The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: the wind up bird chronicle
Review: The first line of this book, which talks about the perfect song to make spaghetti to, is what made me read it, and Murakami's style, so perfectly expressed in the first line is what made me enjoy the book so completely. Murakami's writing is so unbelievably honest, and he has such an attention to details that would normally be considered unimportant to plot, but which he makes a main focus in the novel. It is full of the things that we would never admit to thinking, or wouldn't deem necessary to write down, and this makes for an interesting read because you feel as though you're reading about a real person. When you're confused, Toru is confused right along with you. At one point in the novel I found myself shocked by something one of the characters said, and looked back over the text to see if I had missed something, only to find out a page later that Toru was as shocked as I was, and just didn't want to interrupt the speaker to try and make sense out of what they had said.
This book is amazingly funny, but also incredibly creepy at times. Murakami creates a world that is incredibly realistic, and then throws outrageous things into it in a way that doesn't seem awkward in the least.
This book follows the path of a mystery, but unlike most mystery novels, you cannot try to predict "who the killer is" or in this case "why Toru's cat has gone missing." The only thing you can do is to let yourself be swept away by the tide, as if you were caught in a dream that you knew you were having, but didn't have to ability to depart from. I use this analogy because many of the scenes in the book are dreamlike, as well as some being literal dreams. In a way, reading the wind up bird chronicle was like waking up from a disturbingly vivid dream, the kind where you can remember every detail, every action, but you have no idea what the dream means. This isn't to say that I have no idea what the point of the book was, but I often felt as though I was missing some profound meaning behind every word. Murakami makes every detail and every line of dialogue important and deliberate, and every scene gave me the feeling that the meaning of the book was hidden inside it.
And perhaps it was. I cant say that there was only one meaning behind this book because I think everyone who reads it will get something different. For me, this book was about self discovery, but for others it could be about society, relationships and how they change, war, the nature of evil, living out your chosen destiny, or making your own destiny. In more briefer word though, it is simply a funny, serious, sad, exciting, disturbing, eye-opening novel that I definitely do not regret having read.

Rating:
Summary: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Review: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle engages your attention from the first line. The novel is humorous, tragic and disturbing all at once. I must admit, I found myself dozing a bit at intervals when either the main character Toru Okada or his friend Lieutenant Mamiya would discuss the war in Manchuria (honestly, IÕm not a fan or war stories), however I thought that the book was interesting and exciting to read.
This novel is brimming with symbolism. Toru Okada pays meticulous attention to detail and notices everything including the weather, the time, the strange lack of reality in his world, water, pleasure and pain. Throughout the book, Okada searches for something real, tangible, and "concrete" (as he puts it) so that he can have something to hold on to in his world that is sadly deteriorating and becoming more dream-like and less real every moment. For me, this book was mostly about OkadaÕs search for the concrete in an abstract world.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle tested my patience to see how long I could stand a book with a main character who hid himself in a well for about one hundred pages and reflected on life. After finishing the book, I thought about my impatience at that interval and attempted to see where it came from. This book is unlike any other I have ever read; although it is obviously fantastical and mostly unrealistic, it almost seems like the most realistic book I could imagine. I believe that if someone was at the bottom of a well, in the dark, that it would be a time of reflection and contemplation and not a point where the plot needed to take over and propel the story. I suppose that I simply expected for it to end neatly packaged, for it to have a classic resolution, but it did not. It was a pleasant surprise though, because it left me with much to think about.
I really enjoyed MurakamiÕs style, and use of symbolism and intricate details in this story because it left me with a very fulfilling experience both while I read and after I finished. However, I must admit that I was a little disappointed that I never got to know what happened to the little boy who heard the Wind-Up bird from his bedroom window, or what KumikoÕs secret was. I got so interested in what would become of them that it was a tremendous let down that I never found out. In the end, I was both happy and confused. I think I might try picking up another Murakami book, but IÕll have to wait a while. I need to recuperate.

Rating:
Summary: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Review: Warnings about water. Precise notation of time, the complete lack of it. Women who become one another at critical moments. Baseball bats and blue-black marks. Cats, birds, jellyfish, tigers and elephants (oh, my!). Young soldiers and little boys. Sex in dreams and real consequences. Love and dysfunction. War, gore, and fear. And more water. Confused yet?
I was, but I was also intensely interested. The various intertwining narratives split their time between the concrete and the nebulous, the ordinary and the supernatural. The result is a schitzophrenic reality with a smooth finish, that can be read and enjoyed simply as a wonderful story. I never felt that Murakami was trying too hard.
However, the layers of symbolism that make up the story are difficult to analyze and understand. Water is obviously a major unifying thread. Everything in the story is built around the "flow" of life, of events. This flow is marked by the behavior of the literal water in the story, from tap water to the ocean to a dry well. Mr. Honda tells Toru to follow the flow, and he obeys, even as it takes him to ever-stranger places. Another theme deals with identity. Lt. Mamiya and the Kano sisters are empty. Kumiko, May Kasahara, and Nutmeg's women have disturbing and nameless things lurking within. Toru must combat the evil that lives inside Noboru Wataya, and rescue both his beloved wife Kumiko and himself, armed only with a vague sense of unreality, a gateway well, and a baseball bat. In the end, he succeeds, though just barely. His victory is not total, but it does have a quiet kind of triumpth.
This book is not "about" any one thing. It is better understood through feeling than through thought, a characteristic that makes it difficult to describe; it must be experienced. When I finished it, I felt bewildered, yet serenely satisfied.

Rating:
Summary: Truth as seen from a well
Review: You can find the plot and characters detailed in many other reviews, so let me cut to the experience of reading the book. Toru Okada, like the reader, waits for information to come to him, whether it's a titillating phone call, clues about his wife's disappearance, or insight at the bottom of a well. We scramble to make connections, to go deeper, to see the pattern, and are constantly distracted by new incidents and ideas. Many have noted that Okada is a passive character, but that makes us connect to him since we are reading. Like him, we are most active in our dreams or in that netherworld where we're not really sure if we're acting or imagining. The book is most alive at the psychic level, which encourages this faith that if we can make the deep connections, if we can find psychic wholeness, that we'll do the important work of combating the evil represented by the telegenic politician, Noboru Wataya. I have no idea why so many readers feel the book is unresolved - there's a violent climax in which the narrator takes heroic action and returns to the world with a stronger self. What more can one ask of a story?

While I was reading the book, I felt myself splitting in two - there was the reader moving quickly through the prose, reacting viscerally to the shocks and jolts of the narrative, and a deeper self, struck as by a tuning fork, waiting for revelation. Okada goes beneath the surface of the mysterious world of war, consumer goods, and music to the place where he finally sees the true face of his enemy, confronts his fear of the flashing knife, endures real wounds from psychic battle, and is healed by unseen tears. I emerged from the well of the book with a similar sense of hope and integration. Some strands of narrative remained unwoven, some ideas seemed outside the provisional pattern I constructed, but that's the way it is in this life. I read many books more than once, finding richer webs of meaning each time. Murukami provides pleasure on so many levels - historical, musical, cultural, literary - that I trust him to be many steps ahead of my first reading of this masterwork. I've read his early novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, his recent South of the Border, East of the Sun, and his non-fiction examination of cults and culture, Underworld, but this novel was the most satisfying of all because of its breadth of vision and sheer ambition. It requires attention, but it rewards deep reading.

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Summary: Buried in Kanji, Wrapped in Rice Paper
Review: I should say that half way through The Wind-Up Bird, I read over some reviews to get a feel for what other people think. Unfortunately, many were intent on giving the story away. Quite simply, it is best not to know the story line in advance. This is not a book one could possibly rationalize and understand without having first experienced it. More to the point, such analysis will only detract from the experience of reading the book in the first place.

Encountering The Wind-Up-Bird Chronicle is like encountering a delicate origami crane for the first time. From the very beginning, you wonder how it got in that shape. You wish to know the secret of its structure. To do so, you must work at it slowly and carefully, undoing each fold with the utmost care and caution in order to discover the pain-staking sequence that led to its beautifully complex and elegant shape. Reading The Wind-Up-Bird is like unfolding a bigger, more-complex crane -- so complex in fact that you might be confused when the entire thing is laid out in front of you, creases spanning the entire page. If you are like me, you might spend weeks or months trying to figure out how to put that crane back together.

Without giving too much away, allow me to share some of the things that engaged and enwrapped me:

* The possibility that every experience in our life contains deep and profound philosophical meaning.

* Discovering the mysterious nature of life and the vagaries of chance fate; realizing that the place we inhabit and the family we are born into are givens that guide us, not things we can ultimately choose.

* Questioning the extent to which we can fully understand other people -- from the man why walks by us in the street to the significant other who sleeps on the other side of our bed.

* Realizing the deep and intricate continuity between dreams and waking life. More to the point, discovering how the two realities affect each other and blend together in a seamless fabric called reality.

* The possibility that our most profound insights about life might only be found in the bottom of a dry well in a deep meditative, trance-like state.

* Finally, the book made realize that a story is quite possibly the best tool with which to convey historical reality. Sounds strange, I'm sure, but after doing a lot of deep research about Japan's involvement in Manchuria during WWII, Murakami is perhaps in the best possible position to give voice to what is often omitted from non-fiction historical texts, simply because history (which is almost infinite) is never fully uncovered or told by finite, fallible and imperfect historians.

Hmm, I suppose I should discuss names a bit too. All Japanese names have meaning as written in kanji. Tanaka means 'in the rice field'. Kobayashi means 'small forest'. O'Hara means 'big field'. It wasn't until the entrance of Mr. Ushikawa (bull river) that I remembered this and began to wonder how each character's name was written in the original Japanese version. Indeed, Mr. Ushikawa's speaks openly about the significance of his name at one point. As he says, he sort of grew to fit the name, instead of the name growing to fit him.

The main character's name is also significant, but more so when he comes to known as "Mr. Wind-Up-Bird." (I'll leave that one to you.) Mr. Wind-Up-Bird and Mr. Ushikawa made me realize that I might be missing some important context, so I decided to research every name that appears in the book. It wasn't hard for a man in my position. After buying a Japanese edition in Tokyo, I spent a good hour talking over the names with a kind English-sensei that just happened to be handy. From this, I was able to flesh out many hidden nuances. One of the character's names, a certain Noboru Wataya, turned out to be of critical significance.

Noboru Wataya's first name was written in katakana in the Japanese version, but any Japanese reader would know that "noboru" has two corresponding kanji: One means "to rise" and the other means "to climb." The kanji representing "to rise" has the further significance of pictographically representing a rising sun, and thus in Japan it is often referred to "taiyo noboru" -- taiyo meaning sun. Although written without a corresponding kanji, Noboru implies something moving up -- quite possibly sun itself, and thus the very symbol of the Japanese people.

The last name, Wataya, appears in kanji, and it simply means cotton valley. Not just any valley, though. It has the connotation of a hidden, secret or mystical valley. The image of shrouded Shangri-La comes to mind. While reading the book, it is important remember that Noboru Wataya might be rising or climbing something in both the literal and figurative sense of the term. Is he rising in the social ranks, or perhaps climbing the social ladder? Again, I'll leave that to you. Of particular note, though, is the fact that Wataya is not a common Japanese name. According to my source, it is extremely rare, if anybody of Japanese origin bears the name at all. All of this overlaps very with the myterious and unique character of Noboru Wataya himself, so I was glad to have gotten the scoop.

I will say no more about the book, because it is simply too complex to unravel in a review like this. If you want to know whether or not the book is for you, try reading into it for a good ten minutes. It is amazing how much you can get from ten short minutes if you really invest your attention. I hope you find this book as intoxicating and rewarding as I did. Feel free to write me and let me know either way. I'm good like that.

Rating:
Summary: Shape Without Form, Shade Without Colour
Review: Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is a good combination of the weirdness that turned me off his "A Wild Sheep Chase", and the transcendent beauty that had me gushing over his "Norwegian Wood". Thankfully, he's taken what didn't work in the former and made it work, and what did work in the latter and amplified it.

Our narrator here, an out of work lawyer named Toru Okada, bears a lot of resemblance to his "Norwegian Wood" namesake, Toru Watanabe. Both men are ciphers, devoid of any personality of their own. "No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by," Okada notes at one point. "But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely." This is how both Torus see themselves, only it was hardly true. Okada, like Watanabe, is adept at unwillingly attracting a menagerie of strange women to him. There's a pair of seemingly psychic sisters with silly names, an inquisitive and curious high-school girl who lives across the alley, and the mysterious woman who's always offering Okada a cigarette.

Most dominant of these women is Okada's wife, Kumiko. "Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?" Okada asks early on, articulating the novel's central question. It is Kumiko of which he is speaking here. She appears one morning wearing a strange new perfume. And then she disappears. The remainder of the book finds Okada searching for her, and the situations he gets himself into do a lot of work in answering his question in the negative. Take one example, in which he relates the story of how on their first date, Kumiko wanted to watch the jellyfish at the aquarium. Unfortunately, the jellyfish call up a bad memory for Okada: the time as a boy when he accidentally wandered into a school of jellyfish and got badly stung, making him violently him sick. The curious thing about this story is that he admits to never telling Kumiko any of this. Through his own actions he misrepresents himself to his wife, while paradoxically proclaiming her to be the one person who understands him. It is Kumiko herself who metaphorically answers his question, later on in the book, when she notes that, "Two-thirds of the earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's underneath the skin."

Mirroring this idea, that we can't ever know another human being, Murakami's book presents itself as a confusing mixture of styles and time periods and points of view. While writing in a prose style that's comfortable for a reader to flow through, Murakami does a lot of work not letting the audience (nor Okada for that matter) see the machinations that are powering the story. To a passive reader, this can be quite disconcerting. The book is filled with tools to keep the reader off-balance: characters often tell long-winded stories, and abruptly cut themselves off in the middle for seemingly no reason; Okada asks countless questions of the people he believes to have the answers but never seems to get any; in fact, his questions are often ignored.

But a more discerning reader will revel in Murakami's post-modern detective techniques. Like Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy", "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is less about finding the answer, than about the labyrinthine path one must go through to even ask the questions. The story is: "A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit. And--" as Okada incompletely notes at one point. He is a narrator most put off balance, but more than willing to follow along on the adventure. "I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel," he says. "That someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true." He is constantly recognizing that the little universe into which he's stepped has artificial rules. At times he becomes frustrated with the lack of cohesive explanations ("This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films' 'reality'") but he never quits on the search. The audience, in order to enjoy this book, should follow Okada's lead in this regard. If they don't, Murakami's head games will confuse rather amuse, and annoyance will rule the day. If you're not ready for a book so aware of its reader that it helpfully title chapters 'No Good News in This Chapter' and 'A Place You Can Figure Out If You Think About It Really, Really Hard', then you're probably not ready for "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle".

If you are ready, then you'll encounter 600+ pages (it's long, but not *too* long) of simply but effectively written narrative (Jay Rubin's translation once again captures the tranquility-within-chaos that is a hallmark of Murakami's prose). One that's set in Japan but bears the cultural marks of American influence. One that jumps back and forth between the recent past and "prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan." You'll encounter an interesting use of parallel motifs, where items or events that occur in the past or in a dream or on TV reveal themselves again in Okada's waking life. Here's a helpful hint: follow the bat, the dry well, and, of course, the wind-up bird, which "comes over by my place every day and goes 'Creeeak' in the neighbor's tree. But nobody's ever seen it."

Rating:
Summary: I LOVED IT
Review: This i by far one of my favorite books. I absolutely love it and send it to everyone i know or let them borrow my copy. In many cases it's not returned because they loved it or couldnt get themselves to pick it up because it's quite thick (you lazy people! hee hee)however, keep it mind, once you start to read it's hard to stop -- so here i am again on amazon to order myself another copy. It's a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Murakami Grows Up
Review: This is a highly accomplished book by Murakami, a kind of grown up version of Wild Sheep Chase. The off the wall humour has gone but in its place we have some fine character development and an excellent edge on contemporary sex and politics. Its still vintage Murakami though with larger than life villains, girls with sexy ears, some nice culinary touches and the inevitable view of the shopwindows in downtown Tokyo. Woven into the story is a revealing cameo of the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo and the aftermath of the defeat.

Jay Rubin's translation is pretty good although one or two bizarre grammar errors seem to have escaped someone's eye and I noted too some problems with the adjective derived from the word Malta. However, for all that, it is quite a tour de force almost ranking with Hard Boiled Wonderland.

Rating:
Summary: distict and well excecuted
Review: Besides the above, I must say this book is an exceptional blend of detail and fiction, fact and fantasy. At no point does it come off as 'unbelievable' or 'unnatural' although it deals with blurring the line between reality and dreams. Even the cover is unique and beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Questions Without Answers
Review: I love all of Haruki Murakami's books and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is my second favorite ("Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" is first). No one is better than Murakami when it comes to writing about "Everyman" and I think that is one of the keys to his enormous popularity. Even if you don't particularly care for his deadpan style, I don't think there's a person alive who can't identify, in some way, with the characters in his books.

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is no doubt Murakami's densest book to date and, if you're new to this author's works, I would recommend starting with something else first...perhaps "South of the Border, West of the Sun" or "A Wild Sheep Chase."

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" begins when its out-of-work, down-on-his-luck protagonist, Okada (this book's "Everyman"), lets a pot of spaghetti boil over, foils an obscene phone call, then takes a legitimate call from his wife, Kumiko, who asks him to look for their lost cat, Norboru Wataya. Norboru Wataya is named after Kumiko's politician brother and I really haven't figured out if that means Kumiko likes her brother or dislikes him.

Murakami's signature themes are alienation and loneliness and he makes great use of them in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." No matter how much Okada tries to "fit in," he seems to be nothing more than a tourist in the landscape of life; characters drift in and out of his world as he searches for his own identity and a read sense of self. The problem is, each of the characters Okada encounters is searching for something as well and each pulls Okada into his own dreamlike world, confusing the issues (and Okada) even further.

The characters that come to life in the pages of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" are as bizarre as any Murakami has ever created. There is May Kasahara, Okada's sixteen year old "Lolita" type neighbor; Creta and Malta Kano, two psychics; and Lieutenant Mamiya, a man who tells a fascinating tale of wartime espionage, a tale that may hold the key to the heart of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." Lt. Mamiya is a man who has spent time at the bottom of a well, and spending time at the bottom of a well is an experience that will eventually change Okada's life and confer upon him a strange, metaphysical openness.

Murakami juxtaposes the bizarre and the mundane better than any author I have ever read and he does so in such a way as to render the bizarre totally acceptable, and, yes, sometimes even mundane. His books usually don't have meaning, but then life doesn't always have meaning, say Murakami's characters. If it's meaning you're looking for, you'd better look elsewhere.

Murakami writes in a curious deadpan tone that is reminiscent of the very best detective stories and his books are, to some degree, detective stories themselves. They could take place anywhere; there is nothing in them to identify them as uniquely Japanese. If you're looking for classical Japanese literature, Kawabata, Abe or Mishima would be a far better choice. Murakami is totally modern in flavor.

Although this book, at first glance, may seem to be light it is anything but. And, just as life fails to answer all our questions, so does Murakami. Although this book is dense and complex, it leaves a lot unaccounted for. There are some things, Murakami seems to be telling us, that simply don't have answers. Or perhaps they simply don't require them.