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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9780679775430
Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed
ISBN: 0679775439
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 624
Publication Date: September 01, 1998
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: September 01, 1998
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial 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
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The Wind-Up Hype
For a few years now, I've heard "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" was a magnificent book of surreal mysteries that stood as one of the best of the 20th century. I guess in a way, both of these arguments are true. However, the book fails to connect in the end and leads the reader on a long and winding journey through high expectations and, ultimately, dead ends.
The book is undoubtedly an epic. I usually don't commit to 600 page books or more unless I expect a punch and some sort of intellectual ... Read More
Rating:  - More fun than sitting alone in a pitch-black well!
I think what I like about Murakami is his tendency to avoid standard resolution (whether this is intentional or not), especially with this novel in particular. Previous reviewers had asked, 'Well, what happened to so and so, what's the significance of this or that and where does it all tie together?'. I don't really care, to be honest, because the shifts in mood throughout the book- strange, funny, scary, disturbing, hopeful- is what really did it for me, no doubt ameliorated by the authors prose. ... Read More
Rating: - Weird but engaging
Toru Okada, the protagonist, loses his job, his cat, and his wife and goes looking for all three. His search introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters. Strange occurances abound. In the end, this book has too many loose ends (perhaps because the English translation is abridged) and wanders into the weird too often. I do, however, continue to think about the book after finishing it.
Rating:  - If you leave out the sex
there's not much of the book left.
We have telephone sex; adulterous sex; occultish-astral sex; sex with prostitutes and ex-prostitutes; vaguely-titled "fitted" sex for exclusive clients; sex with a device (vibrator?), wet-dreams, rape fantasies...
Just about everything except sex between a man and a woman bonded by love and committed to one another in anything as outlandish as marriage.
If sex sells, that might just explain why most reviewers found it hard to put ... Read More
Rating:  - Quite the story, you just can't walk away from it.
I just finished reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I stayed up too late several nights in a row because I couldn't put it down. Sometimes scary and haunting but altogether very beautifully written and very true to the human situation.
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