The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

Home. You are here: Books / The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

Editorial Review

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.

Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
• Japan's most overrated author
  I'd been wanting to read this book for a while, having already sampled most of Murakami Haruki's work, and since I'd heard that this was his best work I was naturally compelled. Yet the reports were mixed - some non-Japanese had devoured it, while some Japanese had found it dull as hell. Certainly, it presents a very complete world, which not ever book can accomplish.
  The book is very Murakami in the way that it shows a man - very dull, quite ordinary, yet somehow unconventional in his thinking and... more info
• Patience and Growth Yields Great Reward
  This book was truly gave me the bang for my buck!
  I purchased this item around the early winter (December-January) of 2007, and finished it November 15 of 2008. (Yes I know I'm a very slow reader). However part of this had to do with the fact that I had almost given up on the book, I'd say around the half way mark.
  So why did I give this book a five star? Should the fact that I almost gave up on the book send a message saying that: "if it doesn't hold your interest than the purpose of the book has... more info
• A certain "something" that is bizarre and intriguing
  Haruki Murakami has always been a favorite author of mine, and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a perfect culmination of every element of his work. He includes mystery, love, sex, politics, history, intrigue, philosophy, and more in this novel to make it a book that is nearly impossible to describe.
  As Toru Okada finds himself searching for his missing cat, and soon, his missing wife, Kumiko, the reader is taken on Toru's personal journey by meeting several characters during the search. The lustful and... more info
• Excellent read
  Excellent book. Very surreal writing. Murakami is probably my favorite author and this may be his best work.

Similar Products:

• Kafka on the Shore, Price:
  $10.17
• Norwegian Wood, Price:
  $11.16
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International), Price:
  $10.17
• A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel, Price:
  $10.17
• After Dark (Vintage International), Price:
  $11.16