Customer Reviews

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

5 star:		(120)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you have just bought "After Dark," I wish you bon appetit. When you are finished the newest Murakami sensation, however, you must go back to this earlier, even more incredible work. All the haunting tropes of any good Murakami story are there (cooking, old jazz, cats, earlobes, cooking, missing people, detached sex and good coffee), but in their most distilled, brilliantly rendered form. The world of the Wind-Up Bird is haunting, confusing, dreamlike and wry. It is a rip-roaringly quiet story that meanders towards the end, but keeps you turning pages nontheless. There is a prolonged torture scene that may or may not take place at the bottom of a well, or is it the plains of Mongolia? An intriguing woman who may or may not be someone's missing wife keeps calling to have phone sex. A tornado occurs. You learn something about the fall of the Roman empire. You are often unsure where you are or why things are happening, but you keep turning pages because Murakami has cast such a spell on you and his strange world is as compelling as any soap opera. A fantastic read, in all senses of the word.

When I was 12, Madeleine L'Engle's fantasy, "A Wrinkle in Time," effected me in a way no other book did - bridging the gap between childhood stories and grown-up novels. Like "A Wrinkle in Time" the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a fantastic tale in which a certain amount of the story occurs in places that are not of this world. We are given to suspect that some of these places might be in the protagonist's mind, or, they might not be. Set in Tokyo, this is the story of a young married man named Toru Okada whose cat and wife both disappear (under different circumstances). The reader follows Toru as he searches for them both (as well as his search for "self"), and in the process encounters oddly "re"named mystics, an endearing if somewhat depressed teenage neighbor girl, an old war veteran with horrible memories from Japan's engagements in Manchuria, and a megalomaniacal brother-in-law (by far the scariest character in anything I've read in a long time). The tale gripped me and was a great read. Murakami does fantastic things with both the physical and psychological details and has a way of drawing in the reader to feel (s)he is in Toru's head.

I should start by saying that I usually like bizarre fiction. Well, "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" is certainly that. A "regular Joe" for the main character, surrounded by the weird and inexplicable - psychic sisters named after islands, a healer and her mute son (named after spices), a well with no water in it, and an alternative reality set in a hotel.

The beginning of the book sucks you in, written in a crisp, modern style, with no high-brow literary waffle. Very quickly you realise that something strange is happening to our "normal" protagonist, Toru Okada. The events don't seem to be connected in any way, but they are portrayed as clues, and you are batting for Toru to figure them out. The random, bizarre happenings make you excited, curious, desperate to read on.

So then you read on. And on. More strange characters and events get introduced. There are large forays into the Japanese occupation of Manchuria before WWII and gruesome stories of violence there. But still, you think (or rather hope, by now) that this will all be explained. Somehow. But alas, it isn't. And you begin to suspect that many of the things you thought were significant "clues", were actually just there to increase the "weird and quirky" factor.

At the end, several important people and occurances had just disappeared out of the novel (Malto and Creta Kano?), or were left hanging without explanation or resolve. I don't want the meaning of everything spelled out to me, I'm happy to use my imagination to figure some things out. But this book didn't even leave me with a skeleton on which to build my thoughts at the end. Only one of the themes (good vs. evil - how original) was resolved to my satisfaction.

Read Murakami's book for an introduction to his style, read it if the words "Japanese" and "bizarre" in combination sound good. But don't expect to finish it feeling contented.

Other reviewers have summarized the plot very well, so I will leave that out, and keep my comments short. This book reads like a No drama: full of ritualized, stylized drama hidden behind masks. In the end, you never really get inside the characters' lives; a successful novel draws you in, whether you want in or not. Partly, this is characteristic of Japan, circles within circles, barriers within barriers, but partly, I think the author is striving too hard for effect.

I really liked the book but it's so frustrating with all the loose ends. It's like a David Lynch movie, and I feel like I wasn't equipped with the proper skills to thoroughly interpet the symbolism and meaning of the book. Someone perfectly summed up all the dissatisfing points that I would like more clarification on:

"Despite the fact that I enjoyed reading this novel very much and think very highly of it, I do feel somewhat unsatisfied with a number of plot elements in the intertwining stories that I think were not properly explained.

1.) Regarding the nature of Noboru Wataya's dark power, which Kumiko and her sister were also tangled up with: It seems to me Noboru Wataya is a sort of black magician who has learned to harness this innate ability, and yet it is hinted at that the entire Wataya bloodline is somehow affected by this evil power. This evil entity is central to the plotline (It was in some way responsible for Kumiko's horrifying streak of extramarital [affairs] which in turn triggered her disappearance), yet the phenomenon surrounding it is kept extremely vague. This mysterious something was almost certainly behind Noboru Wataya's defilement of both Kumiko's sister and Creta Kano, but as for the purpose for these defilements we are kept in the dark. When Toru finally does battle with this evil entity, it still is kept extremely vague and we never get to see it. I found myself wishing Toru would ignore Kumiko's requests and turn the flashlight on it, just for curiosity's sake.

2.) Regarding the story of the young boy who I assume is Cinnamon who hears the wind up bird and then proceeds to witness two shady looking characters burying a certain something on his property. Judging from his descriptions of these two shady characters - one tall and one short - I can only guess that they are indeed Noboru Wataya and Ushikawa. In the dream sequence the boy experiences after watching the real life events, the buried object is a human heart, which leads me to question #3...

3.) Regarding Nutmeg's Husband and Cinnamon's Father, who died in a certain hotel room under very bizarre circumstances. Nutmeg confirms that the assailants removed several of his organs and smeared his blood on the walls, etc. Again, I can only guess that Noboru Wataya, Ushikawa, and the evil being are involved here too. But there is never an explanation as to the connection between Cinnamon's father having his heart removed in a type of ritual killing, and Cinnamon Witnessing two men burying something which in the dream state is revealed to be a live beating human heart, shortly afterwards resulting in the loss of Cinnamon's voice.

4.) Regarding the dark hotel. I find myself wishing this place was explained a bit more. Who is the No Face man, or the "hollow man" as he refers to himself, and why does he decide to ally himself with Toru? Who is the whistling waiter? What is the significance of room 208? The dark hotel is obviously the domain of the dark entity with which Noboru Wataya is aligned. I can speculate that this is some type of spiritual prison maintained for Kumiko by Noboru Wataya, but I find myself wishing that the reason for this place's existence were more clearly defined. "

Does anyone have insight into these points? I would really like to read someone's in depth analysis of this book because I'm curious and frusterated as hell!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my first Murakami, and through the first half of the book I had every reason to be impressed and excited by its promise of a rewarding and thought-provoking read. Indeed, in the early going I was mesmerized by the multifarious cast of quirky characters and the somewhat kooky plot lines, and additionally, the unbalanced mood and the underlying tension kept me eagerly focused towards the explanations and resolutions which were surely coming. I was willing, if not thrilled to leave the main storyline time after time to read and absorb the lengthy historical chapters, secure in the knowledge that by book's end, the interconnectedness of it all would be made abundantly clear. However, the second half of this book left me far more disappointed than the first had gotten me interested. Let's get this out of the way first so there is no misunderstanding: Murakami is, without a doubt, a gifted and interesting storyteller with a unique voice and an engagingly oblique manner of limning his plot. But his technical skills and economical prose style notwithstanding, he is either the laziest or most arrogant author I've ever come across. After causing us to feel so strongly about the predicaments and machinations of so many characters, and making us wonder about the resolution of and connection between so many story lines, and schooling us in a good dose of Japanese, Manchurian and Mongolese history, and escorting us through a variety of worlds, netherworlds, cyberworlds, dimensions, dreamscapes and cityscapes, we are left dangling in mid-air. Absolutely nothing we are interested in having revealed to us is ever explained or made clear. And 600 pages of unresolved set-ups is no small matter. We have been on the receiving end of long and ponderous expositions, all of which are interwoven with mysterious shadow-plays and subtle implications: What are Noboru Wataya's strange powers? how do Malta and Creta Kano ultimately tie into everything? -and please tell us why we had to hear about that red hat so many times if it didn't end up being important to the story... and what the heck is really happening at the strange sessions where Nutmeg and Cinnamon offer rich women the opportunity of fondling Toru's skull in a dark dressmaking room? where on earth had Mackerel been? was Kumiko the mysterious woman in the netherworld hotel room? and why did May Kasahara run away from home only to start writing Toru an endless stream of letters in which she refers to him as "Mister Wind-Up Bird" every other sentence (o.k., so it's cute...), all this in-between the times she is making men's wigs in the countryside 15 hours a day? and what is the significance of the strange guy with the bat? and why did Toru Okada share the trait of a throbbing blue mark on the face with Nutmeg's zookeeper father? So after 600 pages we don't get any answers to anything, and meanwhile most of the characters whose unresolved predicaments we have been wondering about for quite some time now, have either disappeared from the plot entirely, or been transmogrified into less-palatable versions of themselves. Some simply flit back into the story for a brief moment before the end mercifully comes. We are, shockingly, left without any of the answers we have been so eagerly reading towards, left to fend for ourselves with our own imaginations, abandoned to perform what was essentially the author's main responsibility to his readership. If we are not owed either the answers he has made us wonder about, or at least some reason for having asked the questions in the first place, what are we doing with our noses buried 600 pages deep in this book? In my opinion, the end result of this type of coy, shadowboxing style of writing is pointless storytelling. These are not the type of deeply- conceived characters with fascinating complexities, where it would be interesting and rewarding to ponder the various sorts of ways that life and fate might have affected them had the story resolved this way or that. It is the very situations and the bizarre potentialities of this story which imbue it with interest, and I felt bamboozled after caring enough to wonder what it all meant, only to have Murikami stop the engines in total limbo. Frankly, in this vein, I think Murakami missed his golden opportunity towards the end of the book when Toru Okada is morphed back from the strange hotel room to the bottom of the flooding well. As the well fills with water and our hero is paralyzed from the abject exhaustion of just having traveled through time, space and hotel room walls, we are not sure what will become of him, but we fear the worst. Now comes the brilliantly-named chapter, "The Story Of The Duck People"!!! Holy cow, here was Murakami's chance! As long as our author is leaving it all up to us anyway, I think he should have drowned Toru in the well and made this Duck People chapter describe a bizarre other-dimensional world, which is some kind of weird afterlife place, where everyone from the book ends up as half-duck folk, and where because of this strange new "reality" the whole plot has a chance to be explained and resolved. I'm being serious! Before I knew what this chapter actually was - alas, just a final May Kasahara letter in which she describes the antics of some real-life ducks who live by her wig factory *yawn*, I had some STRONG chills running up and down my spine. The image evoked by those weird words, "The Story Of The Duck People," made me think that Murakami had fooled us until the very last moment, blindsiding us with the unexpected coup de grace, succeeding richly at the precise moment when all seemed hopelessly unresolvable. And such is the fine line which writers walk... In "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," in my opinion Murakami fell off the high wire, and didn't build himself a net sufficient to save himself and his book from a failed try at greatness.

We can all marvel at the sheer creativity Marakami wields in this book. But be warned, all ye fans of straightforward fiction.

Sure, it's fun to read. The main character is a kind of average-joe underacheiver whose life is thrown into a kind of cartoon-choas. But like free jazz, the virtuoso solos lead nowhere but confusion and . . .

In the end, unanswered questions abound. We never really figure out what the sinister "tendency" is that overcomes the main character's wife and turns his life upside down.

It's got something to do with sex and human brutality - but the plot is never resolved so we have little more than a sketch of a bizarre and twisted tale of modern Japan and the lingering legacy of WWII.

I'd recommend this book to those interested in modern Japan and to fans of literary art who might dig deeper into the book's symbolism.

I love this book. I hate this book. That would be the best way to describe how I feel about it. I don't think it's possible to explain exactly why I feel this way without revealing certain things about the book, so please be advised that this review contains some SPOILERS.

This is the second Murakami book I've read (first one being "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and...", which I loved). Without a doubt, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a real page-turner, but unfortunately, this page-turning doesn't really lead anywhere, which is why this is such a disappointment. Questions remain unanswered, characters vanish into thin air, things happen without as much as a hint at explanation.

Don't get me wrong: I don't expect every question to be answered completely. Sometimes using your imagination works best. I can accept that there is no explanation to things like what "tendency" it was exactly that made Kumiko disappear, what powers Noboru Wataya had, how he used them, or even how Toru got the mark... The general idea is there, and that's enough. It is not described what "work" Nutmeg and Cinnamon do, but we can use our imagination. It is not explained what "netherworld" Toru traveled to from the well, but we can use our imagination. Something to do with subconscious, human nature, the nature of reality and the consequences of our actions. OK, I can live with that. But in the end, simply TOO MUCH is left to our imagination.

I couldn't help but feel that I was reading about the same people that I read about in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I suppose I have to read more to say for sure, but at this point I feel that Murakami's characters are very one-dimensional, and they act and speak in strange, irrational ways most of the times. Perhaps part of it is my having a Western mindset, but something tells me that's not it. Toru Okada is described as "everyman", but tell me, what "everyman" normally climbs down an old well to sit in the dark for hours on end? What sixteen-year-old virgins normally lick thirty-year-old men on the cheek without much explanation or reason? What husband usually remains absolutely emotionless after finding out that his wife of six years has misteriously disappeared? Easterner or Westerner, I don't buy this as usual human behavior. And, given that this is a first-person narrative, it's especially odd that the narrator rarely reveals any emotions. Is it done of purpose to keep up guessing, or is it the problem of Murakami's writing's style?

Brace yourself, the questions are only beginning. How did Toru get the mark and why? Who was the singer with the baseball bat, and why did he attack Toru? How did the cat manage to survive for over a year of missing, and why did it come back after all? What was Leutenant Mamiya's role in all this? What were Malta and Creta Kano's roles in all this? Why did Kumiko change all of a sudden after six years of marriage? What happened to Cinnamon as a child that made him stop speaking, and what was the significance of that bizarre "What happened in the night" chapter? Why wasn't Toru getting May Kasahara's letters? Who wrote the Chronicles stored in Cinnamon's computer and why? Why was Nutmeg's husband murdered in such a vilent and bizarre way? Who was the anonymous woman that kept calling Toru throughout the book? Who were the "holow man" and the whistling waiter? The questions are endless.

There's a saying about fiction, "If there's a gun sitting in the corner, by the end of the story it must fire". In this case, that isn't true. We keep on hearing about things that seem to bear some great significance - like Malta Kano's red hat, or the tune from The Thieving Magpie. But in the end we realize that those things are there just because it sounds cool. That is the biggest problem I have with the book. There are lots of things in it that could be edited out without having any impact on the book as a whole. The war stories are very well written, I'll give Murakami that. But take Boris the Manskinner, for example - WHY was it even there? What's the point? Take out "Creta Kano's long story", take out May Kasahara's letters, take out Cinnamon's incident when he was a child... None of those things had any point or explained anything. I'm not saying they shouldn't be there - no, I understand that the events of WWII, for instance, are tied in to our time. What I don't understand is why did Murakami had to present so many complelling characters only to have them disappear without a trace as the story unfolded.

A lot of people say that Murakami is a genius and if you didn't "get" his books then you're simply not smart enough. As an artist, I see this attitude a lot in art as well. Here's the truth: *people often say they "got it" even when they haven't, for fear of appearing stupid.*

Perhaps I really am not smart enough to "get it". But the truth is, this book made me feel like the story was written one chapter at a time - i.e., that Murakami in fact did not have the foggiest where it was going, and how it would end.

I take my hat off for Murakami's ambitiousness, imagination and vivid writing style. But to me it remains questionable whether he is truly a genius trying to convey some vastly significant message with his books (which, consequently, only a genius can truly understand, and I don't claim to be one). More often I get this very strong feeling that he is merely a very CLEVER writer who is very skilled at making a bunch of nonsense sound important and significant. Either way, I won't deny that what he does is entertaining. So I'll definitely be reading more of him.

Toru Okada is in the midst of much more than a mid-life crisis. He quit his legal job and has yet to search for a new position. His wife, Kumiko, has been acting out of character and is fretting about their lost cat. To top it all off, an unknown woman has been calling him on the phone and is making very suggestive conversation.

I listened to the Naxos Audiobook version read by Rupert Degas. Great job on the various characters. I had no trouble telling when characters changed. At 26 hours, this is a very long story, though it seemed as though it was several novellas all linked together by common elements of flow and water.

Mr. Murakami has put together a most unlikely group of characters. Right from the first, I didn't like Kumiko's brother , Noboru Wataya. He didn't seem to have any human qualities. More a logic machine than something alive. May Kasahara was a gem. She was that precocious teen that had a question about everything and wanted a true answer. I looked forward to her appearance in the story. I think that my favourite character was Lieutenant Mamiya. When he told a story, I wanted to pull over to the side of the road and just listen. I didn't want to have to pay attention to the traffic; I just wanted to listen. His stories were fascinating and quite likely could have been true.

It was interesting that while Toru was trying to hang onto his marriage, all sorts of other females kept intruding into his life. May, the unusual physic sisters Malta and Creta and the mysterious Nutmeg. With no attempt at enticing them, all these women seemed to flock toward him. Why?

All in all, I found this an unusual book. It kept coming back to 'flow'. That un-resolved issues in Toru's life had interrupted his 'flow' and that until he corrected them, his life would not be settled. I would have had a hard time reading a paper version of this book. It wasn't something I could listen to in huge chunks of time, but rather for shorter periods, with lots of time to digest what had happened in the various chapters. If you have tried to read the book and found it hard to stick with, give the audio book a try in smaller bits. It worked for me.

First, the good: This is a highly readable book. I started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle about 6 weeks ago, and read it through to the end. Also good: The story is complex and multi-layered, and the action never flags. Now for the bad: Murakami writes this book almost entirely in the passive voice. This can be very effective when describing action sequences, but it is less effective when describing the main character's thoughts. Also, the main character is so riddled with doubts that he seldom understands when he is in the "real" world (i.e. the world we currently inhabit) and a dream or subconscious world. Another issue I have with this book is Murakami's overuse of simile's - specifically, overuse of the words "kind of" and "like". I prefer reading books where the author describes things as they are, not what they might be, "sort of are", or are "kind of like". While some might say this adds to the book's level of intrigue and sense of mystery, I got the feeling the author (and through him the protagonist, Toru Okada) was simply unwilling or unable to develop the ideas proposed in the book. Having said that, the story itself and the questions it asks are intriguing enough on their own to keep me reading through to the last page. I recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle if you're looking to read a book that holds your attention all the way through with good story and pacing, even if the book as a whole leaves you with more questions than answers.