The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
I began this 600-plus-page book determined to be a good sport, ready to hike willingly down Toru’s shifting paths, to travel with him into the fourth dimension. While Toru found himself odd man out, this reader found herself on a forced march through Murakami’s House of Oddities. His surreal characters stand out more as creations of an author’s rampaging imagination than as parts of a whole working vision. The war scenes have a shattering power, but cannot compensate for the dangling threads the reader is left holding on to. The chaotic, unpredictable world Toru struggles to fathom is, at the end, just as unfathomable and the resolutions unsatisfying. No matter how noble the theme of Toru’s determination to get to the bottom of understanding, Murakami left me feeling unrewarded for my efforts. Maybe the uncut Japanese edition might provide the reader with more to grab on to, but by the end of the English version, I wanted out of the labyrinth.
To read about the issues of translating Murakami, read an email roundtable conducted from Dec. 18, 2000 to January 18, 2001.
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/murakami/complete.html
The participants were:
Philip Gabriel, Murakami translator and professor of Japanese literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Jay Rubin, Murakami translator and pprofessor of Japanese literature at Harvard University.
Gary Fisketjon, editor at Alfred A. Knopf.
posted by Sally Sixpack @ 5:55 PM
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Summary of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
"Really, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it's been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you're such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things. . . . So hanging around you hasn't been boring in any way. . . . But tell you the truth, it's made me nervous too." The speaker is May Kasahara, a Japanese teenager who bears a strong resemblance to Holden Caulfield. She's speaking to Toru Okada, who lives down the street from May in Tokyo and to whom a series of very strange things has been happening.
Her words could also stand as a response to this absolutely mesmerizing, befuddling, unaccountably brilliant novel. Murakami is one of Japan's most popular writers, but while his previously translated books have been well received critically in the U.S., they have yet to garner overwhelming popular acclaim. This one will receive plenty of attention, but it's hard to imagine it sharing best-seller slots with the likes of John Grisham. It's just too much book for that.
Just what kind of book is it? That's the befuddling part. Plot summary is nearly useless: Toru Okada loses his cat and then his wife. He devotes himself to finding the latter but spends much of his time in the bottom of a well, hoping to pass through the wall and into an alternate world where the secrets lie.
Meanwhile, he encounters a series of ever more puzzling characters, including a World War II veteran who recounts the horrifying story of the battle of Nomonhan, during which thousands of Japanese died meaninglessly in conflict with Russians and Mongolians. This overwhelming tidal wave of story washes over Toru Okada, who absorbs each new revelation implacably, hoping but usually failing to make sense of it.
Murakami is utterly at ease with multiple subjects, genres, and styles--surrealism, deadpan comedy, military history, detective fiction, love story. His canvas is as broad as twentieth-century Japan, his brush strokes imbued with the lines and colors of American pop culture. Oddly, it all holds together on the stoic shoulders of Toru Okada and his single-minded determination to reclaim the woman he loves no matter how absurd the world around her becomes. In the scary but never boring vastness of this novel, it's nice to find one buoy on the horizon we recognize. --Bill Ott
Salon.com
For a guy who rarely leaves his own block, Toru Okada, the decent, if hapless, hero of Haruki Murakami's new novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," has a lot of adventures. …
Murakami is that unusual creature, a metaphysical novelist with a warm, down-to-earth voice and a knack for creating credible characters and spinning a lively yarn. Best known in this country for his 1989 novel "A Wild Sheep Chase," Murakami leavens the arresting philosophical symbolism of modern Japanese fiction with a goofy sensibility shaped by American pop culture -- he's like Paul Auster with a heart and a sense of humor. From the beginning, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" has the easy authority of the work of a natural-born storyteller, and each eccentric character and odd development only adds to the anticipation that Murakami will tie it all up in a satisfying resolution. He expertly twines themes of suffering and inner emptiness with Toru's covert battle against the evil Noboru Wataya, an economic pundit of slippery charisma. Profoundly vacant, Wataya realizes that "consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media's tiny time segments." He parlays this cunning into a political career, of course. Wataya is the precise opposite of the humble Toru, and at first this appears to be the sole source of their antipathy.
The first 600 pages of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" offer much unadulterated reading pleasure, and it's only as the remaining pages grow ominously sparse that the proverbial sinking feeling sets in. Even if he does provide for Toru, Murakami can't, in the end, gather all his novel's intriguing subplots and mysterious minor characters together convincingly, and he summarily drops whole handfuls of loose ends. Like the mark in a brilliant con game, I closed "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" feeling somewhat bereft, but still so dazzled by Murakami's skill that I couldn't quite regret having come along for the ride.
Amazon.com
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.
Publishers Review
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.
Kirkus Reviews
Not merely a big book from the broadly respected Murakami (Dance Dance Dance, 1994, etc.), but a major work bringing signature themes of alienation, dislocation, and nameless fears through the saga of a gentle man forced to trade the familiar for the utterly unknown. … On a canvas stretched from Manchuria to Malta, and with sound effects from strange birdcalls to sleigh bells in cyberspace, this is a fully mature, engrossing tale of individual and national destinies entwined. It will be hard to surpass.
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