Rating: 
Summary: incredible book
Review: I won't bore you with an long academic review of this book. Let me just tell you that I read a ton of books and rarely take the time to write a review on-line; but had to with this book.This book has all that great literature should: social commentary, mysterious & intriguing characters, excellent dialogue, history, comedy, sorrow, and is extremely well-written. This book is awesome. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Zen and the art of story telling
Review: In times when most works of fiction are made out of the same tasteless material cut out by nearly identical cookie cutters this books stands out in a monumental way. Using a precise harmonic writing style, Murakami probes the boundaries of realism and the reality of the inner self.
In an interview the writer said that at one moment the initial idea of the book came to mind: A man cooks spaghetti, the telephone rings. What happens?
By molding Toru, the innocent rather passive bystander, into a metaphor for post second world war Japan, Harukami takes the reader on a trip of identifying, facing and conquering of inner demons. The story develops in a way that has been often described as dreamlike. I am not so sure that this is very accurate. Japan's roots in Buddhism and Shinto have resulted in expressions of a search for harmony in purity and simplicity. As such, reading this superb book gave me more of an impression of being in one of Japan's famous stone gardens, than in a dream.
In order to take the reader along on Toru's inner Odyssey, Harukami provides the form of a mystery in which a cast of "mysterious characters" provide the main character with clues. However, by not allowing many of the secondary story lines to resolve and sometimes letting characters blend or change identity, the writer is very effective in luring us readers to the heart of the matter. It is too bad that some of the professional reviewers were not too taken with Murakami's approach, but cookie cutter writing generates it's own category of critics,....or was it the other way around?
After finishing this book in a couple of days it took me about an equal time to let every aspect of it to sink in. Since this chronicle is such an individual personal expression, I simply see no reason to compare or grade. Get this book and make up your own mind and soul!
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Summary: what an imagination!
Review: This was the first novel I read by the incomparable Murakami, a cult hero in Japan and increasingly in the West as well. Part hard-boiled mystery, part character study, and part sheer oddity, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a delight. If you've never been to Japan, Murakami's stories may seem rather 'un-Japanese'. Although his novels are devoid of geishas and samurai, contemporary Japan bears more in common with a Murakami setting than a classic Kurasawa film. The intermixture of corporate conspiracy, odd fetishes, bizarre twists of events, and Western pop-culture captures much of the feel of urban Japan today, magnified and distorted in a circus mirror. The result is accessible, entertaining and wildly imaginative. It probably appeals more to the young-at-heart. My favorite Murakami is the slightly less polished "Dance, Dance, Dance", followed by the strangely structured "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", written at a time when some critics tried to classify Murakami as 'cyberpunk', and "A Wild Sheep Chase", which really does involve a hunt for a missing sheep. "Norwegian Wood" and "Sputnik" are less characteristic of Murakami's style, but interesting as well. "Wind-Up Bird" is a great place to start. Try it! Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful writing - unfortunately the story disappears
Review: The opening chapters of this book brought the same feeling to me as the original film of Point Blank. Why? Well, despite their superficial differences both works exist in that world of listless summers, dry concrete, abandoned houses and dusty derelict gardens, and journey through the heart of the modern city (Tokyo/Los Angeles), yet a city that seems strangely empty. Echoes of J.G. Ballard here too. Toru Okada, the novel's hero, an aimless happily unemployed everyman, has little in common with Lee Marvin's relentless single-track hitman however. Only wanting to drift, cook pasta and love his wife, the collapse of all these simple domestic pleasures, prefigured by the loss of their cat, pitches him into a wierd underworld of ill-fated war heroes, psychic healers dressed in 60s fashions, a corrupt politician who happens to be his hated brother-in-law, a strange cynical teenage girl (a kind of anti-Lolita) and more. These characters inhabit an impossible dreamspace, swirling under the surface of the sluggish Tokyo summer heat. Okada's happy mundane world becomes filled with threat and dangers glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, but is also opened up to directions that had never before seemed possible, as this space begins to infiltrate and merge with his own reality. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle features bizarre and memorable characters and, so far as can be determined in translation, a dense realist descriptive style. Its tales of love misplaced and hopeless coincidence echo those of the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, and the sprawling muinutely detailed journeys of George Perec. In his treatment of the fear and uncertainty underneath the superficial order of Japanese society, and an acknowledgement of the long shadow cast by Japanese militarism in the first half of the Twentieth Century, Murakami has much in common with Kobo Abe. He has clearly influenced younder writers like Banana Yoshimoto in his obsessions with new age eccentriciy. As also mentioned, there are hints of Ballard and Nabokov too. This is all very well, and all very brilliant, until about two thirds of the way through when a major change in the feel of the book occurs and Murakami appears to lose control of the plot (such as it is) and the book ceases to be deep and intriguing and starts to be aimless and baffling. If only Murakami had managed to sustain the book to the end this would have been a masterpiece. As it is, it is still well worth reading, and an exceptional display of imaginative and magical writing.
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Summary: Joe Average in a nightmare world
Review: What makes this book so enjoyable is that the surreal elements of the story are always set in everyday occurrences. Murakami does not let the book run away on him or the reader, and this also makes the strange events and characters more unsettling. What makes them even more believable is the narrator. He's a bit of a loser, an average Joe, who doesn't fully comprehend what's happening to him, and yet there's something so sympathetic about him that the reader can never lose interest in him. He's the heart of the novel, the warm core of it that keeps the reader engaged. Another way Murakami keeps the reader engaged is the masterful use of subplots. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of those big books that leave you feeling as if you had read several different novels.
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Summary: One of the great novels of the late 20th century.
Review: This was the first Murakami novel I read, and it remains the best (above NW, Sputnik Sweetheart, or Underground). What this reminds me of more than anything is David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks'. A man is comfortable in his seemingly humdrum life until he starts to investigate the case of his wife's missing cat. As the layers start to peel back, he slowly discovers that the world is following the logic of a kind of Japanese dreamtime... and as he follows the signs and symbols of this madness, he is drawn to ANOTHER PLACE... the mysterious hotel, and the nightmare figure that stalks it. Often Murakami re-uses the same system of symbols in his books - deep wells, missing animals, disturbed women. This has two main effects - one, you can better understand what he's getting at in one of his books if you've read a couple of his others too, and two, after a while his novels seem to be remixes of each other, which can take the edge off your enjoyment of them (Sputnik Sweetheart in particular suffers from this). So, should you start with Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and get Murakami's worldview in it's strongest form while you are still fresh to it, or work up to it, all the better to appriciate it's nuances? All I can say is - this was my first trip, and I loved it. A novel of shadows that bite you.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting for Murakami
Review: Murakami writes well and I finished the tale. As I closed it, I wondered why I had persisted, spending precious time on nothing of substance. I hope that at some point he touches at least one foot on earth and writes about something.
Rating:
Summary: nobel prize for literature in the future
Review: One day Murakami will win the Nobel Prize for literature and this book will be cited. I liked this book because I could identify with so many of the emotions Murakami writes about in the book. He writes about the calming effect of swimming and taking the water in and out of your mouth like a fish as you stroke through the water. He writes about the feeling of loss and disorientation when someone you love leaves you. He shows the horrors and atrocities of violent murder in WW 2 and how they scarred people for life. I loved the letters May Kasahara wrote to "Mr. Wind-Up Bird" and I understood her being so scared at times. Although I wouldn't like being in the bottom of a well, it was a great metaphor of escaping into blackness, total aloneness and recouping on one's own. The book is rich in so many ways -- all the characters, through their letters and meetings with Toru Okada, show their innermost sorrows and also how they have survived. The book made me feel like I have company when I am up in the middle of the night and can't sleep thinking about so many things and people in our weird lives. But alas, as Murakami presents life in this book, it is all normal and this a comfort and reassurance.
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Summary: Epic scale with a Japanese flavor
Review: I read this book two years ago and it is still with me. This is the only thing I have read by Murakami, and it blew me away. It is long, but never felt long. It has the epic scale of something Tolstoi or Dickins might have written, but with a Japanese flavor. The story is about one man losing his job, then his wife--she just never returns from work one day--and the lengths he goes to find her, and in doing so, what he finds in himself. To achieve this, though, Murakami covers all of modern Japan from before the Second World War to the present. He takes us through the real and the surreal, the public and the private, the political, religious, and social issues of modern Japan. He juggles (successfully) at least 10 major characters at once. While the main character, Toru Okada, is so familiar to Western readers that he might as well be an American, the backdrop against which he lives his life, as painted by Murakami, is uniquely Japanese. So I, as an American, could sympathise with the troubles of Mr. Okada, while at the same time learn much about recent Japanese history (who knew the Japanese fought the Soviets in Mongolia in the 1930's?). And Murakami deals with almost as many plot elements as he does major characters and all but two (the baseball bat and the story of the young boy watching the two men under the tree outside his bedroom window at night) come together flawlessly in the end. This was one of the best books I have read in years, which is especially gratifying since I bought it on impulse without knowing anything about the author. I would compare it to Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" in its attempt to encompass much of modern Japan (as Rushdie does with India) within a unifying narrative. And hats off to the translator for giving us a very readable book in English.
Rating:
Summary: "curiouser and curiouser"...
Review: Alice remarked "curiouser and curiouser" as she fell down into 'wonderland' and encountered the strange and the surreal. In 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' our hapless, bland former Japanese white color worker (or 'salaryman' in Japanese) finds himself entering his own wonderland, which happens to be right in his own neighborhood. No, he doesn't say "curiouser and curiouser". But this reader certainly did ... and smiling all the while. Haruki Murakami has created a truly bizarre, original and thoroughly enjoyable story involving metaphysics, the paranormal ... and just plain "wow!". He touches many areas (war, politics, meaning of life) in an elaborately interwoven plot - it would be impossible to explain it all in a book review. However this book vaguely reminds me of the many Philip K. Dick novels where the author suggests that people can share the same mind space (dreams, thoughts, soul). However 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' is not a science fiction novel per se. While I thoroughly enjoyed this novel it does have some flaws. Murakami failed to produce closure, or at least satisfactory closure, on several of the many subplots (and associated characters). The book seems to end with many unanswered questions. Murakami-san should have been slightly less ambitious on the scope of this novel and perhaps focused a little more attention on cleanly wrapping it up (as much as this reader didn't want it to end!). However all this is not a real bother; I'm still busily recommending this novel because of its shear audacious originality. Bottom line: a unique piece of brilliance which should catapult Haruki Murakami on to the 'must read' lists of fans who appreciate unconventional fiction.
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