Rating: 
Summary: spaghetti and water flow?
Review: from a short story, this novel started out with the same character making spaghetti as the phone rang - which lead him into a search for a cat and ultimately, a resolution of the world's symbolic water flow. murakami attempts to resolve many issues in this novel - including life in a well, solving the symbolic waterflow problem, ridding of his brother-in-law - which bears the same name as his cat . . . i am re-reading it the third time.
Rating:
Summary: Lengthy but worthy
Review: Haruki seldom wrote about normal stories. The plot of his stories is always complex and apparently senseless. It's only in this senseless world that we will focus more on the thoughts of the writer instead of the story itself. After all, writing is all about expression of thoughts.Saying so, his story is powerful, never lack of humour or tension. It started from cooking spaghetti, going through a love story with a teenager, mesmerizing the atrocity of Sino-Japanese war, and ending with modern day Japanese politics. Lots of his writings are symbolic (like the very long stories of the well), it's his unique eastern philosophy that brought me back to his books again and again. This book is long but every word is worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Great, but depressed....
Review: I've read this book in Japanese first.(because I am Japanese)
And I realized all these stories based on true world. I think this is the real world we live in. Everything is not obvious, but absolutely someone help this world to be right energy like Toru Okada did.
To finish this book, you have to be yourself and think about what does this world mean for you. In the meaning, I was very depressed after I read it. But it was worth it. This is related with primitive religious in Japan, not voodisum.
so if you know about it, it helps you to understand all these stories.
Rating:
Summary: Exceptional
Review: It`s been said here before. This is a great book. This is an involving book. This is a perplexing book. Although reasonably lengthy, when finished, you have to wonder if much actually happened. The plot itself is not complex, but it`s the writing style, creating some kind of timeless and borderless world, that is just so fresh and interesting. While there are a lot of good descriptions of this book in other reviews, perhaps it would be a good idea to read this book not knowing anything about it. Because no words written here can match the prose in this book. Exceptional.
Rating: 
Summary: Murakami Makes Us Care, Then Leaves Us High And Dry
Review: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my first Murakami, and through the first half of the book I had every reason to be impressed and excited by its promise of a rewarding and thought-provoking read. Indeed, in the early going I was mesmerized by the multifarious cast of quirky characters and the somewhat kooky plot lines, and additionally, the unbalanced mood and the underlying tension kept me eagerly focused towards the explanations and resolutions which were surely coming. I was willing, if not thrilled to leave the main storyline time after time to read and absorb the lengthy historical chapters, secure in the knowledge that by book's end, the interconnectedness of it all would be made abundantly clear. However, the second half of this book left me far more disappointed than the first had gotten me interested. Let's get this out of the way first so there is no misunderstanding: Murakami is, without a doubt, a gifted and interesting storyteller with a unique voice and an engagingly oblique manner of limning his plot. But his technical skills and economical prose style notwithstanding, he is either the laziest or most arrogant author I've ever come across. After causing us to feel so strongly about the predicaments and machinations of so many characters, and making us wonder about the resolution of and connection between so many story lines, and schooling us in a good dose of Japanese, Manchurian and Mongolese history, and escorting us through a variety of worlds, netherworlds, cyberworlds, dimensions, dreamscapes and cityscapes, we are left dangling in mid-air. Absolutely nothing we are interested in having revealed to us is ever explained or made clear. And 600 pages of unresolved set-ups is no small matter. We have been on the receiving end of long and ponderous expositions, all of which are interwoven with mysterious shadow-plays and subtle implications: What are Noboru Wataya's strange powers? how do Malta and Creta Kano ultimately tie into everything? -and please tell us why we had to hear about that red hat so many times if it didn't end up being important to the story... and what the heck is really happening at the strange sessions where Nutmeg and Cinnamon offer rich women the opportunity of fondling Toru's skull in a dark dressmaking room? where on earth had Mackerel been? was Kumiko the mysterious woman in the netherworld hotel room? and why did May Kasahara run away from home only to start writing Toru an endless stream of letters in which she refers to him as "Mister Wind-Up Bird" every other sentence (o.k., so it's cute...), all this in-between the times she is making men's wigs in the countryside 15 hours a day? and what is the significance of the strange guy with the bat? and why did Toru Okada share the trait of a throbbing blue mark on the face with Nutmeg's zookeeper father? So after 600 pages we don't get any answers to anything, and meanwhile most of the characters whose unresolved predicaments we have been wondering about for quite some time now, have either disappeared from the plot entirely, or been transmogrified into less-palatable versions of themselves. Some simply flit back into the story for a brief moment before the end mercifully comes. We are, shockingly, left without any of the answers we have been so eagerly reading towards, left to fend for ourselves with our own imaginations, abandoned to perform what was essentially the author's main responsibility to his readership. If we are not owed either the answers he has made us wonder about, or at least some reason for having asked the questions in the first place, what are we doing with our noses buried 600 pages deep in this book? In my opinion, the end result of this type of coy, shadowboxing style of writing is pointless storytelling. These are not the type of deeply- conceived characters with fascinating complexities, where it would be interesting and rewarding to ponder the various sorts of ways that life and fate might have affected them had the story resolved this way or that. It is the very situations and the bizarre potentialities of this story which imbue it with interest, and I felt bamboozled after caring enough to wonder what it all meant, only to have Murikami stop the engines in total limbo. Frankly, in this vein, I think Murakami missed his golden opportunity towards the end of the book when Toru Okada is morphed back from the strange hotel room to the bottom of the flooding well. As the well fills with water and our hero is paralyzed from the abject exhaustion of just having traveled through time, space and hotel room walls, we are not sure what will become of him, but we fear the worst. Now comes the brilliantly-named chapter, "The Story Of The Duck People"!!! Holy cow, here was Murakami's chance! As long as our author is leaving it all up to us anyway, I think he should have drowned Toru in the well and made this Duck People chapter describe a bizarre other-dimensional world, which is some kind of weird afterlife place, where everyone from the book ends up as half-duck folk, and where because of this strange new "reality" the whole plot has a chance to be explained and resolved. I'm being serious! Before I knew what this chapter actually was - alas, just a final May Kasahara letter in which she describes the antics of some real-life ducks who live by her wig factory *yawn*, I had some STRONG chills running up and down my spine. The image evoked by those weird words, "The Story Of The Duck People," made me think that Murakami had fooled us until the very last moment, blindsiding us with the unexpected coup de grace, succeeding richly at the precise moment when all seemed hopelessly unresolvable. And such is the fine line which writers walk... In "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," in my opinion Murakami fell off the high wire, and didn't build himself a net sufficient to save himself and his book from a failed try at greatness.
Rating:
Summary: Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Review: I finished this book last night and my feelings are mixed. On one hand, I absolutely loved the first three hundred pages or so, but the last three hundred...ugh, they just got too weird. The story starts off simply enough. A young couple have lost their cat, probably in the nearby alley. Things start to get a bit weirder when the man (who is unemployed), starts receiving explicit phone calls and encounters a number of strange people with odd stories. This part was all good. I liked how it was getting steadily weirder, but still remaining anchored in reality. At this stage, nothing was implausible, just very weird. Then. The author must have gotten too caught up in making things weird, because it started to get really stupid. The main character followed a random guy around for a while and then beat him up. For no real reason (the reason was there, but it was weak, I think), a woman started spending lots of money on him, his wife disappeared under increasingly stupid circumstances, he developed...ugh...psychic powers. Etc and etc. Not too impressed with all that. But. I was waiting for it to be all neatly wrapped up. And it wasn't. One of the main characters at the start, May, she was relegated to little more than a letter writer at the end. I didn't see the point at all of the old man telling his long (but interesting) stories about Russia/Japan hostilities in WW2. And the *BIG SPOILERS* big bad guy at the end being his wife's brother? Sure, that was obvious, but it was never really explained just how he managed to get all these psychic powers, or what he intended to do with them, or why he was such a threat. And the psychic dream world place was never explained, not at all.*/BIG SPOILERS* So in the end I was disappointed. But I loved the start. I can handle weird, but not stupid weird.
Rating: 
Summary: Free Jazz
Review: We can all marvel at the sheer creativity Marakami wields in this book. But be warned, all ye fans of straightforward fiction. Sure, it's fun to read. The main character is a kind of average-joe underacheiver whose life is thrown into a kind of cartoon-choas. But like free jazz, the virtuoso solos lead nowhere but confusion and . . . In the end, unanswered questions abound. We never really figure out what the sinister "tendency" is that overcomes the main character's wife and turns his life upside down. It's got something to do with sex and human brutality - but the plot is never resolved so we have little more than a sketch of a bizarre and twisted tale of modern Japan and the lingering legacy of WWII. I'd recommend this book to those interested in modern Japan and to fans of literary art who might dig deeper into the book's symbolism.
Rating:
Summary: the grip of the past
Review: Haruki Murakami's novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, is an exquisite body of passionate storytelling and artful characterization that simultaneously reunites readers with the sights and sounds of their everyday lives and locks them in the grip of the past.
Toru Okada is a normal, unemployed, young man living in the suburbs of Tokyo in 1984. The story begins with Toru listening to the radio while cooking a simple meal of spaghetti. His pasta goes softer than al dente when a woman phones him and asks him for ten minutes of his time so that they can understand each other's feelings. He tells her to call back later. Moments later, his wife Kumiko phones to tell him, first of all, that it is OK with her if he decides to stay unemployed for the time being and, secondly, that she is worried about Noboru Wataya, their big, brown, striped tomcat, who has been missing for over a week. After lunch, Toru puts on his sneakers, steps out into the hot summer sun, and hops over the backyard fence to search for the cat in the dusty alley behind their house.
In the first 23 pages, Murakami establishes an intimate constellation of symbols that he sets out to explore in the remaining 584 pages. The result is a rich tapestry colored with the depths of love and life.
In the alley we catch glimpses of abandoned backyards, wandering sounds of televisions, and the softness of cool shade. Toru tells us that as a result of the suburban development of the city, the back alley gradually became sealed off on both ends. Empty and abandoned, the alley soon becomes Toru's, and thus the reader's, connection to a mysterious teenage girl and an empty well that takes Toru, quite literally, to a dream world. Ironically, the alley is really a closed space that leads nowhere.
The name 'Toru' translates into 'conduit' or 'passageway'. Just as the view from the alley shows us the 'insides' of people's lives, Toru is our connection to a world of people and events, conscious and unconscious. He is Mr. Wind-up Bird. A narrator that connects the reader to an old war veteran, a prostitute of the mind, a young mute named Cinnamon, and his mother Nutmeg.
Murakami traverses space and time to tell stories of forgotten soldiers and mass consumerism. Set in Japan in the mid-1980s, the stories and personalities woven together in the novel are rooted in the history of Japanese empire in the 1930s and 40s. Much more than a set of facts, Murakami paints history as a living, breathing entity through which he drives his exploration of the Japanese psyche. Murakami draws a powerful link between the emptiness he finds in modern Japanese society and the past that it emerges from. In so doing, he challenges himself and his readers to imagine and to confront the conscious and unconscious historical forces that shape daily life. As a work of fiction, Murakami's novel is invaluable for the interpretive freedom that it gives its readers. Rather than a book that can be read for answers, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a novel that must be read for its possibilities. In its approaches to the history of Japanese imperialism the novel offers inspiration on the different ways in which the past must be historically imagined. In exploring history, Murakami challenges Japanese national identity. The narrative is Murakami's struggle to confront the contradictions of modern Japan, the story is Toru's struggle to take back his own identity. While Toru confronts the contradictions in his life at the bottom of the well, Murakami confronts the contradictions of modern Japanese identity by composing the oral narratives of Lieutenant Mamiya and Nutmeg and Cinnamon's meta-fictional narratives.
History is Murakami's well. Just as the well takes Toru to another world, the narratives that Murakami writes for Mamiya and Nutmeg introduce the reader to a imaginary world that borrows a sense of reality from a historical context that Murakami subtly and carefully invokes. Across the borders of Manchuria Yamamoto is skinned alive while Honda and Mamiya manage to escape back to Hailar only to become forgotten and disgraced in the battle of Nomonhan. Though both characters managed to end up back home in Japan, Honda lost his hearing and Mamiya lost his left hand. Much more than sacrificed appendages, the two characters lost their souls in Manchuria, living the rest of their lives in solitude and emptiness.
As haunting as the images were, Murakami sculpted the many stories in the chronicle in such an organic way as to imbue in each an undeniable moral and psychological weight, harmonious in a constellation of sounds, symbols, and meanings.
The weight of each narrative is rooted in an underlying memory of Manchukuo-a memory that Murakami writes as alien yet familiar, conscious but unconscious. Just as Rossini's The Thieving Magpie is unconsciously familiar, so too are the images of Japanese soldiers killing Chinese people and the 'modernity' that we find in the Xinjing zoo. Murakami is working to connect and embrace the contradictions in modern Japanese history in an effort to understand and transcend them. The work challenges and in many ways convinces readers to connect the contradictions and imagine the many meanings in fiction and in history. Haruki Murakami's novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, is a compelling meditation on history and historiography that crosses psychological and national boundaries and penetrates the depths of individual and collective identity. The psychological undercurrents in Japanese history are strong. Murakami's novel is an important window into the depths of those waters.
Rating:
Summary: snobby schmuck deconstructs other snobby schmuck
Review: You know what's worse than snobby pretentious literary schmucks? It's the schmucks that try to deconstruct them, thereby becoming more of a schmuck than the literary schmuck they're criticizing. And this can go on and on. But I think my review will explain it all. By entering into the fray with my own theory, I seek to pick apart and paint a coherent picture of the situation at hand. First of all, I know more than you because I'm deconstructing you at the moment. Deconstructionism relies on the observer having more access to the observed than the observed does himself. Thus, I stand outside and watch, as one schmuck disses another for intellectual well-read pretensions. And I cast down a label upon both of you, for you are both schmucks. But I, since I stand outside as a spectator, am free from criticism. I'm being clearly objective, and anyone in possession of objectivity cannot be a schmuck in anyway. Schmuckiness is only for those who bring their personal biases to bear on a certain issue. Since I am without this, I can look, listen, scoff, and cast judgment, and know with all my heart that my analysis of the situation means more than yours. I am outside the system, I can watch the schmucks roil and romp and duel it out and be completely unaffected by them. Anyway, Wind-Up Bird is a very good book. I know this better than you, because I've deconstructed the schmuck reviews and their schmuck tendencies. My review, because of its comprehensive analysis, stands alone as the best. No snobbery here. Just the pure objectivity of someone who can see your schmuckiness without you seeing it.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing worse then snobbish literary shmucks
Review: Amazon.com reviews, despite being very helpful, are plagued with one major ailment: the book snob's opinion. I can't stress how furiously my scrawny arms shake when I read a defensive, hostile review chalk full of copious and unnecessary references to other books that's only purpose is to inform me why this person possesses some greater knowledge/has a "more valid" opinion then the rest of the fine people writing reviews. It's hard to bear when these people use such revoltingly snide, pseudo-punchy literary terms as "fast food fiction," and "short attention span writing," in an attempt to emulate the scathing book reviews they long so desperately to be able to write. Tell me, how many times can one successfully classify hip literature as a product of the "Mtv Generation." Yes, it's all about the Mtv Generation. The nerve of us. We just barge onto the scene with our "fast food fiction," vintage track jackets and ipods, with complete disregard to the standards of profundity established by an aging Gen-X dufus. Don't pay any mind to these people. Chances are, you aren't pretentious enough to have a rigid set of standards and won't send down lighting and pestilence on anything that fails to meet them. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is wildly imaginative, and that alone makes it worth reading. Murakami writes an intensely surreal story in a simple, straightforward tone that creates a nice contrast between the books' protagonist and the events surrounding him. It's deeply emotional. I could say more, but you should just experience it yourself. It's a deliriously entertaining read. Just go out and try it. Ignore the imposters and spite the cynics.
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