The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami

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It is quiet difficult for me to describe what this book was like. It is surreal and psychedelic. It is mysterious, something out of this world. You just need to stop questioning things and let yourself get carried away. It begins with a seemingly ordinary day in the life of a very ordinary man. But things only gets strange and stranger from there - dreams spill into reality, lines between natural and supernatural are smudged, a guy sitting deep down in a well digs into his subconscious, a boy's personality is stolen by the devil, a miraculous blue mark on a cheek heals people....unusual characters drift in, tell their unusual stories and leave. About 2/3rd of my way into the book I was going crazy to know where it was all going. So it was a relief to get to the end where some of these bizarre happenings were explained. That sounds pretty out there. Will I like this book? Obviously I can’t guarantee you will, but I don’t normally go for magical realism and I loved this book. The writing is great, and very easy to read, especially for a translated work of literary fiction. I found the characters and the story completely absorbing, even if I didn’t always feel like I understood the meaning of everything that was happening. People apparently compare Mr. Murakami to Thomas Pynchon, but I haven’t yet read any of his books. The storytelling style here reminded me of Stephen King’s doorstop novels like The Stand and It. There are tales within tales, each fascinating even if only tangentially related to the main story being told.

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. A surface-level summary of this novel: a young, unemployed Tokyo man named Toru Okada is asked by his wife Kumiko to search for their missing cat. His search brings him into the orbit of several new and unusual people: a mysterious woman who calls Toru from time to time insisting that he knows her and that she’ll only be free when he remembers her name; May Kasahara, a cheerful yet morbid teenager; Malta Kano, a psychic, and her younger sister, Creta Kano, who styles herself a “prostitute of the mind”; Lieutenant Mamiya, a veteran forever changed by his experiences during the Japanese WWII campaign in Manchuria; a mother and son who call themselves Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka. But also because, for example, you are constantly applying the weirdest moral standards to books ever, as in the single note I wrote about this was "you're actually allowed to be sexist if you're really talented." A siren sounded in the distance. Just as Dusty opened her mouth to sing, the dream broke off and I woke up in the darkness of my bedroom, the rain pitter-pattering on the glass.

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Alienation: Throughout the novel the characters are obviously related to each other but they never feel like they connect to one another. All of the characters develop independently and tend to live solitary lifestyles. This can be presented in Toru and Kumiko's marriage. Throughout the novel, Toru presents himself to be one who seeks solitude. One example is presented as he completes an everyday task, "I went to the Municipal pool for a swim. Mornings were the best, to avoid the crowds". [7] His desire for solitude also is shown when he quits his job to take care of the house alone while Kumiko goes to work. He enjoys being home alone. In the relationship between Kumiko and Toru, both characters seem to be developing in solitude. Both characters hide many of their thoughts from one another and even though they are married Toru ponders on the fact that he may not know much about his wife. [8]

Side note: with this novel Murakami won the "Yomiuri", a Japanese literary prize, conferred to him by the Nobel Prize Kenzaburō Ōe, previously one of his most ardent critics. What satisfaction! Murakami uses these odd correspondences to build narrative tension, while at the same time manipulating his various subplots to raise a slew of other questions. What role does Kumiko's sinister brother, Noboru, have in her disappearance? Is Noboru's Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?While reading Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love", I came across a passage that called out for the Paul Bryant approach and leant itself to a retort to Paul's parody. I don't always give the same response when people ask me which book is my favorite. It depends on my mood, and there is also some recency bias depending on which books I have most recently enjoyed. However, more often than not, I will declare that my all-time favorite book is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. This book made such a strong impact on my thinking about the world, about the ways in which people treat each other, and about the metaphysical reality hiding just beneath the surface of what we see in our everyday lives. Malta Kano: Malta Kano is a medium of sorts who changed her name to "Malta" after performing some kind of "austerities" on the island of Malta. She is enlisted by Kumiko to help the Okadas find their missing cat.