Goodreads | The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

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Liz rated it:

03/06/08

Read in March, 2008

Several of my friends took an anthropology class last year entitled “Millennial Anxieties,” and this book was a central focus of the syllabus. I think I understand why Haruki Murakami’s work is particularly relevant to that theme. One of the many aspects of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that repeatedly catches my attention is the emphasis on sensory and extrasensory experiences. In the first half of the novel, Creta Kano’s discussion of her past in the language of pain and numbness is a poi...more Several of my friends took an anthropology class last year entitled “Millennial Anxieties,” and this book was a central focus of the syllabus. I think I understand why Haruki Murakami’s work is particularly relevant to that theme. One of the many aspects of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that repeatedly catches my attention is the emphasis on sensory and extrasensory experiences. In the first half of the novel, Creta Kano’s discussion of her past in the language of pain and numbness is a pointed commentary on the ways that people can choose to experience the globalized, overly stimulating world. A person with extrasensory abilities (such as Malta and perhaps Creta) or even just more sensitive receptors is likely to become overstimulated by all of the excess, crowding and speed of the modern world, and can become either completely overwhelmed, or become a shell that repels every sensation.

In Japan (and most of the developed world), the battery of the senses by media—visual and auditory—is a problem for many people, who need to carefully balance between what they allow themselves to feel and what parts of the world they need to shield themselves from. When Creta states that her numbness caused her to feel that she was not “anchored to the world” (99), Murakami seems to be saying that the delicate equilibrium of oneself and the outer world requires one to acknowledge the value of possibly being hurt by it. Pain, in some respects, is participation. So too is globalization, which brings everyone, from Indonesian girls who sell their hair to the Japanese salarymen who wear toupees, closer together than ever before. Information, media, trade and technology link every country together and rest on a mantra of increased speed equals more wealth equals a better world. Creta’s body, then, might be a space where the competing attitudes towards globalization meet, where too much compliance is physically destructive and isolation is psycho-spiritual death.

Toru Okada’s mind and body are perhaps also representative of defiance against globalization, for just as Jacques Cousteau went beneath while everyone else was looking up during the Space Age, he deliberately narrows his world and finds wonder. He reflects that by limiting his world to four or five people and three or so square miles, “the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving” (125). By making his world smaller, Okada escapes the buzz of homogenizing and deafening world culture and economy, and is able to discover amazing things that exist around the corner and within people and himself. Being critical and curious about people and places that no one has really cared about so much before, the narrator recreates “the world” for himself and starts to provocatively re-link local people and spaces with national history.

I am also going to admit that I am somewhat mystified about Noboru Wataya’s role in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Did he exist simply to create a mystery for Toru to solve about Kumiko’s disappearance, a mere justification for an end-point in the mystery, an all-to easy figure of blame for everything that had gone wrong? Murakami draws strong connections between the arbiters of physical destruction in Manchuria and Noboru Wataya’s mediated, psychically destructive influence in modern Japan, but I am not sure where it leads to. I think that from what we know about Noboru and his relationship with Creta Kano, his “projects” consists partly of forcing people to experience change, in peculiarly violent, detached ways. If, like his Manchukuo-era military-political ancestor, Noboru Wataya is capable of pushing forward an experimental agenda with unethical means, was it right for Kumiko to murder him? What was Noboru Wataya’s agenda in the first place?

Aside from my indecision regarding Noboru Wataya, I have come to an understanding of the importance of the jellyfish in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. If you think about it, jellyfish are the ultimate simple organism—they exist as drifters and move with the tides, and feed on whatever probiotics pass through their membranes. Their simplicity, juxtaposed to the complexity of human mind and body systems, makes them a model for many of Murakami’s characters. Toru Okada and Cinnamon are jellyfish-like because they are receptacles of stories and observations; Creta Kano also exhibits jellyfishian qualities when she passes through alternate worlds in a search to “contain” the egos of others as a spiritual medium. However, Creta, Toru and Cinnamon are not proper jellyfish because while they seem to search for the simple links connecting discrete events, their active searches actually make their reality more complex and unlinkable. Human beings, it seems, cannot be like the rather zen jellyfish; is this a failure or a something we should be proud of?

The idea of jellyfish humanity is further developed in Murakami’s depiction of what happens to the senses when human beings enter “vast” environments, particularly in the cases of Lieutenant Mamiya in Mongolia and Toru Okada in the well. Whereas Mamiya gets to experience the discombobulating effects of wide open spaces, Toru must search for vastness underneath Tokyo, and finds it in the dark. Alone with his thoughts, his “body was nothing but an empty tunnel, a conduit for moving the words from there to here. They were definitely fragments of thought, but thought that was happening outside my consciousness” (268). In the dark of the well, Toru’s mind and body merge with the environment and get away from him, creating a de-centered equilibrium for Toru’s senses, memory, mind and body. This is quite possibly as close as anyone in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle gets to achieving the jellyfish state of mind, and it is terrifying in its portrayal of the de-anchoring of mind from body. IS jellyfish state desirable, or is it an at-best temporary means through which people can passively dissolve linearity and make sense of the story of their lives?

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