Product Description

'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #828 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-22
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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, Amazon.com

The Week
`manages to be both surreal and compelling'

The Week
`manages to be both surreal and compelling'

Customer Reviews

A literacy masterpiece
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a literacy masterpiece to really absorb into. Hanif Murakami represents the voice of Japanese literature, as he exhibits sound skills and great attention to detail. The skill is a remarkable and unique talent to really praise. Haruki is in a different league compared to peers in the distinguish way and manner. The author writes with tender simplicity, solid imaginative mind and is richly descriptive. As a reader, you can easily visualize the surroundings of the key events of the stories featured in the novel. The craftsmanship of writing is clearly demonstrated. Literacy standard reaches the highest level.

The author sheds light on key cultural and historical aspects of his native country. Material covered in the story is really interesting and insightful. Principal themes emphasized in the novel range from family life, social hierarchy system and darker aspects. The characters featured are an accurate representation of the typical society members. The setting of the novel is superbly and meticulously sketched. It really nicely blend with the plot of the story. The story journeys during the 1980's.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle not only proves Murakami literacy class, but the ability to really entertain readers and to draw you into the story, with the style of writing and strong characterization. I would truly recommend The Wind Up Bird Chronicle for anyone who expresses a strong passion for contemporary literature and appreciate a good story. This is a quality associated with the author novels. It is literacy masterpiece that is a real pleasure to read.

Stretching it somewhat
Before this, I read Norwegian Wood which is a very well written and moving book. The wind up bird chronicle is more surreal and reminds me somewhat of Garcia Marquez, which is okay if the storytelling is excellent. The book has several story lines going, and not all of them equally interesting. This undermines the urgency of the book and I wonder whether the book wouldn't have been better when the stories about the past of some of the minor characters would have been left out.

Poor Mr Wind-Up Bird
I really enjoyed this book, I loved it, it took me less than a week to finish, I was sad to finish it actually, I wanted it to keep going, but Murakami has this habit of ending stories ambiguously, so you're not sure where the protagonist goes next, or if they're even okay, but I love his work anyway.

The events in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are quite haphazard, Okada Toru keeps getting weird calls from some woman he doesn't know, his wife's personality goes all out of whack, he's lost his cat, he meets a death-obsessed sixteen year old, a pair of psychic sisters, a woman who can't stand bad clothes and her son who doesn't talk, a man who was in Mongolia in WWII and spent three days in a well (not by choice)...it all goes mad, and, as his sixeen year old friend always says to him, you can't help but think with every other turn of the page 'Poor Mr Wind-Up Bird'. (That's what she calls him, as a nickname because she says his real name is boring).

It an amazing book by an even more amazing writer, no-one who reads this can possibly speak ill of it, though if you've never read him before, something like 'South of the Border, West of the Sun' or 'A Wild Sheep Chase' may be easier, but even so, one of the most amazing books I've ever read.