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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami,

Jay Rubin (Translator)

Start date: July 1, 2021

Finish date: July 31, 2021

Discussion: New School Classics- 1915-2005

Why we're reading this: July 2021 New School Classic Group Read
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What Members Thought

Jun 29, 2010 Laura rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-20th-century, japanese-fiction, e-books, 1000-guardian, mtbr-challenge-2018, 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, read-2018

What a magnificent book, it really deserves a 6 stars rating!

This is a multi-layered story where the author describes Toru's adventures. If they are real or not, it doesn't matter.

Among the many chronicles written there and intertwined with the main plot, Murakami also mentions the legacy of Japan in World War II.

This is certainly Murakami's masterpiece since he makes uses of several literary resources such as: letters, flashbacks, internet chats, newspaper stories and so on.

2* Yesterday
4* Town ...more

10 likes · Like · see review

Sep 03, 2020 Maggie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: boxall-1001, fiction, magical-realism, guardian-1000, asian

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. "Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle--a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth."

Let's play a game. I'll give you some items, and you have to create a story out of them. Alright? Here they are. A missing cat. A bird that makes a sound like it is winding a spring. Phone calls. Dry wells. A baseball bat. A blue-black mark on a cheek. Water. Got that? And now for the people. An anonymous lady who makes phone sex calls. "Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle--a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth."

Let's play a game. I'll give you some items, and you have to create a story out of them. Alright? Here they are. A missing cat. A bird that makes a sound like it is winding a spring. Phone calls. Dry wells. A baseball bat. A blue-black mark on a cheek. Water. Got that? And now for the people. An anonymous lady who makes phone sex calls. A missing wife. An evil brother-in-law. A lady in a red vinyl hat. A woman who dresses in the style of the sixties. A sunbathing girl. Japanese WWII veterans. A rich woman and her mute son.

I wouldn't be surprised if that was the challenge given to Murakami when he wrote this book. It's a bizarre book with bizarre characters, where the practical and the supernatural intermingle. The line between reality and dreams is blurred -- sometimes what happens in a dream happens in reality, sometimes it mirrors what happens in reality, and sometimes it predicts what happens in reality.

It all starts off quite normally. The protagonist, Toru Okada, is cooking spaghetti. Toru has recently quit his job at a law firm and has become a house husband. He receives a mysterious phone sex call from an anonymous woman. His cat goes missing, he meets the mysterious sisters Malta and Creta Kano, and the girl who lives down a dead-end alley behind his house, May Kasahara. Then his wife, Kumiko, goes missing. While searching for her, he runs up against Kumiko's evil brother, Noboru Wataya, an up-and-coming politician, is told WWII stories by Colonel Mamiya, hides in the bottom of a dry well where he gains access to a mysterious dreamland where Kumiko appears to be trapped, gains a mysterious blue-black mark on his cheek, and is hired by Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka whose clients lick the mark on his cheek. He does eventually find Kumiko -- or someone he thinks is Kumiko -- through Cinnamon's computer and at the bottom of the well.

Like I said, it's bizarre.

Against this backdrop, Toru is a good narrator. He has a firm grasp on reality, distancing himself from the Watayas' spirituality from the start. So when the strange events happen, he questions what is truth and what is reality, and at certain points begs for solid facts, something that can be touched and felt, a request that mirrors the thoughts of the bewildered reader. So while Murakami plunges the reader into a strange world, we never feel alone, for Toru is plunging in with us. And by the end, the reader has learnt to accept the strange alongside the normal, and to see the relationships and interdependence between the two.

There seems to be more than one world in the book. There is the real world and the dream world. Toru has sex with Creta Kano in the dream world, and wakes up to find that Creta has been prostituting him in his mind. There is the "well" world, which Toru enters only in the perfect darkness of the well, when he empties his mind, dissolves through the wall of the world, and finds a lobby with Noboru Wataya on TV and the phone sex woman in a hotel room. It is only in this world that Toru is able to defeat Noboru Wataya and rescue Kumiko. Then there is the historical world, in the story that Colonel Mamiya tells Toru of his time as WWII Japanese soldier fighting and suffering in Manchuria, of being thrown into a well and losing his happiness forever, and in the stories that Nutmeg Akasaka tells Toru of her father, a veterinarian in a Manchurian zoo, and of her time on a ship escaping from Manchuria back to Japan. All these worlds have parallels with and influence each other.

Then there are the parallels between characters -- or are they actually the same character? Colonel Mamiya is a parallel for Toru, both of them seeking truth at the bottom of a dry well, and fighting for good. Boris the Manskinner is a parallel for Noboru Wataya, both of them tormentors of Mamiya/Toru, both of them rising upwards in hierarchy and incredibly powerful, and both of them with superpowers (Boris cannot die, Noboru Wataya has the ability to defile people, whatever that means). Kumiko, Creta Kano and the phone sex woman are possibly all the same person. The woman in the hotel room changes her identity into all three of them. Creta Kano, who dresses in sixties' fashion, appears to be a predecessor of Kumiko, who has the same body as Creta and also loves fashion. And Kumiko was apparently having sex with multiple men, and possibly acted as the phone sex woman and called Toru to hint to him what she could not say outright. If Kumiko and Creta Kano are the same person, Kumiko's older sister and Malta Kano are possibly parallels for each other, both having protected their younger sisters.

Noboru Wataya is almost legendary for utmost evil. Self-centered and arrogant, he manages to hide his cold heart with a populist facade via the media and politics to win the hearts of the people, rising steadily to the top while trampling on his opponents. Toru Okada is the opposite. Laid-back and unambitious, his joblessness and the aimlessness of his days results in long stretches of restless inactivity. Yet, unexpectedly, Noboru Wataya cannot trample over Toru as easily as he thinks. Toru, despite his normally calm demeanour, fights for what he is passionate for. He loves Kumiko and wants to find her, and when Noboru Wataya tries to persuade and threaten Toru to divorce Kumiko, Toru puts up a strong resistance. He even buys a house that is rumoured to have an evil force about it just so he can climb down its well in his search for Kumiko. And Toru wins. There is a lot of ambiguity in this book, but the victory of good over evil is absolute.

Toru and Kumiko have a complex relationship. Both detached from their families, their common bond is being the black sheep of their families, and they defy Kumiko's father's wishes by eloping and living unambitiously in a small apartment. Their lifestyle could not be more different from the other Watayas' constant upward social mobility. Yet they are at peace and love each other. That is, until Kumiko disappears, then reveals to Toru via a letter that she was sleeping with another man. At the end, she reveals that she was actually sleeping with several men. And all this she blames Noboru Wataya. In some way, he defiled her, and so she pursued sexual relations with other men while loving Toru and feeling ashamed. Till the end, while Kumiko is in jail for killing Noboru Wataya by pulling the plug on his life support machine, Toru loves Kumiko. They are still not living together at the end, but there is a sense of hope that, having found Kumiko and understanding her insecurities, Toru will be able to win Kumiko over with his steadfast love.

Fate is a theme that pops up over and over. It is most prominent in Colonel Mamiya's story, in which he cannot die during WWII despite trying desperately to. Boris the Manskinner cannot die either, even when a gun is pointed and shot right at him. In Toru's life too, events just seem to fall coincidentally into place. His uncle tells him to sit in a public area to watch people. While he's doing that, Nutmeg speaks to him, and gives him a job. She then finances the cost of the house with the well, and it is through the well that Toru finds Kumiko. Each event is seemingly random, yet they all connect together to lead Toru to where he needs to be. The role that fate plays can perhaps be understood best by realising that fate plays an important role in Japanese beliefs.

I don't fully understand this book, and I'm not convinced it is a book that is meant to be fully understood. Murakami has created a labyrinth of interconnected plotlines and symbols that seem to mean something, but which don't have a clear or consistent meaning. But you don't have to discover the meaning of the book to enjoy the book. The joy is in the journey, of simply enjoying the story, identifying connections between the dots, and teasing the mysteries out in your mind. Just like in life, though there are few certain answers, there is much pleasure to behold. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 30, 2012 Gary Lyons rated it it was amazing

Very enjoyable but quite odd like most of murakami's books. ...more

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Jun 13, 2019 Charles rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It’s a terrific novel that makes us pause and think this fundamental question: who the hell am I? Where is the life I dreamed of? What if I cross over the reality to an imagery life? What if you imagined actually come true? The last scene was just spectacular. On a rainy day like today, you don’t want your life just drift away...

Random quotes I liked:

Hell has no bottom. I’m qualified for nothing. Never to use imagination. It can only cost your life. I defiled myself beyond all cleansing. What t ...more

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