Customer Reviews

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Naxos Complete Classics)

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Many of the previous reviews do a great job of discussing this novel, and I will not repeat that discussion here.

But what the previous reviews do not mention is that the American publishers, Knopf, forced Murakami and his translator, Jay Rubin, to significantly abridge the original Japanese text. The casual reader would have no way of knowing this, and, indeed, I only noticed because I was reading alternating chapters of the book in English and Russian translations. Half-way through the novel, entire chapters suddenly started disappearing from the English-language text. Puzzled, I went back to the copyright page of the English-language edition, where, for the first time, I noticed the cryptic notation that the book was not only translated but also "adapted from the Japanese."

How much of the original text was "adapted" away? I don't read Japanese, but, based on a comparison with my Russian-language translation, which appears to be complete (no Russian publisher would commit such a travesty on an award-winning novel), it seems that something like 15-20% of the text has been cut. For those of you who find the English-language text of the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" choppy, or puzzling, or seemingly incomplete, at least some of the blame lies at the feet of the American publishers who decided, unilaterally, that American readers cannot handle a long book.

Anyway, the upshot is that if you can comfortably do so, try to read the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" in a non-English translation. Or, if you can't, demand that Jay Rubin's original and complete English-language translation be published.

Another reviewer has mentioned that far from being a scattered collection of independent incidents strung together by the coincidence of the central character's involvement, Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" is unified by means of its insistence on the problem of evil and what to do about it. Surely this is moving towards a clear understanding of the novel.

Evil, though, is a such a culturally grounded concept. Is evil sin? Maybe in monotheistic cultures, but I think in Murakami's novelistic universe--and this is a recurring feature of many discussions of Japanese religion, culture, and art--a more insightful way of comprehending evil is as "defilement," and this is the term Jay Rubin uses in his translation time and again. Defilement is what ties every character together: some inner filth that each character is trying to purge in some way. May Kasahara's idea of the physical manifestation of death as an oozy gray thing is the clearest picture we have of that unrelenting ghost that haunts everyone intersecting with Toru Okada's life. It is not regret or guilt. It is not emotional scarring. It is a sickening tangible object poisoning a person's life and threatening to overwhelm it. It must be washed off, or it will destroy whatever it comes in contact with.

Because defilement is such a defining feature of the work, it functions to create two broad sets of characters: the defilers and the defiled, where Kumiko's brother (Noboru Wataya) is the archetype of the defiler and Kumiko herself the archetype of the defiled. Confusion arises and the border between the two sets becomes blurred because the nature of defilement is to spread, and once Kumiko herself becomes defiled, she spreads that to those around her, principally to the central character, her husband Toru.

The third character type is found in Toru, whose beautiful quality is to absorb all the defilement, find a way to stop the spread of it, and then to wash it away, to expunge it in the final defeat of Noboru Wataya. Toru's beautiful quality is not easily won, though. The whole of "Wind-up Bird" tells of the immensely difficult quest for it, an encountering of many different faces of defiler and defiled, a repeated tasting of others' defilements, in order to learn the method of purification.

In a sense, then, "Wind-up Bird" is a classic love triangle, but it has been made archetypal: the defiled is fought over between the defiler and the purifier. Because of its reduction to the archetypal, all defiled characters are functionally the same, and all defilers are functionally the same. Malta Kano and Creta Kano, May Kasahara and Lieutenant Mamiya are all defiled; Noboru Wataya and the Russian intelligence officer, the woman on the phone and the man with the baseball bat are all defilers. Faces shift; functions remain the same. In every story, Toru is fighting for Kumiko, trying to wash out the defilement she is letting herself be destroyed by. In every story, Noboru Wataya is reaching out in every direction, to taint everything with his evil (defiling) intelligence.

Once the flimsy physical borders between these characters are down, the focus of the novel takes on a focused, white-hot intensity. It is almost as if the fire of it is so scorching that Murakami had to cloak it in an array of different facades. Also, by giving so many faces to the defiler and defiled, he insures that the reader will respond to one of them. One of the defilements will connect and lead to self-identification, and in this lies the great humanity of the novel, the thing that makes it so very intriguing for so many readers, the thing that makes it more than just a good yarn.

In the end, Toru is no closer to Kumiko. But he has fully become himself. He has merged with his unshakable purpose. Water flows unhindered in the long-dry well.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins with a pot of spaghetti about to boil over as the voluntarily out of work protagonist, Toru Okada parries an anonymous obscene phone call just in time to receive a call from his wife, Kumiko, who orders him to begin a search for the couple's missing cat, Noboru Watanabe, named for her politically important brother. If the above sounds pretty breathless and confusing, you'll be surprised to learn there's a lot, lot more. The lost Noboru Watanabe is simply the device Murakami uses to set this densely-layered, often bizarre book in motion.

Toru's search for the lost cat introduces him to the novel's other characters, who move in and out of his life and lead him into an ever-enlarging labyrinth. There is the Lolita-like May Kasahara, Toru's neighbor, who regards the thirty year old Toru as "interesting" and calls him Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Even more bizarre, are the two sisters and psychics, Malta and Creta Kano, who invade Toru's dreams as well as his reality. (After having psychic sex with Toru, Creta later appears naked in his bed, and, as to how she got there, she doesn't have a clue.)

In the meantime, Toru's wife, Kumiko disappears, much to the delight of her politician brother, who detests Toru and vice versa. And, by the way, the politician brother just happened to have raped Creta!

When Toru learns Kumiko has left him for a man who's better in bed, he's surprisingly surprised, although he shouldn't be and neither should we; signs of her adultery have been rampant.

With nothing else to do about the matter, Toru lowers himself to the bottom of an empty well, the better to meditate on his unpredictable predicament. But May takes the ladder away and three days later, after Creta has rescued him, Toru emerges with a blue mark on his face, one that gives him special healing powers.

At this point things really become confused.

Toru's mark of healing is recognized by Nutmeg Akasako as being similar to the one her father bore. Lt. Mamiya has also entered the story, recounting a fantastic tale of wartime espionage that just happens to involve time spent at the bottom of a well!

Much in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle develops around the elements of chance, destiny and responsibility. Characters drift in and out of Toru's life, yet each pulls him into his or her own world.

Some may think this novel tends to digress a bit too much, but that's all a part of Murakami's trademark, for he's well-known to prefer freefalling through his work rather than planning it out carefully. The result, however, is a cumulative effect of bizarre happenings and black comedy, with Toru being the integral link. Although a recurring theme in Murakami's oeuvre is that of childishness, Toru is, at times, both childish in his innocence and cynical in his outlook regarding his fellow man.

Toru is a protagonist who sees, hears, feels and reacts, rather than does. He attracts a large assortment of unusual characters rather than actively pursuing them. Murakami's prose has a distinctive "Western" feel and, although his characters are Japanese people, living in Japan, they could be anyone, anywhere.

Those looking for the more traditional Japanese novel should look to other authors instead, most notably Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai.

Surreal and sprawling, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a detective story, a history lesson and a satire. It is a big book that unites Murakami's signature themes of alienation, dislocation and nameless fears in the voice of Toru, aka, "Everyman." It's an enormous accomplishment that, believe it or not, all starts with a pot of spaghetti and one lost cat.

I should say that half way through The Wind-Up Bird, I read over some reviews to get a feel for what other people think. Unfortunately, many were intent on giving the story away. Quite simply, it is best not to know the story line in advance. This is not a book one could possibly rationalize and understand without having first experienced it. More to the point, such analysis will only detract from the experience of reading the book in the first place.

Encountering The Wind-Up-Bird Chronicle is like encountering a delicate origami crane for the first time. From the very beginning, you wonder how it got in that shape. You wish to know the secret of its structure. To do so, you must work at it slowly and carefully, undoing each fold with the utmost care and caution in order to discover the pain-staking sequence that led to its beautifully complex and elegant shape. Reading The Wind-Up-Bird is like unfolding a bigger, more-complex crane -- so complex in fact that you might be confused when the entire thing is laid out in front of you, creases spanning the entire page. If you are like me, you might spend weeks or months trying to figure out how to put that crane back together.

Without giving too much away, allow me to share some of the things that engaged and enwrapped me:

* The possibility that every experience in our life contains deep and profound philosophical meaning.

* Discovering the mysterious nature of life and the vagaries of chance fate; realizing that the place we inhabit and the family we are born into are givens that guide us, not things we can ultimately choose.

* Questioning the extent to which we can fully understand other people -- from the man why walks by us in the street to the significant other who sleeps on the other side of our bed.

* Realizing the deep and intricate continuity between dreams and waking life. More to the point, discovering how the two realities affect each other and blend together in a seamless fabric called reality.

* The possibility that our most profound insights about life might only be found in the bottom of a dry well in a deep meditative, trance-like state.

* Finally, the book made realize that a story is quite possibly the best tool with which to convey historical reality. Sounds strange, I'm sure, but after doing a lot of deep research about Japan's involvement in Manchuria during WWII, Murakami is perhaps in the best possible position to give voice to what is often omitted from non-fiction historical texts, simply because history (which is almost infinite) is never fully uncovered or told by finite, fallible and imperfect historians.

Hmm, I suppose I should discuss names a bit too. All Japanese names have meaning as written in kanji. Tanaka means 'in the rice field'. Kobayashi means 'small forest'. O'Hara means 'big field'. It wasn't until the entrance of Mr. Ushikawa (bull river) that I remembered this and began to wonder how each character's name was written in the original Japanese version. Indeed, Mr. Ushikawa's speaks openly about the significance of his name at one point. As he says, he sort of grew to fit the name, instead of the name growing to fit him.

The main character's name is also significant, but more so when he comes to known as "Mr. Wind-Up-Bird." (I'll leave that one to you.) Mr. Wind-Up-Bird and Mr. Ushikawa made me realize that I might be missing some important context, so I decided to research every name that appears in the book. It wasn't hard for a man in my position. After buying a Japanese edition in Tokyo, I spent a good hour talking over the names with a kind English-sensei that just happened to be handy. From this, I was able to flesh out many hidden nuances. One of the character's names, a certain Noboru Wataya, turned out to be of critical significance.

Noboru Wataya's first name was written in katakana in the Japanese version, but any Japanese reader would know that "noboru" has two corresponding kanji: One means "to rise" and the other means "to climb." The kanji representing "to rise" has the further significance of pictographically representing a rising sun, and thus in Japan it is often referred to "taiyo noboru" -- taiyo meaning sun. Although written without a corresponding kanji, Noboru implies something moving up -- quite possibly sun itself, and thus the very symbol of the Japanese people.

The last name, Wataya, appears in kanji, and it simply means cotton valley. Not just any valley, though. It has the connotation of a hidden, secret or mystical valley. The image of shrouded Shangri-La comes to mind. While reading the book, it is important remember that Noboru Wataya might be rising or climbing something in both the literal and figurative sense of the term. Is he rising in the social ranks, or perhaps climbing the social ladder? Again, I'll leave that to you. Of particular note, though, is the fact that Wataya is not a common Japanese name. According to my source, it is extremely rare, if anybody of Japanese origin bears the name at all. All of this overlaps very with the myterious and unique character of Noboru Wataya himself, so I was glad to have gotten the scoop.

I will say no more about the book, because it is simply too complex to unravel in a review like this. If you want to know whether or not the book is for you, try reading into it for a good ten minutes. It is amazing how much you can get from ten short minutes if you really invest your attention. I hope you find this book as intoxicating and rewarding as I did. Feel free to write me and let me know either way. I'm good like that.

This book was one of the weirdest and finest books I have read. The experiences were a surreal convoluted epic that I wish hadn't ended. The story starts off simply enough about Mr. Okada losing his cat, then his wife, and then finally his own mind. In a bizarre fashion all of the odd characters and situations that Okada finds himself in are all related in some way which is eventually summed together at the end.

What was most fascinating is the elements of Buddhism, the search for nothingness to really get in touch with one's consciousness. Okada finds the strength and ability to achieve `emptiness' at the bottom of a dark well. In the well, the author puts us in touch with the most bizarre adventures in Okada's consciousness.

This is the first time I have read a book by a Japanese author. Just as each culture has their own unique style of writing (the Russians with their incredibly complex characters) this Japanese author had a wonderful surreal simplicity to the writing that made you want to never put the book down. I highly recommend the book - it is incredibly easy to read, but so complex in thought. I have every intention of reading more of Murakami!

There aren't too many writers who can deal with metaphysical issues in fiction as deftly as Murakami can. A part of the reason is Murakami's style of narrative. His prose is more American than most modern American writers. Murakami is a self-professed admirer of Raymond Carver's laconic prose and he translated Carver's stories in Japan. He also has an affinity for American hard-boiled noir fiction, and the cool, ironic first-person narrative infused with laid back, unassumingly spare prose makes Murakami's stories strangely approachable.

But more immediately impressionable upon a reader is the sheer agility of his imagination and his fearless courage. Not only does Murakami tackle stories of high improbability, he succeeds with all the virtuosity in the world. In
"The Wind-Up...", there's a main story of Toru's quest to find his vanished wife, and surrounding the mysterious disappearance are labyrinthine subplots that traverse different eras and parallel worlds. Hats off to Murakami for making the stories somehow believable! There are surreal characters that appear and disappear in Toru's life, such as the prescient Kano sisters who operate through dreams, Nutmeg and her son Cinnamon who deal with the affluent women and help them with strange 'spiritual' ailments, Boris the Manskinner, etc etc...

The stories of these characters all have to do with a metaphysical search of some kind of 'truth' that is always apparent in Murakami's fiction. For instance, the well that Toru climbs down into serves as a portal that leads to a world where dreams and alternate personalities exist. Murakami does an eerie job of making the 'unreality' seem more real and pertinent than the actual world in the novel. It disconcerts the readers and makes us question the reality of the world that we take for granted.

It is true that Murakami leaves a lot of plot elements and questions tied up and unanswered, and a lot of characters disappear without a trace. But Murakami's project is not in dispensing solutions, but in calibrating our sights to see, or strain to see what happens at the fringes of reality. It's a testimony to Murakami's mastery that the horrors, lusts, sadness, and yearning in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" are more palpable and immediate than in any other fiction I've read recently. The characters, especially May Kahasara, the teenage girl, come to life and stay in your memory long after reading. And for all his off-hand, disarming humor and narrative style, Murakami's metaphors cut to the heart with a frightening accuracy and have the power to invoke whatever world he wants to describe with unflinching emotional honesty.

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" deals with Toru's loss of everything he had come to believe to be the founded and accepted fact of his life. Through his tale, and his quest to regain his life, the readers will come to realize that there's something much bigger at stake than an individual quest. It's of a nation crippled by the memories of its past(Japan), and for the identity of the mankind as well. A terribly ambitious project for Murakami, and he pulls it off with an aplomb. You'll come away from the reading of this book impressed, and more importantly, deeply moved.

Haruki Murakami writes an excellent book. Often his plots are cleverly twisted, incorporating allegory, social-commentary and political satire: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is no exception to the rule. This convoluted, Kafkaesque epic is perhaps one of the best novels Murakami has ever written. It is a metaphysical portrait of a man searching for identity in a time of social and political crisis: war, sexuality, an election, a man-skinner and a missing cat are the fiery ingredients that make this book so intriguing. Ultimately, Murakami offers a truly unique experience that challenges the reader both intellectually and emotionally: it's a one of a kind novel.

The plot revolves around the humble Toru Okada, a mild-mannered man whose wife is becoming more distant from him every day. The book opens when he receives an explicit phone call from a woman that seems to know a lot about him... also, his cat has disappeared. These two events (especially the phone call) act as catalysts for Toru to embark on a spiritual, metaphysical journey of self-discovery (I'll concede that that sounds a little cliched) that finds him in the middle of a dangerous political situation. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is an exciting, challenging novel that keeps the reader in suspense right to the very end.

Murakami writes extremely fluently and his words translate to English seamlessly with the help of translator Jay Rubin. His writing is subtly humorous, allegorical, yet uncomplicated. It is the culmination of his many literary devices that makes The Wind Up Bird Chronicle such a masterwork. Ultimately, this is a novel that delivers a rollicking story and a challenging text: quite a rare find these days, in the almost infinite supply of novels that makes finding a truly excellent book so hard to locate. Brilliant work Mr. Murakami.

(For further Murakami DEFINITELY read "A Wild Sheep Chase" as well as "Norwegian Wood")

This book was highly recommended to me by a friend of mine, so one day I picked it up and began to read. I was propelled into a journey that was both mundane and surreal in the same threads. The story started slowly, and yet it was at once fascinating.

Even before I was done with the book, I was recommending it to others. Then, one of them asked me: "What is the book about?" Honestly, the first few times I thought about it, I really couldn't come up with an answer. Why? Simply because the writing is so intricately real and so poetic, the main character (the story is told in the first person) traverses through one dilemma after another without breaking for reflection. To answer the story with a simple answer such as "the book is about a man who enjoys walking" would do a horrible injustice.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is about a man who is desperately trying to accept the fact that not everything (and in fact, possibly nothing) in the world is concrete. He searches in vain for facts or simple explanations to solve the mysteries of his life, but time and time again he ends up with more questions than he does answers. His journey does not ever take him far from home in the physical sense, but often he finds himself in dark corners of his own mind... corners that at first he fears, but later realizes they hold the very answers he's been looking for.

Read this book. It is simply amazing.

The disappearance of a cat signifies the end of unemployed Toru Okada's easily explainable life. His wife leaves him, and soon he finds himself in the company of some very strange and psychic women and a disaffected teenager. Inexplicable happenings at first baffle Okada, but soon he takes them all in stride for lack of anything else else to do. Murakami has created a complex dream world of a global Japan, where the past horrors of the war mingle with coffee from Dunkin Donuts. This book is reminded me somewhat of Heller's Catch-22; it fuses grim reality with the ridiculous and the impossible, imparting its wisdom through laughter and an unbelieving shake of the head. Even though Murakami's literary gymnastics stumble near the end, the show is well worth a less than perfect landing.

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.