The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel Paperback – September 1, 1998

The fiction, the fame and the personality of Haruki Murakami constitute an unprecedented triumph of contemporary literature for all of us to cherish and honor around the world. Devoted to a narrative poetics of a dream of another logic of existence, Murakami embodies a splendor of re-imagining audacity that is distinctly of the highest achievement of the artistic sensibility of our times. Murakami's body of texts is an epic dream of defamiliarizing storytelling of displacement of consciousness beyond waking life and known finalities.An assault of art and soul in a colossal ambition of meaning, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a towering performance of narrative consolation that can only be read in a trance as a text of bliss. Every chapter of the 3 Books and 68 Chapters of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a shuffling shade of a visionary dream in a dazzling palette of gnosis of a storyteller as seer. The story of a failed marriage is spun in breathtaking narrative invention as a surreal extravaganza of human fate in a gorgeous pastiche of voices, styles and genres panning human meaning from the gross to the sublime. Written by the only writer in the history of literature who is also a marathon runner, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is nothing short of a narrative marathon of total genius that cuts the ribbon of enlightenment.The cat of Toru Okada's wife Kumiko disappears in the opening pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and a search for the cat ensues that turns into a phantasmagoria of unsettlement of consciousness in eerie occurrences of borderless mutation of dream and reality of 607 marvelous pages. An ordinary cat disappears and along with it ordinariness itself. From the mesmerizing story that Murakami tells us we may infer that in searching for what we lose we may recover more than we lost because in our search we had the courage like Toru to lose who we ordinarily are and find who we are at "the core."In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the world is a "defiled" place. "Defilement" is a foundational error of the human self being split into two by a diabolic "power." Every major character in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Toru, Kumiko, Creta, Lieutenant Mamiya and Cinnamon) is differently split into two and differently searching for a lost wholeness. Noboru Wataya, the brother of Kumiko, personifies the sinister metastasis of "defilement" that spreads and invades as a glamorous "power" of seducing and splitting evilA perplexed loser, Toru seems an Everyman whom Murakami selects to search for meaning deeply and literally in a "well" and surrounds with saviors of the soul like Mr. Honda, May Kashara, Lieutenant Mamiya and Nutmeg Akasaka and saves almost fully. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle reads like a medieval Morality play retold as a contemporary magical allegory of a postmodern psychomachia. As it draws to a close after an epic spell of storytelling, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle convinces us that it has told an ancient tale of the perils of the soul in an evil world and the ultimate victory of Good over Evil in a hypnotic surreal plot with real characters and magical action and mythical perfume that is the most imaginative narrative contemplation of human fate in our times. The story of Toru is a surreal edition with Murakami's idiosyncrasies of imagination, enchantment of craft and majesty of wisdom of the eternal story of Everyman. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a secret almanac of the soul--the lost soul, the searching soul and the saved soul--as a postmodern magical novel of mad loveliness and aching wonder.The act of reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--moving from page to unfathomable page of an astonishing novel of voice after bewitching voice, mood after surprising mood, moment after mysterious moment and story after strange story of the encyclopedia of the human enigma--is its own incomparable meaning. However, if the reader cannot avoid asking at some point or the other of this fabulous script and the spell it casts what the writing and the reading of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle amount to, the answer can only be that it is about the ultimate human search for Murakami and his reader: saving the soul--that it is what Murakami has done in the way he knows best as an author to save his soul: by telling a story at the deepest recesses of an esoteric imagination and what we as readers ought to do in the way we know best as readers to save our soul: by losing ourselves in saving grace in the form of a novel of the highest generosity of narrative wisdom and compassion in contemporary literature. I doubt if anyone can read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle without choking in thanks for being saved in the magical opulence of imagination and wisdom and compassion of a transcendent novel of hell and heaven and the human soul by a storyteller as savior.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a mystery without a true solution. Know that I haven’t spoiled the book for you in any way by saying this. Not only is there no real solution, but also a solution isn’t even the point.The various, rather disparate elements of this story revolve around the central mystery like planets around a black hole. The planets never come together in a neat way, and the the black hole warps time and space so weirdly that relationships between things become flipped, like the merging sides of a Möbius strip. Occasionally, an element becomes absorbed into the mystery, never to be seen again.Take, for instance, the characters Malta and Creta Kano, two strange detective sisters employed to help the main character, Toru, an unemployed legal clerk, find his cat, and then his missing wife. The two sisters become involved not only in his case but also in the minutiae of his life, like the existential consultants in the movie I Heart Huckabees. The two sisters set to work, appearing into his life and disappearing out of it again like ghosts: at the top of a well, at the bottom of a well, at his house, from his living room, in a hotel room, and even in his dreams. Spoiler alert: they never help Toru find anything, at least ostensibly, unless you imagine them working in the background, keeping things moving. Eventually, they never appear again. But the cat shows up. Was that their work? Maybe. Does it ever matter? Not really. It’s not even clear the two women were real.Features of the present story merge with the past, only rearranged slightly, like in a David Lynch movie. An elderly veteran appears to Toru, telling a long war story about how in Mongolia he was forced to jump to the bottom of a deep, dry well to survive, only to be found and saved days later by a fellow soldier with psychic abilities. Eventually, Toru, while searching for his cat and missing his wife, finds a similar dried-up well near his house. What he does next adheres only to dream logic. He climbs to the bottom of the well to ruminate on his problems. Eventually, he too is trapped there for several days, only to find he has the ability to enter from there into a strange, liminal netherworld. He finds himself in a lightless hotel room and meets a menacing presence. As he tries to escape, he bruises his cheek. The bruise becomes like a permanent birthmark. Creta appears and saves him from the well, only to vanish again.After some time, Toru is then recruited by a mysterious wealthy woman to serve as a sort of psychological prostitute. He is blindfolded, and unseen female customers come to kiss his blue birthmark. This somehow alleviates their inner suffering. None of this makes any sense, of course, but you can’t stop reading anyway. The wealthy woman then reveals her own background. She grew up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where her father ran a zoo. His zookeeper was a man with the same blue birthmark on his face. The zookeeper was charged with murdering all the large carnivores before the zoo was abandoned by the Japanese army ahead of the advance of the Soviets, then himself died in the war.What is the link between the zookeeper and Toru? Maybe Toru is the zookeeper’s reincarnation. This only hinted at, but never confirmed. Maybe there is no logical connection, but a dreamlike connection that can only be illuminated from afar.Such are the many interlocking enigmas that power the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, part mystery, part romance, part war story, part political thriller, part magical realist fiction. But fantasy and science-fiction nerds beware: The book is relentlessly indifferent to clear explanations and logical resolutions. In order to appreciate the story, you have to embrace the mystery. Or cluster of mysteries.I liked the story and found it haunting and compelling, and in the end, despite any skepticism, I found myself caring about Toru and his missing wife and I was sad to say goodbye to them as I finished the book. There were a few issues I had with the book, though, which I generally have with all the Murakami books I’ve read so far. For one thing, the gore and sex are a bit much.But let’s start with the sex. There’s not a lot of it explicitly in the book, thankfully, but it implicitly permeates the story, usually from a male gaze. All the women are described by their sexual features and how well they look in their clothes, including a 15-year-old girl wearing a bathing suit while sunbathing in her back yard. I don’t care about cultural differences. This comes across as creepy and pedophilic. Also, Creta is seen nude on several occasions and is described as having an impeccable body, and it makes me think: just once in a Murakami novel I’d like to have a female character’s body be described as very normal but her personality as intriguing.Okay, now with the gore. There is a scene where the old veteran tells Toru a war story about how he and his squad are captured by Mongolian and Soviet soldiers who then force him to watch as they flay one of his fellow soldiers to death. The scene goes into extreme detail for several pages and is quite nauseating. Writers are usually told to show and not tell in their writing, but here is one part where I think the story could have done better with more telling and less showing. The scene is well written except for the fact that the author forgets that it’s a story told to Toru by the old veteran rather than to us by the author. Wouldn’t Toru have asked the veteran to spare him the gross details? Wouldn’t the veteran become too disturbed to continue with such detail himself? No, because Murakami is too infatuated with the violence to consider this possibility. This decision comes across as pulpy and sensationalist, causing the scene to cast a distracting stain almost to the middle of the book. You’re so nauseated by the scene that you find it difficult to absorb much else that comes afterward. I don’t think this scene belongs in this book at all, but in a separate book altogether about Japanese wartime experiences. Its shocking luridness contrasts too much against the subtle, murky nuances of the rest of the story.This points to the one way Murakami could improve the book. Remove all the wartime stories and put them into their own proper novel where they belong. The connections between Toru and past wars seem too emotionally far fetched anyway. This new war story book would be even more fascinating than the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It would directly address the unstated sense of accountability that underlies Japanese sentiment about the two world wars and would be more sincere. This is the story that Murakami really wants to make if he could, just for a moment, pause from writing clever, gimmicky, and self-indulgent surrealist stories about alienation, dreams, sex, fast food, cats, and underage girls.Don’t get me wrong. This is clearly the best novel he’s ever written. It’s quite engaging. But what this also means is that you won’t be missing much if you skip most of the others.

Inside Murakami, there is a deep well, from which he pulls up these stories.At the bottom of that well is not the devil or hell.But there is Boris the Manskinner.And Murakami makes him as real as you or me.