The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Far and away the most pround and gripping novel I read this
Review: This novel reminds me of a powerful hybrid between the great 19th century modernist novels and the paranoid genius tradition of Pynchon and DeLillo. The 600+ pages fly by as the the reader gets wrapped up in an ever tighter and more peculiar web of history, conscience, search, loneliness and love for the lost as well as pity for the many victims of cultural malaise.
Set in Japan it easily transcends geography and nationality and becomes a sort of diary of an everyman who is both, entirely common and extremely at odds with his surroundings who become more inexplicable the deeper he looks for answers to seemingly mundane questions. Definitely in the grand tradition of magical realism but not as overtly verbose! Hardly a sentence seems profound enough to quote but read in its entirety it is moving and devastating and kept me turning the pages way past a reasonable bedtime.

Rating:
Summary: Sadly disappointing...
Review: It has been about nine months since I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. After having read Murakami continuously for over a year, that book burned me out and disappointed me, and now it's time to write as objective a review about it as possible. Before buying it, I thought I was "saving the best for last," as I had read every Murakami book available in the U.S. except this one.

I don't understand why so many readers think this is Murakami's best work. I wish that I could have enjoyed it, but it was a dull, uninspiring, stale read. There is no growth in this book, no energy. No sympathy for any of the characters; no ideas to awaken one; every line is just the same existentialist circus. This book goes nowhere. After having heard so many starry-eyed, enthralled readers talk about Toru Okada's voyage to the underworld(his wife leaves him, and he decides he wants to spend time in a dry well in his backyard), I thought I was in for the eighth wonder. In one word, it was boring.

I don't know why I thought this. I'm not claiming that it will seem as stale to anyone else, but I just want to warn other readers that --Murakami fans or not--- if they haven't read it, perhaps it is best to go to a library before buying it. Here I will try to give the best reasons I can to say why I didn't enjoy it. I am very familiar with Murakami's work, and perhaps if this had been the first book of his that I read, I would have liked it more. But in any case, the writing was nothing of what I had anticipated.

Toru Okada is the Murakami "everyman" taken to its most boring extreme. This is the heighth of this very Murakami concept to many, but his character is hardly believable. The story opens while he is cooking spaghetti. He has quit his job in a law firm and is trying to think at the moment, but he gets no thinking done and enjoys staying inside all day, listening to music. He seems to have no reaction, no emotion, no opinion, and his energy and spirit is lost somewhere in space. Toru Okada is pale, stale, flavorless...dry like camphor.

Perhaps the book would be more effective if it were 400 pages shorter. With a little life breathed back into it, the book's elements, story line, events, all would make for an interesting story, but by the time each major event of the book is complete, though, we've forgotten what it is we are trying to find. We have ceased to care. There's no gravity anymore; we're floating somewhere as dead as Toru Okada. Take Kumiko's disappearance, for example. It takes forever for it to happen, for it to be of importance to the reader.

In the meantime we meet even more camaphorous characters that further bog down the story. May Kashara (sp? sorry, I don't have the book anymore), the annoying teenager. Toru Okada spends what it seems like 7 or 8 chapters taking little excursions to his backyard to talk to May, who seems to be hiding something. Her leg is bad (Murakami's women characters either 1) have some sort of issue with sexuality and play the piano, 2) spend every day in a café until someone comes to pay the bill and takes her home with them, 3) have inhumanly gorgeous ears and little else, 4)have bad legs and disappear all the time); she limps. She drinks soda. She is obsessed with death and seems to have an obsessive crush on him. He's oblivious to that, of course.

Okay - all of these things have the capacity of forming a book worth reading, but the problem is that the writing is lifeless, and that even the most amazing ideas (characters going through walls, psychic alter-egos, alternate realities, dangerous and mysterious characters, etc.) all fall through and end up soggy and sickly, like discolored detergent-water on mud.

Creta Kano? Reviews make her out to be almost supernatural; it doesn't get more enigmatic than this, I thought. But she and her sister are so dull. Murakami was running out of ideas?

The only part of the book that I can say I enjoyed was when the old army officer tells about his time in Manchuria, where he saw a man being skinned alive. That could be a nice short story.

I have to be honest. I go to book three, and then threw the book in the fireplace. It just wasn't worth it. It is sadly disappointing, an anemic book. I liked other works by Murakami, though, especially The Elephant Vanishes (a collection of his best short stories), Sputnik Sweetheart, and Norwegian Wood.

Rating:
Summary: What am I missing
Review: I am sorry but this book is one of the worst I have read. What am I missing? Everyone seems to love it except for myself. I had the book sitting on my shelf for a couple of years, wondering why I bought it. Then I looked at reviews and thought "This must be good." So I started to read, kept reading, and still hated it. Please, someone tell me what I am missing?

Rating:
Summary: Should be one in every library
Review: This sounds absurd, but it is an absolute disgrace that the hardcover edition of this book is no longer. It has to be one of the most beautifully designed novels ever to be published, the crowning achievement of eminent book designer Chip Kidd's career and a package that displays an impressive commitment to deep quality on the part of much-maligned corporate publishers. So the fact that this edition is out of print is disturbing -- track one down if you can.

Even more important though is the fact that such a beautiful, multi-layered design is so appropriate to the book inside. Like the cover, Murakami's writing is colorful and gorgeous, both accessible and very apparently ambitious. And like the book design, Murakami's prose just barely covers all that's going on underneath the first layer of storytelling. Other reviewers have written about the plot and characters, but what's interesting is that while Murakami tells an ambitious and provocative story, from novel to novel the characters and storylines don't seem to change much -- it's not they're predictable (they're absolutely not), but they're not necessarily surprising except for how true, how accurate they feel, despite the fact that (for me) they take place a world away. But underneath this story is an absolutely fascinating, completely unique, and always developing treatise I guess on how to live in the world. And in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle both the storytelling and this architecture underneath have taken a monumental, ambitious step forward that explicitly embraces a sense of history for the first time.

But beyond all that universality, I read this book for the second time while traveling through Japan, and what I had never thought of as culturally or even geographically specific in Murakami's work suddenly took on a whole new life. It was absolutely the best way to read the book -- in sort of a corny way, the way Kerouac is best read when driving cross country -- but also in an unusually rich way, the way Borges is best read in Buenos Aires, because what might feel obscure, pedantic, academic feels deeply grounded. It's not that the book's greatest value is as a travel guide or as a an introduction to an "exotic" culture -- in fact the opposite, it's the fact that there's not really an exotic world, that in fact the way someone like Murakami (or Borges) perceives the world is in fact completely relevant, even applicable to the way we do. And that's why this book, from the inside out, is a perfect example of why literature is still vital.

Rating:
Summary: tell me once, tell me twice, tell me too many times
Review: I've recommended this book to nine people. All of them read the first chapter. Not a single one of them has gotten past the third chapter. I read the book four times. If I have to blame someone or something for keeping my friends from reading this book, it would be time -- or, better yet, circumstance.

Some books require a certain mood. Some books require a dark room, some books require candlelight, some books require classical music, some jazz, some beatles, some bubble bath -- or so I've heard.

THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE may just require you to be sitting with a dead CD player on your lap, in the first chair in a row of chairs, three places away from a napping Middle-Eastern man in orange robes, near baggage claim #1 at the Pittsburgh International Airport at seven o'clock in the morning on September 11th, 2001, waiting two days for someone who isn't ever going to arrive.

I lost patience with the book when May Kasahara kept rambling on and on in her letter. I remember the exact moment I lost patience -- when she first introduced the wig factory. I lost patience with the book, and with everything that was happening in my life and in the world. I almost tore the book in half. I'm not a strong man. I probably would have broken my wrist.

For some reason, I kept reading. Murakami was disturbing me, bugging me, tiring me, and testing my patience. He was telling me a story that amounts to little (and, at the same time, much) more than a man sitting at the bottom of a dried well. He was telling me a story that says little (and, at the same time, much) more than "I was dying, just like everyone else."

However, if just for a moment, Murakami was talking to ME. I've not read a novel that penetrates the psyche of war (if war indeed does have its own psyche) in a such a way. I've not read a more atmospheric, unpretensiously reflexive novel. I've not read another 600+ page book more than four times in forty-eight hours. Few books make me cry, for any reason. Surely not books about inmates on death row or tragic love stories.

In THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, nothing is simple. Nothing is really clear. A lot of things don't fit. It's not ALWAYS funny. The narrator digresses. His dry wit disintegrates when the going gets postmodernly rough. Murakami doesn't mention the Beatles enough. Murakami makes it clear from the third chapter: he's not going to make this easy on you, and he's not going to make it easy on himself. He's not going to make anything easy on anyone. If he wanted to that, he'd write SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN, and cut out the whole thing with the envelope of money, because, as my friend put it, 'That was just weird. Like one of those math problems, where they give you too much information, you know?'

Ahem.

In THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, one in three plot points is like that envelope of money. THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE is a math problem with too much information.

Witness the psychic who says the cat is never coming back, and that the narrator will find his tie. Witness the cat, returning late in the book, and the narrator's tie, never mentioned again.

If you choose to read this book, read it with an open mind. Reading it four times, too, helps.

In closing, I would like to say that I don't fully 'get' this novel, and I'm not sure I would ever want to.

Rating:
Summary: Murakami is a master of prose
Review: I read this book whilst travelling in Africa and I vividly remember me sitting late into the night under my mosquito net breathlessly chasing the protagonist ever further into his surrealist labyrinth. The unusual character of the setting - a European reading a book in Western Africa by a Japanese author - simply added to the powerful sense of disorientation. What sticks to my mind two years after reading this book is Murakami's uncanny ability to conjure up images of great physical power. His prose is suggestive to a degree that it literally spills over into the other senses: I cherish the memory of a number of strong aural, visual and tactile impulses related to various episodes in the book. The centrepiece, for me, is Lieutenant Mamiya's epic narrative of his war-time experiences in Manchuria and Mongolia: a dark metaphysical fable where beauty and death mingle in a deeply poignant way.
I have since read no other of Murakami's books. Glossing over some of their back covers I can't escape the impression that settings, moods and plots seem to vary only a little from book to book. I'd rather stick to the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, then. It'll give me re-reading pleasure for the years to come.

Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: this book is honestly one of the most amazing i have ever read. the characters have breadth and depth and yet remain singularly out of reach. . .but in an intriguing, incredible way. his prose is amazing and i would recommend this book freely to any reader.

Rating:
Summary: decent fiction still exists?!
Review: I remember reading Banana Yoshimoto's strange and beautiful "Kitchen" far deep into the night many years ago--it was one of those compulsive reads that went down with one gulp and left me staring into the darkness just thinking. Unfortunately (well, actually fortunately), "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is a much chunkier read so I couldn't do the same thing however much I wanted to, yet there was something about it that reminded me of the former experience (and not because they are both Japanese authors either).

As a person who grows increasingly more disillusioned with modern fiction, I'm pleased to say that "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" may have temporarily startled away my usual curmudgeonly attitude and given me hope that there is decent literature yet to be discovered. I loved the hodgepodge of tradition and pop culture, the twist on the usually tired east-meets-west genre, and most of all, the attitude--the nonchalant normalacy of Toru Okada as he stumbles around unearthing both the macabre and the mundane. Its sense of invention, mystique, and expertly woven (yet strangely and paradoxically unwoven) storyline never had me secondguessing...I didn't know what freakish journey I would be taken on and I didn't care!

Rating:
Summary: A world class writers masterpiece.
Review: I've read all of Murakami's works available in English and this his best work ever--which is saying something as he is a truly gifted writer who possesses a vivid imagination, a unique, compelling writing style who delivers consistently first rate fiction on a regular basis.

At heart this is a book about the societal schizophrenia that characterizes modern day Japan-a country that revels in it's ancient history and heritage but cannot admit or cope with it's 20th century history and shame, that basks in economic success and power while enduring political decay and corruption, that is obsessed with its racial homogeneity while steadfastly denying the attendant alienation and anomie that is engendered by the forces of conformity and sublimation of personality the obsession creates.

Murakami's genius is his ability to express and convey this reality through, on the one hand, the most ordinary and mundane protagonists imaginable and allegorical illusions derived from the most mundane of surroundings. In this case the former is Toru Okada, the sort of fellow who perpetually seems to be involved in the contemplation of his existence while, say, cooking spaghetti.

Toru doesn't get around much even though he's trying to find his lost wife, his lost cat-basically, his lost life. He nevertheless does get around enough to meet an unusual cast of characters, each of whom represents an aspect of Japanese society-whether it be disaffect war veterans, alienated teenagers or powerful-and powerfully corrupt-politicians. In fact most of Toru's travels are to and through so-called alley, blocked at both ends, That serves as a microcosm of Japan itself and is littered with other ordinary allegorical detritus--the statue of a bird looking sadly unable to fly, and the unidentified wind-up bird that creaks invisibly in a nearby tree, the a dry well Toru spends so much time meditating in, a house abandoned because of a series of tragedies and so on.

This may not sound like it adds up to much of a story, but, in fact, it's a cauldron of stories-a mystery, a surrealistic fable, a deadpan comedy, a military history, and a love story-all of which work on their own and all of which blend into the whole.

This is not an easy book to read-yet it's impossible to put down. What more can you ask of a novel but thoughtful literary entrapment? You get it here in droves.

Rating:
Summary: Wind -up Bird Chronicle
Review: Complex, well written, with characters who are both real and surreal in a plot moving from worldly to dream-world laid on a hum-drum background. The young May Kasahara reprensents modern, cool Japanese youth. "Empty shells" from the Manchurian (but perhaps all of the empire days) are still about. Nobura Wataya as a corrupt politician has the maniputlative skills needed. The wealthy moderns who can't cope and the counselors who service them including the supernatural Kano sisters. The central, first person Toru Okada is an honorable "loser" and the foil for Murakami to play out his message.