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.

Advice to Toru

SHUT UP AND GET A JOB!