The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture of..." (more)
Key Phrases: vinyl hat, rice pudding mix, bird chronicle, Noboru Wataya, Creta Kano, May Kasahara (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Amazingly long, incredibly pricey, wildly experimental, often confusing but never boring, Murakami's most famous novel has been brought to audio life with extreme dedication: by Naxos, a company that regularly wins prizes, and by a reader with an uncommon combination of skills. Degas is already a Murakami veteran, having read the audio version of A Wild Sheep Chase (Naxos), and has worked on radio, stage and even cartoon voice (including Mr. Bean). He catches the constantly changing mental landscape of Murakami's fertile imagination—which moves from detective story to explicit sexual fantasy, heartbreaking Japanese WWII historical flashback, everyday details of married life (cooking, shopping and pet care) and even the occasional burst of satiric humor. Degas treats it all with the clarity and calmness of a very deep, very still pool. Certainly not for everyone's taste or budget, but anyone interested in this important author will find something to enlighten them. Available as a Vintage paperback (Reviews, Aug. 18. 1997). (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International Ed edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679775439
• ISBN-13: 978-0679775430
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (301 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,432 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

77 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable Book -- But Abridged in English Translation, May 25, 2006

By	Roman Melnik (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

99 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unity Masquerades as a Kaleidoscope, September 24, 2006

By	Kevin Salfen (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

76 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ORIGINAL AND BIZARRE, June 2, 2000

By A Customer

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.