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| View Larger Image | The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
by Haruki Murakami
| | List Price: | $15.95 | | Price: | $10.85 | | You Save: | $5.10 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 2119 | | Studio: | Vintage | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 624 | | Publication Date: | September 01, 1998 | | Publisher: | Vintage |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon. |
Amazon.com
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician. Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century. If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 282 reviews)
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B- 
Interminably long, bloated, and meandering, but there are moments of beautiful writing and some worthy chapters that can stand alone (e.g., Lt. Mamiya's stories). Overall, however, the characters, themes, plot just don't come together for me; none of these feel fully realized, urgent, or deserving of the demands it makes on the reader. I feel that the book could have been improved by some judicious editing.
His writing style IS "hypnotic", as they say. Toru's voice really took me to that grey zone between reality and the otherworld that he experiences. Sometimes when I put the book down, I felt like I had just emerged from the dark, mysterious world of "Room 208", and I needed to take a moment to remind myself that I was in the real world.
Murakami is clearly a talented writer, but ultimately his ambitions got the best of him with this one and he doesn't deliver a "masterpiece"; he delivers a promising but flawed book.
August 07, 2008 | |
Amazing novel by one of our greatest story tellers 
This is one of the finest works by Murakami whose style is unsurpassed in modern literature.
August 06, 2008 | |
Leaves You Stuffed but not Satisfied 
Wind Up Bird is wild, astonishing, undisciplined and brilliant. Murakami, who once managed a jazz club, has written the novelistic equivalent of a Dizzy Gillespie composition.
Toru Okada, a very average guy, quits his job as a paralegal. In short order, his cat disappears and his wife Kumiko walks out on him. Toru wanders between his Tokyo house, the yard of his teenage neighbor May and an abandoned manse with a haunted history. Out of Toru's circumscribed ramblings emerges a novel about fate, love, evil, individual responsibility and historical accountability.
Toru meets an old soldier who recounts atrocities he witnessed in Manchuria, Mongolia and Siberia during World War II. Like W.G. Sebald's Natural History of Destruction, Lieutenant Mamiya's story shows us the suffering of those who perpetrated imperialistic evil. Even though it's not central to Toru's predicament, Mamiya's story is told at great length and gruesome detail, as though Murakami is bearing witness to a horror most Japanese are more than willing to forget.
Then we have Malta and Creta Kano, two psychic sisters who invade Toru's mind and his erotic fantasies. Toru also throws in with Nutmeg and her son Cinnamon, two alternative healers. Kumiko's brother Noburu is a professor turned pundit turned politician who personifies an invasive, soul-destroying defilement. Unlike the specificity of the wartime atrocities, Noburu's evil is vague and formless, but it seems to drift over Toru and the other characters like a cloud of Sarin gas.
Although there are compelling set pieces in this novel (Boris the Manskinner, Creta Kano's psychic prostitution) the plot elements don't cohere. Several key story lines get dropped or peter out. In particular, why Kumiko left when she did, what went on between her and her brother, and the specific type of psychological breakdown it led to remain frustratingly vague. After asking us to take a 600 plus page journey, Murakami should provide a few more answers and a few less inchoate psychological descriptions.
Murakami is chasing down something important here, which is the necessity of standing up to evil and the powerful social forces that make it difficult to do so. These social forces permeate individual minds and break down ego strength. Each main character struggles to find the inner resources they need to surmount shame (a much stronger emotion in Japanese culture than western cultures) and to take their proper place in the world. I'd give Wind Up Bird five stars for ambition and three for execution; it's too loose, too long and ultimately too vague in describing its characters' responses to defilement. There's certainly enough brilliance sprinkled throughout to make it worth reading, but be prepared to forgo catharsis.
August 01, 2008 | |
A Story with no Destination 
I can't ever remember reading a book that, on the one hand, describes so well the inanimate things, and yet, on the other hand, provides so little information about the characters themselves. Six hundred pages of "I don't know how I feel" or "There is no way I can explain it."
Toru Okada's (the main character) lacks a spine because his attitude toward life is one of surrender -- he's generally reactive, not proactive. We know virtually nothing about his wife, Kumiko, even though she is central to the story. We never find out why her brother, Noboru Wataya, is such a nasty SOB. We wonder what drives Malta and Creta Kano, who simply disappear from the story. May Kasahara, Toru's 16-year-old neighbor, is like a dog that chases its tail -- she'll still be a flake when she's 50 years old. Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka -- oops, same thing -- 100 questions about who they are, but only a couple of answers.
Leaving a little something to the reader's imagination advances a story; leaving huge holes for the reader to fill in makes for a story that never reaches a destination. It's kind of like the comment: if you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else. And that's how I feel about this book.
I understand that there is a battle between the defilers and the defilees. But I have no idea how the hostility began or how/if it was definitively resolved. The stories told by Lieutenant Mamiya are the best part of the book. In a word, they are fantastic.
I had hoped for a strong ending that would clean up this mess. Oh well, wishful thinking.
July 04, 2008 | |
A Fun Trip
I guess I like his books so much because there is always hope I will understand one of them. Even if I don't, I find pleasure in his writing and the fun of TRYING to make sense of them.
I don't know why this book by Murakami was so difficult for me to get through. It is no more obtuse than the others of his I have read, but I could only take this in small doses. I rarely re-read a book but I may give this one another try in a few years. As I said, there's always hope.
July 02, 2008 | |
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