Name: Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Rating: 4.041569086651054 (427 reviews)
ISBN: 9780099540953

Jay Rubin

Haruki Murakami

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

ねじまき鳥クロニクル

With three novels and one short-story collection now translated into English, Haruki Murakami has emerged as the most significant Japanese novelist in decades. And with this hugely ambitious new book—a true magnum opus, equal in scope and execution to Yukio Mishima's posthumous tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility—he will take his place in the inter- national pantheon of contemporary literature.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is many things: the story of a marriage that mysteri- ously collapses; a jeremiad against the su- perficiality of contemporary politics; an investigation of painfully suppressed memo- ries of war; a bildungsroman about a com- passionate young man's search for his own identity as well as that of his nation. All of Murakami's storytelling genius—combining elements of detective fiction, deadpan humor, and metaphysical truth, and swiftly transforming commonplace realism into sur- real revelation—is on full, seamless display. And in turning his literary imagination loose on a broad social and political canvas, he bares nothing less than the soul of a country steeped in the violence of the twentieth century.

Deceptively simple, wise, poignant, funny, and horrifying, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a mesmerizing saga of personal conscience and the power of history: a stunning achievement whose impact will be felt worldwide.
--front flap

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I found the ties and connections throughout the story and characters very moving. It is not a story to comprehend but rather a concept of how intertwined lives spanned over decades can be.

Lauren Guy

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.

Greg Talbot

Inspired and creative with the story and the literary devices used. Gotta admit, I found myself confused and lost in a lot of the surreal parts of the story. I'm totally willing to say a stronger reader can maybe make sense of the different storylines, where I couldn't. Overall my problem with this bird is that the language is so dry and boring. So much of the writing is about the body. Mr. Okada has the sensual stirrings from many women's bodies. Further he gets storys of men's bodies torn up from war. But I was so unmoved and non-invested because the writing style was so plain. Translator issue? I don't know, but I wasn't able to give the book the warranted attention after the first quarater of the book (150 pages). I did like the merging of the surreal and the quotidian. Some of the plot and Mr. Oskada's "trips" were very interesting.. Overall a disappointing reading experience. But I totally think a lot of people would have a much better experience for this than myself.

I didn’t like it as much as other murakami’s. Maybe because of the translation .

Shidehdeishidi

So incredibly written, with a meandering plot that winds through so many times and places. Very surreal, and a wonderful read, though a bit graphic and hard to swallow at times. 

Liv Wukasch

Sajiya Chaudhary

I love the beginning of a Murakami novel, but I can't get through it to finish it. This happened with Norwegian wood as well, there would definitely be some phrases, some lines where I would just stop and think, for quite some time. How marvellous a writer, what words, what magic. But sometime the story just goes in a completely different direction, and I don't understand the point of it. Some parts would sadly cease to be interesting and I skip them, which I never do with any of the other stories. So, in that sense there were many chapters here that I skipped. 

Apart from that, this was a weird, and almost painfully relatable story. More on this later!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.

A Novel

Phil James

I rarely re-read books because there are so many, and so little time. I made an exception here because I read it it first in a delirious whirl of Murakami books. I was falling in love with a writer and was giddy with his peculiar mix of the banal and surreal. 
For some reason I didn't see beyond the oeuvre to the exceptional nature of this work so I only gave 4 stars. I fixed that now with 5. I was so totally absorbed in each section that I didn't see how all the parts were played out as a whole. 
I recently listened to Patti Smith's "M train" where she becomes enamoured with the book so I knew I had to go back and give it the time it deserved. I'm glad I did.

Superimposes the collapse of a marriage over the investigation into recovered war memories and a man's search for his own identity

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Sarah Sammis

D D D 

If this was the first murakami book I read the rating would be higher, but it’s the 5th so I felt used to it

Jun Angelo Cabuguas

i’m gonna be thinking about this one for awhile, such an easy book to get engrossed in the writing of. (please don’t write women like this)

Haritlak Thawikasikam

My most favorite Murakami's book. The best part is the Mongolian story. How impressive

Aamna

This was a like a long extended dream. The kind you have at 4am. The kind that wake you up and wonder - how could it be so vivid and SO absurd? You remember parts of it like it really happened and other parts you just cannot recollect no matter how hard you try.

Yep, this was just a dream. And I'm sure it'll be different when I read it again. And that I will.

M. Marques

multiple times i swore the book was about to end but it kept going. i always leave a murakami book feeling a bit like im swirling above the surface, like he has a secret embedded in the text that is his and his alone, and this one was no different. perhaps i missed it, & for the sake of avoiding spoilers, i’ll just say i wanted more wind up bird than the book gave me. but i’m not upset at what it offered instead.

mira lee

Slow start for me but ultimately got interesting. At times I was like, “what the hell are you talking about”

Philip Rosenbaum

Eitan Hershkovitz

One of the most elaborate novels I have ever read. Fantastic.

Kylie Frazer

Murakami is the first Japanese magical realist I have come across. I suspect there are more, because Japan's brutal modern history, is less traumatically evoked in this format. A bit like using a pinhole camera to view an eclipse. 

Mr wind up bird is a wildly different protagonist to those of Garcia Marquez or Allende. He comes across with a lack of passion; Japanese water to the Latino fire. That calm precision clashes violently and beautifully with Murakami's magic. 

The wind up bird builds and builds. Somewhat heavy going at first, it greatly rewards the trusting reader.

altlovesbooks

Brief 2/26/23 update: I just finished re-reading this with a group of friends, and I think half my pleasure during this re-read was experiencing their reactions on reading this book. We're kind of a mix of people who have read Murakami and people who made this their first, and it was fun experiencing the same weird emotions I had the first time reading it through them.

My review below hasn't changed, this is still one of my favorite Murakami books so far, but I recognize this is a tough book for someone new to Murakami to get into. That said, there's a lot of great imagery and themes going on, and I loved re-reading this, knowing what I know now.

Original Review: 
"A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit."

There's a lot to unpack in this novel. At its core it seems (to me) about the main character's coping with a stagnant, meaningless life. His house is on an alley with no exits. Murakami takes great care in describing his perfectly mundane house and life, his aimless, jobless wandering, and his passionless, emotionless exchanges with his wife Kumiko. A phonecall intruded on all of that, starting Toru on his wild and unexpected journey, where the end result is time begins moving for him again. 

There's a *lot* more to it than that, and the pleasure in reading Murakami is in those details. Sure, if this is your first Murakami book, things seem haphazard, random, and meaningless when thought of individually, but this is one of those books where you put the book down and suddenly find it makes a strange bit of sense. Even as I'm writing this, things that initially didn't seem to fit together at first suddenly make more sense when considered all together. 

I guess the tl;dr of this review is, what a weird, wild trip that I'm glad I went on. Murakami is an author that either you click with, or you don't. And if he clicks for you, it really, really clicks.

my relationship with murakami’s work has always been like that of two people who sit on opposite ends of the same friend group: he’s someone i passively dislike and avoid the vast majority of the time, except there was this one time that we were both abandoned at the rest stop by the bus carrying all of our friends ahead to montreal and the process of finding another way to our destination kind of bonded us for a few hours without really bringing us together. 

i’ve given him a chance time and time again, and i do

see him as representative of a literary mood that marks him as an outlier even next to his contemporaries in japan. for better and often for worse, i’m aware that there is no way to experience what murakami writes without reading murakami. people have recommended alternatives if all you want is an introduction to the millieu he writes about, and plenty of better japanese authors have been rightfully championed as substitutes to his brand of worldbuilding, but that’s the thing: no one does murakami’s voice like murakami himself, and it will be a disservice to other authors to consider them only through the basis of comparison as well as a disservice to the fact that as sour an aftertaste as some of murakami’s novels bring, there is something unique to his writing style and approach to narrative elements that comprises a kind of irreplicable atmosphere no one but him can spin into being. 

across more than ten (!) attempted books, the only novel of his i’d connected with was 

short, sweet, the pov unique enough as to be removed from the mind-numbing mess of novels like

so when i had this intense gut feeling that now was the right time to read 

, it was mostly surprise i nursed throughout the entire first section after finding that i was having a great time despite it being 

 polar opposite: a first person novel that’s anything but sweet, even less short. what i loved 

 for—its gauziness, its foggy atmosphere, how it felt exactly like the insomnia that plagued me at its worst around the same time i read it—couldn’t come to 

 rescue bc this was so unlike murakami as i’ve known him to be. toru was inscrutably more likeable and far less detached from the very first page than all of his fellow jazz-loving, women-objectifying, staccato-narrating protagonists; murakami’s brand of magical realism has never felt as seamless and encompassing-bc-it-is-so-embedded-into-the-story-that-it’s-ordinary as it did in this; and all the side characters were bizarrely memorable, from may kasahara to both noboru watayas to even that russian soldier politely prefacing someone about to be skinned alive. 

this novel had no shortage of horrors, but the blasé disregard i tend to resent about the trauma murakami loves to indulge in is here given context and significant shape wherever possible in a way that i admit is easy to write off as a fluke. it seems mostly that there was compatibility between all its elements—a rare thing in murakami novels—such that even the most questionable pieces had synergy with the mundane parts, while the nonchalance became a helping layer to the casual deployment of technically horrific elements. toru was enough of a middle ground between non-passive and so aimless he’s unflappable that even the most surreal choices he made didn’t feel disjointed to me; he pushes back against noboru wataya out of spite, listens to long personal anecdotes out of... curiosity? passivity? neutrality? without questioning them too much, yet even his idleness had a sincere component of hollow ennui that you can’t help but acknowledge. 

there’s enough thematically to bite and chew on without overexerting your jaw; nowhere is the question of dichotomies (fate vs. choice, action vs. inaction, acceptance vs. resistance) more natural, after all, than in a story about liminalities within an equally liminal world full of just-slightly-wrong questions that can only have just-slightly-wrong answers. the world of 

never felt intangible, nor did the language ever feel like it’s being evasive just to drain me and keep me chasing for the fun of it bc not even murakami knows what he’s writing about. i was locked in for most of this read, and even as i wrinkled my nose at the last few resolutions in the plot, a part of me did genuinely lament how soon it would be over by then. it’s a kind of paradox on brand for the story, at least.

i also just suspect that the quality of this particular translation is the game changer. 

was translated by jay rubin as well, it turns out, so now there’s an impending crisis here over whether the parts i found unreadable about murakami’s prose in some novels might in fact just be a matter of some translators being made greater than others.

my relationship with murakami’s work has always been like that of two people who sit on opposite ends of the same friend group: he’s someone i passively dislike and avoid the vast majority of the time, except there was this one time that we were both abandoned at the rest stop by the bus carrying all of our friends ahead to montreal and the process of finding another way to our destination kind of bonded us for a few hours without really bringing us together. 

i’ve given him a chance time and time again, and i do see him as representative of a literary mood that marks him as an outlier even next to his contemporaries in japan. for better and often for worse, i’m aware that there is no way to experience what murakami writes without reading murakami. people have recommended alternatives if all you want is an introduction to the millieu he writes about, and plenty of better japanese authors have been rightfully championed as substitutes to his brand of worldbuilding, but that’s the thing: no one does murakami’s voice like murakami himself, and it will be a disservice to other authors to consider them only through the basis of comparison as well as a disservice to the fact that as sour an aftertaste as some of murakami’s novels bring, there is something unique to his writing style and approach to narrative elements that comprises a kind of irreplicable atmosphere no one but him can spin into being. 

across more than ten (!) attempted books, the only novel of his i’d connected with was after dark. short, sweet, the pov unique enough as to be removed from the mind-numbing mess of novels like sputnik sweetheart and the third book of 1Q84. so when i had this intense gut feeling that now was the right time to read the wind up bird chronicle, it was mostly surprise i nursed throughout the entire first section after finding that i was having a great time despite it being after dark’s polar opposite: a first person novel that’s anything but sweet, even less short. what i loved after dark for—its gauziness, its foggy atmosphere, how it felt exactly like the insomnia that plagued me at its worst around the same time i read it—couldn’t come to wind up’s rescue bc this was so unlike murakami as i’ve known him to be. toru was inscrutably more likeable and far less detached from the very first page than all of his fellow jazz-loving, women-objectifying, staccato-narrating protagonists; murakami’s brand of magical realism has never felt as seamless and encompassing-bc-it-is-so-embedded-into-the-story-that-it’s-ordinary as it did in this; and all the side characters were bizarrely memorable, from may kasahara to both noboru watayas to even that russian soldier politely prefacing someone about to be skinned alive. 

this novel had no shortage of horrors, but the blasé disregard i tend to resent about the trauma murakami loves to indulge in is here given context and significant shape wherever possible in a way that i admit is easy to write off as a fluke. it seems mostly that there was compatibility between all its elements—a rare thing in murakami novels—such that even the most questionable pieces had synergy with the mundane parts, while the nonchalance became a helping layer to the casual deployment of technically horrific elements. toru was enough of a middle ground between non-passive and so aimless he’s unflappable that even the most surreal choices he made didn’t feel disjointed to me; he pushes back against noboru wataya out of spite, listens to long personal anecdotes out of... curiosity? passivity? neutrality? without questioning them too much, yet even his idleness had a sincere component of hollow ennui that you can’t help but acknowledge. 

there’s enough thematically to bite and chew on without overexerting your jaw; nowhere is the question of dichotomies (fate vs. choice, action vs. inaction, acceptance vs. resistance) more natural, after all, than in a story about liminalities within an equally liminal world full of just-slightly-wrong questions that can only have just-slightly-wrong answers. the world of wind up bird never felt intangible, nor did the language ever feel like it’s being evasive just to drain me and keep me chasing for the fun of it bc not even murakami knows what he’s writing about. i was locked in for most of this read, and even as i wrinkled my nose at the last few resolutions in the plot, a part of me did genuinely lament how soon it would be over by then. it’s a kind of paradox on brand for the story, at least.

i also just suspect that the quality of this particular translation is the game changer. after dark was translated by jay rubin as well, it turns out, so now there’s an impending crisis here over whether the parts i found unreadable about murakami’s prose in some novels might in fact just be a matter of some translators being made greater than others.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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