[.ca] The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (ISBN 0679775439)

From 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

Wind-Up Bird has no spring:
Do you read for pain or pleasure, entertainment or enlightenment, to pass the time or punish yourself? I have enjoyed everything else I have read by Haruki Murakami, but reading THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE was a chore. I kept waiting for it to gain momentum, but it never did. There are portions of the book that are engaging, but mostly it crawls along covering the mundane minute-to-minute happenings of the narrator and protagonist. How many people fill their journals with what they have for lunch? Some of the most memorable parts of the book are the narrator's buying packages of tofu and fresh vegetables or of his book reading. He also seems to be quite fond of beer and fish. The characters are superficially interesting. Malta Cano is a spiritual counselor of sorts who wears a red vinyl hat. Her sister, Creta, is a sexual counselor. A man gets his skin masterfully peeled off during a tortuous interview. There is another man who doesn't talk and just doesn't want to. Yet another man is a powerful politician and economist who is also an incubus. Doesn't that sound fascinating? You might think so but there is very little magic in the book. The one character that elicits sustained interest is the unkempt "chubby little frog with a bald head," the creepy assistant of the incubus, the narrator's brother in-law. To make a short story long, I found the book a grind to read and am stunned that I cannot find a single neutral review, much less another negative one. Every other review I've read of this book lauds it as a clasic of modern fiction, a "Kafkaesque tour de force," and other such academic blather. I have had to force myself through many books in my life for the sake of academics and usually found some reward in doing so. Don't bother waiting for the reward in reading "WIND-UP BIRD." The reader ends up like Sisyphus: rolling one's interest to the top of each chapter only to find yourself again at the bottom.

This will become your favourite Murakami novel:
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.

Not all questions need answers:
and not all answers need to be spelled out. The comments left here about unanswered themes and untidy threads might indicate a possible misunderstanding. The "clues" referred to in one reviewers comments are indeed real, there is no "weird and quirky" superficiality in this novel. Sometimes things not obvious are the most rewarding on deeper penetration. Characters do not just "disappear," they are absorbed. If at first you don't get it, it doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't make sense; maybe you just don't get it, and maybe if you ponder it you still will. This is great and profound literature, and a page turner as well, with everything happening on multiple levels. Great characters, fascinating developments, deep undercurrents, terrifying and yet so much fun. Like a lot of great and lasting art, you just gotta let it cook. This is a book that rewards.

Entertaining, quirky, and unconsciously dark.:
If you like stories, this book is full of them. The stories are arranged in this way: protagonist meets a mysterious stranger; mysterious stranger tells a mysterious tale; we're not sure why. Toru Okada is out of a job. His cat's gone missing, his wife seems on her way out as well, and he's got little to do these days besides clean the house and cook meals. Still, the phone keeps ringing so we're not bored yet. There's the young sunbathing girl down the street, the sexy voice on the phone, and a couple of bizarre women with strange mental powers and even stranger names. Sensibly enough, Toru takes a sojourn at the bottom of an abandoned well, where another world seems gradually to assert itself from inside a consciousness even he can hardly understand. Unfortunately, it's way too long.

An Amazing Book!:
I was directed to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by two friends. After hearing so much about them I picked up the novel expecting to be instantly blown away. Instead I was lured into a captivating and engaging story. Murakami has an amazing talent of writing descriptively, and not overwhelmingly. He paints clear pictures, and introduces entertaining and interesting characters. This novel is full of unique characters and profound insights that are played off as little moments. The novel follows a man named Toru Okada who's life becomes increasingly complicated after his wife and his cat leave him. The reason I kept reading the novel was because of these strange occurrences, but they were written in a most ordinary way. The character knew they were odd, the reader did also, but the writing gave no indication of oddities. This is what I enjoyed, the mystical that was present in these ordinary situations, and because of or perhaps due to the ordinary surroundings the mystical seemed ordinary. My favorite character was May Kashara, a young girl who was the neighbor of Toru who after a short introduction when Toru spoke about a bird who sounded as though he had a wind-up spring, called him "Mr. Wind-Up Bird". My favorite scenes were the war scenes (although they are very brutal and violent, my imagination went crazy and I was appreciative of the medium of writing where I was in control, instead of a film) and the water well scenes, which were cleverly executed and described. There was a part where Toru promised himself he wouldn't look at his watch and then all he could think about was the watch and the time, and it was described to a T and I was amazed at how well Murakami described the human animal. Murukami's characters are likeable, and each of them are different and well-developed. As the novel continues past strange phone calls to baseball bats and water wells, it became harder for me to concentrate on my life. I simply wanted to read the book until its finish. When I reached the last hundred pages of the book, I took my time. I didn't want to say goodbye to May Kashara or Toru Okada, the characters were so vivid and sweet that I didn't want to finish the novel. I did, however, and the end did not leave me short-changed, but instead was just as an end should be. Not too much and not too little. I would have to say that all in all, Murakami has an incredible skill for balance. He never gives too much or too less, and the novel progresses wonderfully. I would recommend this novel to everyone. But try it for yourself! Pick up a copy! Another book I need to recommend -- very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition" by Richard Perez, an exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.