story that makes sense, this isn't it. A lot of riddles are solved along the way but, if the postmodernists will allow my borrowing of the phrase, all we end up with is a chain of signifiers attached to nothing but themselves. But dissatisfied? Hardly. Dive into this book, be pulled into the mystery of all these missing things and finally resurface with a rich meditation on the enigma of identity and the notion of the true self, of historical inevitability and the possibililty of personal transformation.

And listen to the winding of the springs. show less

An astonishing book. Essentially an urban epic about losing your cat and your wife and your grip on reality, the plot moves dreamily through the mundane world of a man living an aimless, blameless life as he experiences erotic phone-calls, the philosophical musings of a teenage neighbour, horrifying stories from Japan's military campaign in China, a fascination with an abandoned well, two sisters named after islands and their strange vocation, and, frankly, a whole lot of other stuff. The writing is plain but addictive, and though the plot is full of ambiguities, complexities and perplexing enigmas, many of which are left for the reader to resolve, it is nonetheless a supremely satisfying read.