Product Description

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2101 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-22
• Original language: Japanese
• 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

Review
'Murakami writes of contemporary Japan, urban alienation and journey's of self-discovery, and in this book he combines recollections of the war with metaphysics, dreams and hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work', Independent .'Murakami weaves these textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty', Independent on Sunday .'Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original', New York Times .'Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down', Daily Telegraph .'How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration', Independent on Sunday

The Week
`manages to be both surreal and compelling'

Customer Reviews

No man is an island
This book haunted me from page 1, and is still haunting me now that I've read it. I started reading this book when I was jet-lagged after returning from a trip in Japan; and reading it did not help at all. I was completely gripped. I ended up reading chunks of it in the middle of the night, and living in a state of detached sleepwalking during the day. Thank God I've finished it and managed to have some real sleep.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about an "I" who is quite similar to the other "I"'s of Murakami's novels: the narrator, Okada, describes himself as completely normal, feels that he is somewhat a failure in life, feels detached and alienated, is well cultured especially in literature and music, knows the names of the Karamazov brothers and uses swimming and ironing as an anti-stress therapy. Not feeling very happy with his life, he quits his job for a break and to think about his next move. At around the same time his cat disappears, he meets a bored neighbour in her mid-teens, and his wife starts arriving later and later everyday from work. Okada's life becomes mundane: looking for his cat, listening to music, reading history books, shopping, cooking and eating at odd hours, chatting with his neighbour, waiting for his wife, a phonecall, or a letter, etc. Strange characters start to make their appearance in his life, telling him their life stories and slowly dragging him into a world of mysticism and occult. Mysterious events begin to take more time from his everyday mundane life giving this novel a very dark and surreal atmosphere.

This novel is very well written (thanks to both the author and the translator). It is clever, funny and also melancholic. It is full of witty remarks. It is quite a big book, made up of 70-80 `bite size' chapters that are very easy to read, and also addictive -- "I just want to read one more little chapter, just one and then I'll stop reading and go to bed, I know I can stop whenever I want to, I just need to know what happens next otherwise I would never be able to sleep, it's only 5 o'clock in the morning, that gives me 3 full hours of sleep before waking up to go to work..."

Well, it seems that I can go on talking about this book for ever. This is a story of alienation and detachment, of the feeling that others have control over your life, that your options are very limited and that happiness is unattainable. Not all puzzles can be solved, and not everyone can be understood. Highly recommended.

Startling discovery
How bizarre, to end up subsumed in the world of this book during my first trip to Japan. A random airport selection I became completely mesmerised by it, and have spent the rest of my trip working my way through Murakami's other books. Truly unique and rather wonderful.

Insanely entertaining and thought provoking.
I grabbed this book off a shelf, never having heard of Murakami before, a few years ago before taking a plane to Greece with some friends. We were celebrating finishing our exams, staying at a tacky resort and basically drinking and sunbathing, but after a couple of days I found myself ducking out of bar crawls to head back to my room to read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a bloody difficult book to explain. There are so many different, and seemingly bizarrely unrelated, strands to the story. The only real constant is Toru, the main character, and as with many other works by Murakami he is a somewhat passive presence, trying to get his head round the flurry of unusual events, emotions and observations on life. His life is turned completely upside down, but rather than over-focusing on the strange goings on, we also have beautifully written pieces about such banal events as making pasta. On one level the Wind Up Bird Chronicle is almost fantastical in nature, so bizarre are the events, but Toru acts as a grounding force. His doubts, worries, and an imagination that all too often causes him pain, are very normal aspects of any person. It is his very mundanity and passive nature that allows the events to occur - many of the characters he meets simply because he doesn't have anything else that he could rather be doing, and therefore expands his mind and perspective.

Toru as a character provokes sympathy, but it is the events around him that provoke our interest. As a character he is purer, for want of a better word, than the central character of other Murakami books. In some ways he is simply a convenient centre on which to secure the rest of the story, which at times threatens to scatter out of control. Yet I became so convinced by the view of the story through his eyes that I felt quite close to him as a character, and felt that my own reaction to such events would be similarly bemused, or self doubting.

The Wind Up Birds Chronicle IS a confusing book. There were many times when I had to go back two or three pages to reread, largely in a case of 'double-take' - I wasn't sure, or couldn't believe, that something was happening in the way it was described. But considering the various strands, it's an impressive achievement to draw them together as effectively as Murakami does. This book is, in my opinion, a true classic.