The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
(ねじまき鳥クロニクル #1-3)
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds h ...more
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You, the politician with the psychopath eyes on the T.V.! I hate you!
Russian scheming
Where the fuck is my cat?!!! And why did I name him after you Mr. Psychopath EYES!
War
Blood
Death
Zoo animals?
My dreams are wack, yo – but WAIT! Are they really dreams?! No way man, I totally did it with her for real.
Skinning people alive
Wacky woman with the Huge red hat, tell me! Are you a psychic OR ARE YOU NOT?!
What a cool walkway between the HOUSES!
telephonetelephoneRing, Ring, Ring: H ...more

But at the same time, nothing about this w ...more

This profound take on life & reality is so complex, so incredibly well-orchestrated, thought-out... a new one for the list of Tops. The ...more



I think this is my third reading of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I am still loving it! However, I can't say that I fully understand it, but that is the nature of a Murakami novel and I accept that. Earlier review below.
I’m a big fan of Haruki Murakami. When you pick up one of his novels, you’re never completely sure where you’ll end up. This is definitely true of ...more

A great experience.
More than reading a novel, I feel like I've lived the life of another, like when you wake up from a dream in which you played the part of a fearless hero, doing actions you never could have done.
Toru Okada is thirty years old and leads an ordinary life with his wife Kumiko. However, a strange phone call marks the beginning of a series of unusual events that entirely change the existence of the young protagonist. Everyday life and
...more
Review contains spoilers
If you’re a 30-ish married man in Japan with a dead-end job as a law clerk, with hindsight, it was probably not a good idea to have your wife agree with you that you need to take a year off to find yourself. During this year off your cat may disappear and you may start hanging out with a neighborhood high school girl who suns herself in a tiny bikini. Then your wife may ask you to have lunch with the weird psychic sisters to tr ...more


And why haven't I read this book until now?
First off, let me put my four-star rating of this book into context. It's only four stars because I feel like I need to read it again, and maybe again and again, to truly appreciate all that is contained within these 600 beautiful pages. I get the story. There's a plot and all that, but there is also so much more going on, there are so many layers, such co ...more

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel published in 1994–1995 by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
The first part, "The Thieving Magpie", begins with the narrator, Toru Okada, a low-key unemployed lawyer's assistant, who is tasked by his wife, Kumiko, to find their missing cat. Kumiko suggests looking in the alley, a closed-off strip of land existing behind their house.
After Toru has hung out there for a while with no luck, May ...more


The storytelling is great, and even if I had issues with some of the characters (okay, all of the female characters), they all managed to be consistently compelling. But I just couldn't get into this one. The story, while interesting, sort of meandered around and by the end, it seems to have forgotten where it was trying to go in the first place. Murakami starts plot points, presents us with new mysteries and characters, and then he gets distr ...more

Sometimes I feel like in my case it is especially so - for example, every time I pick up this book or glance at this review I have to deal with the fact that some random angry person who thought my Ready Player Two review was a crime against humanity (the likes of which warranted response on everything I posted) called me a "teenager" spewing "bile and bilge" (redundant, no?) in the comments...
But generally, no matter who you are, it's weird.
Not just because of that meme ...more

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?...more
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
...
Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source th



Songs of Fascination
Murakami sings to me of fascination. I still haven't worked out why.
I could analyse the sensation until it died on the operating table.
Or I could focus on just keeping the sensation alive.
Or, somewhere in between, I could speculate that it's because Murakami sits over the top of modern culture like a thin gossamer web, intersecting with and touching everything ever so lightly, subtly expropriating what he needs, bringing it back to his writer ...more

I don't always give the same response when people ask me which book is my favorite. It depends on my ...more

In all its sensitivity, emotional depth and keen understanding of the complications of the human mind The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a stellar work of literature and a tour de force. I cannot go ahead and say it is Murakami's magnum opus (it is not his longest novel), since I haven't finished with all his ...more

Back when I first joined Goodreads, one of the first things I noticed was how a novel I'd never heard of, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, got so much praise from Goodreaders. Was it hype? Or worse, was it just hipster bullshit? You know what I'm talking about. "I only read novels that ha ...more

Beware; it is a weighty and sometimes complex piece. The story follows Toru Okada, a young man whose life is in the doldrums: he has no job, very little ambition, his wife has left him and now his cat has gone missing. In searching for his cat he wonders up and down a closed lane bordering his house and at one point finds ...more


Once again, it is a question of following a narrator whose banal life slowly slips into the Symbolist surreal. At first, it's only a matter of a lost cat and bizarre ano ...more

― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

A weird metaphysical (I KNOW it is a bit redundant to start off ANY review of Murakami by dressing it up in adjectives like weird & metaphysical) novel. I remember wanting to buy this book back in 2007, but I was poor and just about to get married and it seemed like my limited money would be better spent on bread and cheese. Now I own three, but I still wish ...more

Wind-Up Bird on the other hand was worth every moment spent burning through its 610 pages. It was mysterious, absorbing, and informative. Murakami writes i ...more

As an ardent fan of Murakami, and after reading some of his substantial works, I've come to this conclusion that the experience of reading his books in itself is somewhat analogous to traveling, what really matters is the journey than the destination & in his books, it's more about the substance rather than conclusions.
Apart from the usual magical surrealism & strong hidden metaphors, all ha ...more

Still, the book is compelling. You can't seem to put it down. Meanwhile it begins to invade your dreams.. in much the same manner that Toru's (the main character) dreams are invaded. You start having dreams about strange women and empty wells.
So cracking into "Book Three", I' ...more

Few pages into The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and this is the very first thought that struck me. If you haven’t read Murakami before, then this book presents itself as a perfect example of what constitutes this great story-teller style. His world would be completely different from that of yours or what you can imagine. It doesn’t know any boundaries between real and surreal, and it might propel you to ...more

"In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment."
A missing cat.
A strange bird-call.
An abandoned house.
An observant teenager.
Twin clairvoyants.
War stories.
Strange phone calls.
Spiteful brother-in-law.
A dry well.
A separated couple.
A bottle of Cutty Sark.
A baseball bat.
Recurring dreams.
Cinnamon.
Nutmeg.
Wait, what is this about?
Oh! Yeah, another Murakami book.

"Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again sometime.”
...more
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Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by Am ...more
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We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”