Rating: 
Summary: simply stunning
Review: I first came across Murakami browsing through my local bookstore and coming across Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I bought that book on a whim, and was blown away. It was like nothing I'd ever read before; funny, fast-paced, and suspenseful, and yet it was also one of the more meaningful (and in the end, strangely touching) books I'd ever read. When I went back a couple of months later for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I figured that Murakami couldn't possibly top himself. He does, and it gives me pleasure saying that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is easily the best book I've read so far (I'm 19 so hopefully I have a long way to go). Hard-Boiled Wonderland could not have possibly prepared me for this sprawling masterpiece, which bridges across fifty years and a myriad of colorful characters. Murakami, I know, gets a lot of flack for recycling similar plots and disembodied narrators, but that can be overlooked because of his extensive vision. Written in his inimitable style, the plot of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle races along at breakneck speed, never allowing the reader to collect their bearings. But where Hard-Boiled Wonderland had a tongue-in-cheek flair to it, Chronicle got its laughs much more nervously. Several times while reading I actually shuddered and had to put the book down it affected me so much. There are moments in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that will sear themselves into your consciousness forever. Little Cinnamon Asakawa watching with equal amounts of excitement and horror as two mysterious men bury SOMETHING in his own backyard. Lt. Mamiya watching helplessly as one of his comrades is skinned alive. The doomed Chinese soldiers, all dressed in baseball uniforms, awaiting their deaths. And the enigmatic folk singer who, for his finale, burns himself. To say that all these moments (and many more) build up to a cohesive final result would be untrue. In the end, the reader may have more questions about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle than they did at the beginning. But in my mind, any book that invites the reader to (willingly) reread it to decipher all of its secrets is a good book indeed.
Rating:
Summary: A Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Master and Margarita
Review: We chose this book for our Book Group knowing absolutely nothing about it. I admit I was a little daunted at the prospect of reading so large a book in the 3 weeks we had allocated for it. But I have never been more unaware of the pages flying by. Murakami's prose flows so easily you'd think it had been written in English (hats off to the translator). The writing isn't dense with convaluted ideas and traditional literary structures; his writing is woven with imagination and unique events. If you are a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, you will love this book. Murakami combines reality with myth, the supernatural and surreal with the mundane and routine. He is able to create a world where a cat disappears for a year, only to come back and take a nap, and grown men have friendships with teenage girls and you don't think anything of it. I feel very strongly that this is one of the stongest pieces of imaginative fiction out there. If you enjoy strange happenings, dream-like realities, and finding out how an unemployed man spends his days at the bottom of a well, this is the book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Metaphysical Psychotherapy
Review: When the narrator of a Haruki Murakami novel--always male, 30ish, unnamed, hip, Japanese, westernized, Tokyo-dwelling, and beset with relationship problems--hears his wife tell him she's leaving him, or finds out his business is falling apart, or learns that his colleague and best friend is an alcoholic, he reacts with a surprising degree of equanimity. But when the same narrator finds himself forced by evil international agents to search in the snow country for a magic sheep with a star on its back, or receives a unicorn skull in the mail wanted by the Japanese mafia, or enters an office building on an assignment and finds himself escorted by a voiceless woman down a tunnel into the ground filled with waterfalls and flesh-eating monsters, he reacts with the exact same degree of equanimity. Murakami's heroes have been criticized for being too stiff and emotionally detached from their often shocking surroundings, but the fact is that his narrators have always fit the author's central theme--the staggering uncertainty of everyday modern life, and the bravery we exhibit just by stoically facing it.In "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," however, the narrator decides to fight back for once. In this sense, the book seems to represent a turning point in the author's career. Rather than watching his cat walk out on him, his wife walk out on him, his very identity walk out on him, the narrator (who's given a name for the first time in a Murakami novel--Toru Okada) decides to fight back and retrieve what he's lost. Not surprisingly, he doesn't fight back by physically assaulting the strange posse of psychics, faith healers, and ghosts that swarm up around him and tease him with clues about the disappearance of his wife (with the exception of one violent baseball bat attack he commits against a creepy folk singer who offered a bad omen in the early days of Toru's marriage). Instead, the narrator fights back by thinking. He fights back by hiding away in an abandoned well in the neighborhood and forcing himself to reflect back on the early days of his marriage, on the reasons that he and his wife got together, and on the reasons that might have driven her to leave him. In this sense, the narrator's self-imposed thinking sessions constitute a kind of "metaphysical psychotherapy"--therapy that's designed, not to cure some mental condition, but to help him regain his identity and to reaffirm his very existence. The novel's atmosphere is daringly dreamlike: Characters walk through walls, get skinned alive, shoot zoo animals in their cages during WWII, have sexual intercourse with each other in their dreams, and grow strange purple bruises on their faces. Most of the supporting characters (e.g., Malta and Creta Kano, Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka) remind me of the characters in "One Hundred Years of Solitude"--vivid and lifelike, yet identifiable by a single, exaggerated personality trait (e.g., Malta's composure, Creta's physical hypersensitivity, Nutmeg's perfectionism, Cinnamon's orderliness). This isn't a novel for overly literal-minded people. It's the type of book that gets at truths in the most indirect manner possible, so that the reader may not fully understand what has happened until after finishing the book, so that the narrator may not even fully understand what has taken place until the story is over, so that even the author himself may not have known quite where he was going with the book until he was nearly finished. Overall a colorful, ambitious, haunting, and even terrifying book, and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: I have not been this enthralled with a book in quite a while. I happened upon this book in November, and picked it up last week. Well, I am not finished yet, and I am not sure that I want to finish. I am simply enjoying the journey that I am experiencing. I have already purchased Murakami's other available works in the States, for future pleasure. I wouldn't mind acquiring the rights to this book, writing a screenplay, and turning this wonderful book into a film.
Rating:
Summary: Haruki Murakami has changed my life.
Review: Haruki Murakami has changed my life. Because of him, I have started cooking in my little one room apartment, swimming every day and feeling a sense of crazy liberation. This book is my favorite so far. Why? It is simply seductive. I was hooked right away, from the first pot of boiling water. Friends and family looked on in wonder as I threw the book down, repeatedly, to catch my breath. He takes us from a moody and isolated sealed off alley to the bottom of a well...and that is without even leaving the neighboorhood. The main character's search for his missing cat soon has him walking through walls but always with style, swirling Cutty Sark as he goes. My love affair with Murakami's books has been torid and all consuming. My PhD studies grind to a halt with each new book. And the Wind Up Bird Chronicle stopped me in my tracks. I missed it when it ended; I could have told it from that first plate of spaghetti, "you're gonna make me lonesome when you go".
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book, but an inescapable sense of deja-vu...
Review: As a long-time reader and admirer of Murakami's, I must say I really enjoyed this book. It's his biggest, widest ranging, and I would certainly rate it his best so far. If you are a newcomer to this writer, then you are in for a real experience! However, coming to the book with a knowledge of his previous work, I must admit to being a little disappointed at the extent to which he recycles his ideas. You could easily argue the case that this book is not much more than a re-working (expanded and improved) of Dance Dance Dance. The plot is the same (man searches for mysteriously disappeared lover), the atmosphere is the same, the central concerns of the uncanny in everyday life and the feeling of reality gone disturbingly awry are the same. Even some of the characters are the same: the intense and rather warped teenage girl, the slickly charismatic bad guy, the passive, unflappable hero who stumbles blindly towards the centre of the mystery. And the central location to which the main character is inescapably drawn seems to be more or less the same luxury hotel as in the earlier novel. But this is what Murakami does. Each novel has the same main character going through more or less the same experience, and the unsettling worldview that emerges becomes more reassuringly familiar with each trip through the same territory. Where Murakami breaks new ground here is in his excursion into Japanese history, unearthing the forgotten Manchuria campaign. I actually found this to be the least successful aspect of the book. Far from trying to confront Japan's wartime record honestly and clearly, he creates a sensational little story of a cartoonishly malevolent Russian soldier with his animalistic Mongolian sidekick, against which foil the nobly suffering Japanese characters appear almost saintly. While I am sure that atrocities were committed by the Soviet army, as by all sides in the conflict, and that many ordinary Japanese did suffer terribly at their hands, I can't help feeling that Murakami's account could have done more to show both sides of the picture. The execution of the 'baseball team' by the Japanese lieutenant is perhaps intended to serve this purpose, but it is of a wholly different order to the subhuman barbarity attributed to the enemy. Plus, the whole Manchurian episode seems to me to be grafted on, rather artificially, to the main story, with which it has little connection. Compared to say, Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five', where the fantasy elements of the novel combine much more effectively and disturbingly with the historical WWII narrative, I'd have to say that Murakami's novel comes across as considerably less powerful. So, after such a relentlessly negative review, I'd like to urge you to buy this book and read it, because it is most definitely worth it, especially if you don't know his earlier novels. I've mentioned only my reservations about the book, for the good points, see all the other reviews...
Rating:
Summary: A MUST READ
Review: I do not use these words lightly but I really was UNABLE to put this book down once I had started reading. Great story, so many twists, turns and numerous plots. I felt the same way about "Hard-Boiled Wonderland ...". My current read is "South of the Border, West of the Sun". I have read all of his other ones, so I sure hope another book is in the works ...... !
Rating:
Summary: Still think about this book - months later
Review: Several months after having read this book I still think about it. Some of the characters are among the most memorable I've encountered in literature. I just wish I was reading it for the first time again.
Rating:
Summary: a trip into the subconscious
Review: a great book that does a lot to show an exploration of the sub/unconscious, touching on ways that people are and can be connected without drifting much beyond an experience we all relate to: our dreams. even when the story may seem to drift, the drifts themselves captivated me. it gives an interesting cross between magic realism and fantasy though definitely distinct from both of those. i highly recommend it! (alas, the book was not bought in kampala, but in johannesburg, south africa).
Rating:
Summary: Subversive Suburbia
Review: I have had the pleasure of reading all of Huruki's books and if you are thinking of reading this one you are in for a rare treat. What I find so appealing about Huruki is the diverse nature of his oblique observations on the banal. Strange twin peaks esque occurences in suburban back gardens, supressed sexualities, coalecsing realities, and electric ordinariness.Amongst the descriptions of Batchelor life tedium and out of body experiences we are treated to some delicious segways where Huruki describes food being prepared in a way that makes you wish you had a full working knowledge of a Japanese kitchen. If you love the subversive, the strange, the delicious and the entertaining Huruki is yer man.
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