The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami

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At the insistence of a Goodreads compadre who seems to have deleted his account since I bought this, I decided to plunk down my money and give it a shot. What did I think? I dug it but don't start fitting me for skinny jeans and a distressed faux-vintage t-shirt quite yet. 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. A theme that strays in and out of Murakmais work is the presence of the feline community. This greatly interests me, as cats are portrayed in a fantastic way. Kafka introduced cats as a brilliant languid set of characters usually integral to plot and atmosphere. This, to my delight, is continued in Wind Up Bird.

He sounded English. Like one of those guys with a microphone trying to get you to come into their 50p shop, only it’s a recording. Kumikos storlyine mirrors that of Creta Kano. She has a brother and also an older sister that has apparently psychic attributes. She has slept with a countless amount of men in a bid to maybe, re-invigorate her life and shake herself from monotony as well as for monetary gain. I’ve read quite a few of Murakami’s books in the past few years and it’s caused me to reflect on my feelings about this one, which I worked my way through in late summer 2013. The original Japanese edition was released in three parts, which make up the three "books" of the single volume English language version. She had firm but smallish breasts, and although the ladder obscured her body as she descended, I was confident that the rest of her would soon look familiar.Kumiko Okada: Kumiko is Toru's wife and, as the breadwinner of the couple, is the more autonomous of the two. She works in the publishing business. Following the disappearance of their cat, she disappears as well. Kumiko's childhood was stifling because her parents wanted her to take the place of an older sister who had committed suicide at a very young age, an event that became an obsession of their older brother, Noboru Wataya. Also, this is a REALLY weird book. I have read Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Slaughterhouse Five, The Bald Soprano, Naked Lunch and The Third Policeman, but somehow The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the most bizarre, inexplicable piece of literature I have ever come across. At one point I considered giving up on decyphering the plot and just enjoy watching the strange parade of freaks and monsters in the novel. But, instead of making Wind-Up Bird fascinating, the weird characters and situations come across as ham-fisted, almost desperate additons to the book, as the weirdness is employed primarily as deus ex machina. Whenever the protagonist didn't know what to do next (which happened constantly) a psychic would suddenly and inexplicably appear to tell him the next step, and whenever the action began to slow down, the author would include a surreal dream or grotesque murder. This isn't a weird book that has fun upsetting conventions and flirting with the bizarre; this is a book that employs weirdness to compensate for the author's inability to keep control of his own novel.

After Creta moves away, Toru does not hear from her or Malta. However, he randomly meets a woman named Nutmeg who works as a spiritual healer. Nutmeg recruits Toru to work her. She also buys the Miyawaki residence to use as their headquarters. Nutmeg can tell from the mark on Toru’s face that he possesses spiritual healing powers from the well. She wants the Miyawaki residence so Toru can continue to draw spiritual energy from the well, which he can use to heal her clients.

Piccola nota a margine: con questo romanzo Murakami ha vinto il premio letterario giapponese Yomiuri, conferitogli dal premio nobel Kenzaburō Ōe, uno dei suoi più accaniti critici precedenti. Sò soddisfazioni. This book was wonderfully odd. I loved it! Murakami toys in the subconscious, where many unknown but important things brew. He gets you to exist in the imaginative, fun parts of the mind where curiosities, color, and meaning abound. He creates scattered, strange, fragmented, powerful images that end up connecting with just-the-right timing, creating something indescribable, yet satisfying. He manages to meld the unbelievable with the everyday, craftily, so that what would typically seem like fantasy, takes on real life. He allows us to intuitively grasp the wider ranges in our perceptions.