The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

Author - Haruki Murakami ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 5-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. Excellent book. Very surreal writing. Murakami is probably my favorite author and this may be his best work.¤

2) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. This is Murakami´s masterpiece, it´s everything they say, hypnotic, surreal, thought-provoking, mysterious and highly entertaining. I have a theory that the folks that realize Murakami´s talent but still didn´t give a good review are the type who want everything explained and resolved in easily understood and satisfying ways. I think that some people feel unsatisfied if an author doesn´t come up with pat explanations for everything. I think that takes away from the fun of thinking and contemplating the mysteries presented for yourself, and is less realistic. As Alan Moore writes through the character of Hollis Mason in his great graphic novel, "Watchmen" "Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it´s seldom when anything ever really get´s resolved. It´s taken me a long time to realize that." I think people can enjoy great modern authors like Murakami if they don´t think it´s his job or purpose as a writer to explain everything to them. Rather if he gets you to think and wonder about the nature of life and reality while entertaining you at the same time, he should be thanked for doing a great job.¤

3) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami deftly juggles the disintegration of a Japanese couples´ marriage, Japan´s modern wartime history, and a cast of characters that defies conventional description. His writing is entrancing, with a dreamlike pace that underlies the ominous sense of foreboding that fills every page, its mysteries will keep you reading well into the wee hours of the night, curious to find out what lurks on the next page.

It begins with Toru Okada, a recently unemployed Japanese lawyer who, at his wife´s urging, goes off in search of their missing cat and winds up finding (and losing) much more.

Throughout his search, Mr.Okada encounters a number of unusual characters including a young girl, psychics, a prostitute, a war veteran and a politician. Each of these characters bear many scars (psychological or otherwise) and they all play a part in forcing Mr. Okada to deal with questions regarding his relationship with his wife, reality and his country´s wartime history. Readers with delicate sensibilities and stomachs are warned, there are very graphic depictions of sex and violence throughout.

At times I was reminded of Alice in Wonderland, where the pursuit of an animal opens a Pandora´s Box of unforeseen events, some of which may or may not have to do with the protagonists´ loss of sanity.

There´s a lot going on here and Murakami masterfully keeps it from becoming a tangled mess. Questions of love, sex, fate, loss and isolation are a constant in what can be seen as a comment on modern Japanese society.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an engaging, thought-provoking and mysterious read from a remarkable imagination, I highly recommend this book.
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4) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. For a few years now, I´ve heard "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" was a magnificent book of surreal mysteries that stood as one of the best of the 20th century. I guess in a way, both of these arguments are true. However, the book fails to connect in the end and leads the reader on a long and winding journey through high expectations and, ultimately, dead ends.

The book is undoubtedly an epic. I usually don´t commit to 600 page books or more unless I expect a punch and some sort of intellectual awakening. When starting this one, I surely did. After the first 300 pages, I was enthralled, intrigued, entertained, and hopeful. I was telling people what an excellent book this was, ready to mark it down as a confirmed favorite. Murakami filled it with, not only a series of mundane, yet oddly disturbing and cerebral events, but with history lessons, and intricate character studies. But when I reached the 500th page, I was deeply worried the book would end with a van ride off a cliff. I was right about that aspect of the novel.

Murakimi is a talented writer. The ideas are there. The concepts flow. But in the end, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" feels like an extreme insomnia binge more than well throughout novel of the surreal. It would probably make a great David Lynch movie but not a book you have to invest time and brainpower in. The women are oversexed nothings. The main character is shiftlessly interesting at first, then unbelievable and emotionless til the end.

The book makes me want to read more Murakmi to discover the bright spots in his career. However, avoid this book unless you want to impress the 20 somethings at your local cafe.

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5) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. This is a kind of ´love it or leave it´ book: It´s well written but poorly edited, has meaning and resonance but has an untidy narrative(not everything is answered and we never know which part is ´real´)which can be hard for some readers to penetrate through. But, to it´s credit, it´s hard to put down and felt much shorter than it´s sprawling six hundred page length may, at first glance, hint.

Personally, I enjoyed the book. The novel is all about defilement and the struggle to purge the evil from oneself. So, while the story seemed random and surreal on occasion, all of the dreams, sub-stories and stories within stories all contribute on different levels to this theme of defilement. To the book´s benefit, Murakami doesn´t give us an exact answer, instead opting to say that our emotional scars may be our only identity not our sworn enemy.

This seemed even more interesting considering this novel is a product of post-war Japan. Having been defiled by the atomic bomb, Japan has become the world´s only true post-apocalyptic society and although she has survived the ordeal, Japan´s historical scars linger in the cultural psyche still. Which should make more sense for Americans who perceive Toru as being too weird or obtuse to be an ´everyman´.

If I had to compare this book to anything it would be Thomas Pynchon´s ´V.´-sprawling, audacious and innovative but far from perfect. Still though, ´The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle´ is an interesting and engaging read meant more for the ponderous and adventurous type, those willing to take a trip down the proverbial ´rabbit hole´(or in this case, a hollowed-out well).

Funny, odd, sexy, scary, mysterious, surreal and, most of all, fun. Anyone interested in strong, promising postmodern fiction or those just looking for something different, look no further than ´Chronicle´.¤

6) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. Japan´s most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife´s missing cat.  Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.  As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan´s forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.¤

7) Paperback Book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Vintage. 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¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 2-Nov-2008, 06797754399780679775430, 350-270-4X0-640-390-761-8

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