Rating: 
Summary: Hilarious, Ambitious but not Flawless
Review: Though not his best in my opinion, Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is surely the most hilarious of all his works, intertwining altogether such various subjects, which appeared or at least was touched upon in its sister works, as Japan's warfare history, the dark side of Japanese politics, satirical criticisms of advanced capitalism, reminiscences of the past golden days, the evil nature of humans, and so forth. While the protagonist of the books remains one lonely, reclusive and yet profoundly witty, the theme, compared with those in Haruki Murakami's former books, turned increasinly social, more efforts explicitly put on socio-historical issues. This is not hard to understand, many writers are more directly concerned about social issues with age. You may be disappointed if you are to look for meticulous lyricism of a modern man's feelings in this book. Conversely, if you are one who like those 'grand' novels, you may be overwhelmed by the success of this book in reflecting an immensely brutal era Japan has brought to other Asian countries, especially China. The most obvious flaw of the books is certainly its disproportionate distribution of plots and descriptions, some too long or even unecessary, some too condense. Considering that it is hitherto the most ambitious work of Haruki Muramaki's, fans should be more generous. Actuallu I am to predict that the next book, if still on the track, would be the most representative work for this most popular Japanese author; otherwise, we should incline ourselves to accept that his best was already accomplished.
Rating: 
Summary: Look closely -- something astounding is happening
Review: In one of his shorter works, Murakami wrote of watching through an air vent as strange things happened to space and time inside an elephant house. The physical universe takes on new wrinkles with this writer. Each of his works seems to fold back reality and give us a view of something wonderfully perplexing happening in a setting as distant as that elephant house but as familiar as our own lives. I love the way that the mundane and the fantastic weave themselves together in this book. His characters are fully 3-D, giving the lie to his frequent tip of the hat to the hardboild genre. He likes a good mystery, but he's going to populate his with characters that pop and with situations that teeter on the brink between reality and something darker upon which reality seems to be built. Many of Murakami's protagonists seem simply to leave themselves open to the astounding things that happen around them and to them. They are open books onto which events simply scrawl -- leaving them (and us) to try to put the pieces together. More often than not, he portrays the perplexed state between the sexes nearly perfectly. I find his ability to portray characters who can't quite put their finger on their feelings very uncanny. He often seems to be saying, "Look around you -- if you look closely enough, something astounding is happening. Whether you want it to or not."
Rating:
Summary: definitively vague, exquisitely confusing
Review: My copy of the book accidentally came with two dust jackets. I plan to use the extra to cut out Mr. Murakami's photo and display it prominently on my wall. _Wind-Up_ actually seems to me to be one of the most explicit of Murakami's work, certainly more so than the whimpering ending of _Dance, Dance, Dance_. However one cannot deny the presence of open ends and vague descriptions throughout the novel. However, I find these to be the work's most enticing features. With a character like Toru Okada who consistenly searches for things concrete, explanations he can see and touch, the airy situations seem to taunt him, telling him that sometimes you just can't fully understand. This theme is perhaps the only one that persists throughout the jumpy, episodic novel. While I preferred the translation work of Alfred Brinbaum, whose words really hit me in the chest, I do think Jay Rubin has earned his paycheck.
Rating:
Summary: Baffling yet utterly absorbing
Review: I have just put down this book hours ago...after sifting through various bits one more time, hoping to gain more clarity to the maze of characters and twisted plotlines they inhabit. The book is every bit as compelling as the best of his previous novels...his world becomes an alternate world into which I excape. In that sense - I was deeply grateful for the unprecedented length! Additionally, his visceral war flashbacks dealt an emotional blow rarely achieved by writers attempting to convey man's darkest nature. Here, I feel, he took me deeply and darkly into psychological netherworlds not visited in his previous writing. I remain however - not dissatisfied - but grasping for meanings not revealed at its conclusion. My mind is chasing after characters and incidents that have dissolved rather than resolved. Is this a flaw, however, or part of its charm? I'll think about this until his next book!
Rating:
Summary: Murakami broadens his subject matter
Review: This was a very engaging and provocative book, which stands out among the works Murakami has produced since A Wild Sheep Chase. The undistinguished narrator, Toru Okada (here, think Frances McDormand in "Fargo"), faces escalating degrees of unreality entering his world via a lost cat, a series of dreams, fashionable psychics, traditional diviners, and recounted narratives. While many of his trademarks (e.g. anonymous encounters, Jazz allusions, furry totems) and a few of his weaknesses (e.g. abandoned plot threads) are present in this book, I found that Murakami was able to address more serious issues in a less flippant way than in the past -- and that I cared about the central romance. He is attempting to explore nothing less than the nature of evil, and does so slyly, passing the topic among several characters, all with slightly different takes on the world. While this occasionally gets melodramatic, the recounted narratives of Japanese soldiers and civilians during the war are interesting and compelling.
Murakami is not as much a Japanese novelist as an international one, and perhaps this is the reason his books receive so much press in the United States. The world his characters inhabit is as fantastic and universal as the cartoon landscapes of Miyazaki, and a first time reader who has been able to navigate Marquez or Calvino ought to have no problem enjoying this book.
Rating:
Summary: Dark, beautiful, shattered
Review: Murakami s latest, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, distantly echoes Douglas Adams Dirk Gentlys Holistic detective Agency, in that both novels seem to begin with the search for a lost cat, a search that blooms and expands across immense landscapes, that encompasses luminous and dangerous characters, that invokes a brooding, sullen man who threatens to completely devastate human civilization. Yet to say Murakamis and Adams tales are alike is to claim Tchaikovskys Roccoco Variations and Shostokovichs Cello Concerto are the same because both are Russian cello music. Murakami takes a darker path in both body and soul. The hero, Okada, spends much time brooding in a dry well, borrowing deeper into his mind? another world? Okada is searching, first for his cat, then his wife, all the while opposed by his ominious brother-in-law, a man apparently capable of rape without touching, of dominating souls. Okada s only help seems to flicker from the memories of Japanese soldiers once stationed in China. Compelling persons, the capricious May Kanasawa, the Kano sisters, Nutmeg and her silent son Cinnamon, flit through Okadas life, thier mystery never fully explained. The long terrible shadow of Japans involvement in China, and later Russia, increasingly affects Okadas present day life, though how is never quite clear. Murakami explains nothing clearly, much of the seeming action is almost offstage. This can be extremely frustrating compared to more action-driven novels, yet Murakami seems wise not to dwell on it. Yet the fact remains that this is not a book to read once, that the odd details keeping the reader returning to double-check. What happened to the stone bird sculpture in the vacant yard? Or the fate of the elephants in the Chinese zoo? Where had Okadas cat been for a year? Small things, yet I wondered if Murakami made their answers central to the larger questions. I dont know if I enjoyed the book, more is evoked that actually revealed. The novel had grown from the short story The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesdays Women, essentially the first chapter; the book ends on the opposite image from the short, the lost cat now found, the mans wife lost for now. (The reverse of the Adams book, where the hero gets the girl, but alas! the cat dies.) Not a conventionally happy ending, not really satisfying, but it WORKS.--though what Murakami meant by *wind-up bird* is never explianed at all. Perhaps it could be anything--or nothing. Compelling and irritating by turns, Okadas search for his cat and then his wife take him through the *souls darkness* of previous novels. Murakami writes in the dark, yet knows where he is going.
Rating:
Summary: Still...a must read.
Review: I am one of those Murakami fans who has all his works, some in English and some in Chinese. If you are a first time reader of Haruki Murakami, I would not recommend this book right away. But if you've read him before, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this IS a must read. As always, our main character is still that reluctant outsider who dances to his own pace, having almost no contact with his outside surroundings. He lives in his own philosophy and his own special way of observing the world around him. Bizarre as it may seem, the characters in this book are so deadpan, they seem alive. Murakami mixes fantasy and reality into a totally different genre giving readers a whole new perspective on their own lives. But then again, this is only my personal point of view. I'm one of those guys who would stop at an empty red light, 3 in the morning so... take my word for it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Translator's View
Review: THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE is a turning-point in Murakami's fiction, and it coincides with the end of the age of denial in Japan. People recognize now that the Japanese were not simply innocent victims of the Atomic Bomb, that Japanese soldiers actually carried out the Rape of Nanking, and that it was only one episode in Japan's rape of an entire continent. An awakening to the "problem" of China was what Murakami was writing about in "A Slow Boat to China," his very first short story, penned in 1980 and included in the collection THE ELEPHANT VANISHES. The message was there even in A WILD SHEEP CHASE (1982), the "loopy" novel that introduced Murakami to Western readers: "The basic stupidity of modern Japan is that we've learned absolutely nothing from our contact with other Asian peoples," says the weird old Sheep Professor. THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, while still marked by Murakami's crack-brained humor and nostalgic lyricism, drives the lesson home with graphic intensity.
Rating:
Summary: Murakami's Best BEST Book!
Review: I have read everything of Murakami's that is available in English and a tiny bit of what is not, and this is my absolute favorite. He gets a lot of flak in Japan for being too much of a "popular" writer, and I think that this novel proves that it is possible to be popular and be a legitimate writer at the same time. "Wind-up Bird Chronicles" does an amazing job of linking contemporary Japan to pre-war/wartime Japan, on both an individual and societal level, without coming to any easy conclusions. I don't want to tout this work as a great way to make sense of modern Japan, because that would be reductionist, but I think that it is a sweeping look at a society, as well as a fascinating personal journey. Some of the other reviews that were posted here when I wrote this try to make sense of Murakami in terms of very "Japanese" authors like Mishima Yukio, which is fine, but I think that it's important to emphasize that this book is a great story set in a Japan which is no more mysterious or exotic than any other culture. And the translation is great!
Rating:
Summary: Not all questions need answers
Review: and not all answers need to be spelled out. The comments left here about unanswered themes and untidy threads might indicate a possible misunderstanding. The "clues" referred to in one reviewers comments are indeed real, there is no "weird and quirky" superficiality in this novel. Sometimes things not obvious are the most rewarding on deeper penetration. Characters do not just "disappear," they are absorbed. If at first you don't get it, it doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't make sense; maybe you just don't get it, and maybe if you ponder it you still will. This is great and profound literature, and a page turner as well, with everything happening on multiple levels. Great characters, fascinating developments, deep undercurrents, terrifying and yet so much fun. Like a lot of great and lasting art, you just gotta let it cook. This is a book that rewards.
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