The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Incredible! But what the book is about, I have no clue.
Review: I deducted a star from this amazing book for its being almost completely indicipherable...almost. It's ironic that the main character, Toru Okada, is always looking for "concrete" facts when his whole life seems less than real. Often falling asleep and meditating in dreams during the other times, Okada is hardly a reliable narrator. Still, this narrative technique is central to the telling of this very symbolic tale of a "disintegrating" marriage with strange paranormal ramifications.

To me, this book is a harsh, penetrating observation into the issues of abortion, war, and the fraility but value of life. But then again, who really knows? Despite the fact that the story is too vague to draw conclusions, "the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is top notch work from a high-caliber literary genius.

Rating:
Summary: Oustanding Works of a Higly Recommened author!
Review: The imagry that the author creates is very vivid, but he leaves some things left for you to imagine. Maruakami brings so many different, unconnecting worlds together with a single thin thread, managing to give their puny existing a world of meaning. The story flows like life does, with characters coming in forever or leaving forever, but their memory stays. He also creates a new keywhole for the reader to peek through- a way of looking at one situation completely different as though you were seeing it for the very first time!

This book is fantastic. It's a little hard to follow, but as a High-School student I managed pretty well. I finished it within 3 weeks.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting though not easily understandable read
Review: This book will keep you interested and entertained from start to finish. It is a sort of fantasy, mystery, love story. The plot is actually three plots. The protaganist is searching for his missing wife, is developing a friendship with a teenage girl all the while Murakami is retelling a veteran's horrific war story.

The book is hard to interpret, my belief is that it has many meanings but the main point I took away from it is the power of imagination and meditation in acheiving our goals and desires. It is beautiflly written and I would give it a higher rating were it not a little slow in spots. Still, an excellent, mesmerizing read

Rating:
Summary: a stunning mesmerising book
Review: At the heart of the wind-up bird chronicle is the story of a man's search for his missing wife. Yet that is just a beginning as Toru Okada (and reader)is thrown into a psychological, metaphysical and even anthropological journey where the boundary between reality and fantasy adopts the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty. Reading The Wind-up bird chronicle is like being thrown from wall to wall in your own living room. There are so many zany characters and loose ends as to keep you wondering for weeks afterwards. Haruki Murakami displays a wonderful blend of western dualistic pre-occupation and eastern Zen-ist simplicity. Despite his whole world changing around him, Toru Okada remains focussed on his task and took everything in his strides. The wind-up bird is beautifully written (especially the Zoo killing episode) and it is one of my favourite books of all time.

Rating:
Summary: Contrived, excessive and unnecessary
Review: I couldn't wait to start reading this book after a sensational reading of Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood'. Half way through, I couldn't help but asking both myself and around, why write and why read. Certainly, Murakami knows how to write targeting a certain group of audience, which might be a clear goal for most of the writers, which his clear presence, would be contrived story revolving sex, myth, and a bit of history presented in a way of no obvious trace of the real impact. The common characteristic of all these elements, however, is nonetheless confusion. Though quite compelling, the reading wasn't as meaningful and satisfactory as I had expected. One chapter after another, the only motive for my turning the page, was often the last few sentences, promising to reveal some excitement, which was never profoundly presented before coming to another turning point for the next chapter. For something profound and intriguing as to search for meaningful life with a realistic culture background, I am a big fan of the work of Almodovar of Spain; for something with twisted and complicated story line without regard to any realistic meanings, I would recommend the books of Harry Potter. This 'wind-up bird chronicle', simply wasn't developed either way, as far as my taste concerns.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, multi-layered, folding back on itself
Review: "Just ten minutes of your time, that's all I need." This is the unexpected phone call this novel's protagonist receives one morning, and it could be Murakami's plea to his reader. The protagonist, Toru, is just a regular 90s guy, a young lawyer who quit his job, and now stays home, cooks, listens to music, hangs around vacant lots with a 16-year-old girl, and looks for his wife's cat... then he meets a woman in a red hat, some fortune-tellers, and a war veteran with some pretty painful memories.

Often people complain that Murakami's novels have "unrealistic" plot twists. But that is his magic. The reader never knows what to expect. The novel's language is brilliant, and the plot just slightly off-kilter, enough so to make it very interesting. The characters are three-dimensional (at least!), and no one is quite what you expect them to be. There are lots of little themes and motifs that come up time and again, in slightly different forms -- one of the marks of a great novel.

This is not only excellent literature, but is also an immensely enjoyable read, perhaps the most enjoyable thing I've read in a year or two. I read it on two long plane flights, and it made the time pass that much quicker -- the sometimes incongruous world Murakami paints fits perfectly with international air travel. There's something postmodern about the scattered characters and plot, and it's wonderfully telling of our time.

Rating:
Summary: You and I are the Wind-Up Bird ... Aren't we?
Review: I wondered all through my just completed reading of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", who is the Wind-Up Bird. The only conclusion I could come up with, it is us all. Toru was so tired by the end he could only simply walk along with May's hand in his pocket. Wind-Up Bird after Wind-Up Bird wore out ... The Japanese Soldiers in China, etc. ... and for other characters if not with their loss of life ... their loss of their proper order ... even Cinnamon even his mom ... even though slightly.

What a wonderful condemnation of our cultures. What a wonderful asking for us to do better. Haruki Murakami, didn't hammer us ... he quietly showed us our bad.

Let's do better ... what do you say? Will Decker [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps his most "mainstream" work after South of the Border
Review: I've read most of Murakami's books and I can't escape the feeling he's some sort of reincarnated Zen master standing behind me with a stick and head full of koans. Murakami plays; he recycles characters, has kinky relationships and likes the just-a-bit-lost-ordinary-guy type of male leads. I'm not sure how many times he'll keep trying to enlighten his readers (I hope for a few more novels at least) before he gets bored and probably just lives out in the country listening to jazz and cooking (oh, did I mention he has a theme of jazz and fine cooking in the books?).

Like Calvino, what you take away from the novel is what you have inside. Some literature is more like a mirror than a force-feeding of ideas. Let your patterns go and enjoy the pleasure of turning the pages over for the first time...

Rating:
Summary: Imaginative, intriguing, and powerful!
Review: Toru Okada has been married for 6 years when his wife Yokimura asks him to find her lost cat. Soon after he begins to look for the cat, his wife also mysteriously disappears. In looking for both, he encounters such strange characters as Malta Kano, a lady in a red vinyl hat, Creta Kano, her prostitute daughter, May Kasahara, the girl in the alley, and Lietuenant Mamiya, the former Japanese soldier who delivers a box and remains to tell a gruesome war story. Mr. Okada decides to ponder his state of affairs deep within a well on the abandoned property near his house and the story proceeds from there.

As in other Japanese fiction, THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE is a novel of complex ideas told in simple sentences. This story of epic proportion has multiple elements that make reading a pleasure...including mystery, puzzling characters, friendship, history, symbolism, brutality, revenge, spirituality, and a sense of justice. It can be read at many levels, interpreted many ways, or enjoyed for being simply a story of two different world which intersect at different points in time. The driving force behind the novel is the search for how seemingly unrelated occurences will later converge. Compelling the reader to move forward at an ever increasing rate of speed, the plot will not release its grip until the very last sentence. Then it only does so with a warm feeling of friendship and a hope that good will always prevail over evil.

Rating:
Summary: Believe the GOOD reviews
Review: I could go on and on and on about this book. I read it over a year ago in one night lying awake sleeping on a friend's floor in Reykjavik, Iceland. (I was a proud Seattle resident back then.) I have read a plethora of contemporary Japanese literature, and a lot of it takes on the surreal, disconnected, and often crazy tone of Murakami's work, but Murakami is the master. I bought this book in Iceland, where books are a million times more expensive as in America, so that says something. When I wander the bookstores of Iceland now that I live here, I contemplate buying other books of his (on impulse), but it is more of a value to order books via Amazon from here... but I digress. I mean to say that Haruki Murakami's work is worth the money you pay for it. As one of the reviewers on the book jacket stated, the book "takes a baseball bat to your brain." And it does.

As other reviewers/readers have said, you will not even notice the length of this book. It flies past with momentum. Today, a year later, I am still thinking about it.

Toru Okada seems to be wandering through his life, and instead of him making things happen, usually things happen to him. The plot of the story and various analyses of it are well documented here in these reviews. I won't be repetitive. I will simply say that this is a FINE work (by "fine" I do not mean the lacklustre "how are you? I'm fine..." sort of definition.)