Name: Matthew Jackson's review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Item: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Rating: 3
Author: Matthew Jackson

Haruki Murakami

Jay Rubin

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.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

taylor miles hopkins

 Maybe when people people ake their eyes off them, inanimate objects become even more inanimate.

But this was the home I had chosen. I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen.

I think we all have thought about this idea more than one time, no one needs us or we can die alone and no one will notice that. I can't precisely put that into words but is so sad and now i can't stop thinking about it. And i hope we all are surrounded by the people who love and need us all the time.

Miyamoto Musashi

No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by. But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.

Matthew Jackson

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

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 hate 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 murakami a chance time and time again, and i 

see him as representative of a literary mood that marks him as an outlier even next to his contemporaries in japan. for better or 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.

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

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

 caught my eye by chance during my spring cleaning and i had this intense gut feeling that now was the right time to read it, 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 

 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 

 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 dislike 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 that i’ve never found in any other murakami novel, 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 here 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 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 the hell 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.

also: i genuinely think the quality of this particular translation is At Least partly to blame. didn’t even surprise me when i checked my copy of 

and found that it was translated by jay rubin like 

was, so now there’s a crisis waiting there about whether what 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 hate 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 murakami 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 or 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.

the only novel of his i’d connected with, across more than ten attempted books, 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 my copy of wind up bird chronicle caught my eye by chance during my spring cleaning and i had this intense gut feeling that now was the right time to read it, 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 dislike 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 that i’ve never found in any other murakami novel, 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 here 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 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 the hell 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.

also: i genuinely think the quality of this particular translation is At Least partly to blame. didn’t even surprise me when i checked my copy of after dark and found that it was translated by jay rubin like wind-up was, so now there’s a crisis waiting there about whether what 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 😐

Prashanth Srivatsa

Set in Japan, the Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a story of bizarre incidents, characters and their motives, interwoven with menacing flair and humour that is unique to Murakami. A lost cat, a baseball bat, a despotic Russian General and a series of prophecies that seem to unfurl when you least expect them to, it's a magical ride.

Murakami once again arouses a deep sinking dread inside my bones, crescendoing with each page and then leaving me completely hollow by the very end. At times I'll pause in this book every now and then and think to myself, am I actually enjoying myself or am I just forcing myself to trudge through waffle? But I think all the frustrations and confusion and disturbances add up to this incredibly specific experience of existentialist/nihilist terror and hope only elicited by murakami. So yes I eat it up every time

anarh

This is the second Murakami book I've read and it's like the two books I've read are almost the same. Alternating reality with fantasy plays with your mind, many times you wonder what you are reading. His books are strange. Some like it and some don't. I lean towards the ones they don't like. His style is not for me. No distinct connections between plot and characters.

This particular book is unnecessarily long

Konstantina Ag

This is the second Murakami book I've read and it's like the two books I've read are almost the same. Alternating reality with fantasy plays with your mind, many times you wonder what you are reading. His books are strange. Some like it and some don't. I lean towards the ones they don't like. His style is not for me. No distinct connections between plot and characters.

This particular book is unnecessarily long



Frederik De Bosschere

This book has everything you come to expect, and want, from a Murakami novel. There’s ample descriptions of drinking whiskey or beers by the unit, of the ingredients that go into every meal, of very specific records playing, of the shapes and aesthetics of petite women and small neighbourhoods. And of course, a narrative featuring a cat that is missing, characters that feel like ghosts, a world that has a hard time sticking to the singular, and the moon in different (yet always significant) phases. It’s by no means a unique tale within his oeuvre, but it’s the master doing exactly what makes him so uniquely skilled at his craft.

Taylor

When this book is re-translated, I fully intend on re-reading. Something about the prose is just off, not at all representative of what Murakami can be in English. Maybe the second time around I'll understand it better, too.

Anna Brunner

I just. I have to have at least a week to process this. I have no idea what just happened all i understand is that murakami is a genius & wind up bird chronicles is a modern classic

“the book which is associated with it”

Sanat Gersappa

609 pages of pure goodness. A masterpiece and the best book I've read this year.

Cams Campbell

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It follows the story of Mr Okada, a seemingly ordinary fellow at the outset but his life becomes weirder and weirder as the story progresses. My favourite chunks were the stories of Lt Mamiya. It's kind of built up of different people's stories, all of which affect the protagonist and leads to his becoming much more self aware.

It's a somewhat quirky tale that is quite unlike anything I've ever read before. It grabbed a hold of my attention like a thief in the park and kept a hold of it until the end of the story. I normally read fantasy or sci-fi so this is a bit of a step outside the box for me and one that I'm very glad I took. I'm recommending this to pretty much everyone I know and for good reason.

Thanks to Steve Betz for the recommendation!

Emily Morgan

Reading this book was an exercise in discomfort. I was not in a good place at the time, and Murakami's nightmarish dreamscapes seemed only to amplify this pervasive unease. And despite it all, I could not put this book down. It seems ordinary at first, if not a bit mundane, until all of a sudden it's not. Things get very weird very quickly, and you find yourself, along with the main character, spiralling into an incredibly complex maze of missing cats, ominous prophecies and magic wells. The only thing you can do is surrender to the chaos;  “The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down."  

Every chapter seems to introduce a character more eccentric than the last, blending their different narratives into a patchwork tale of a fragmented and ultimately unknowable world. My friend told me not to expect any closure from this book, and she was right. In many ways it leaves you feeling more confused and uncentered than before. Overall, I think my favourite works of fiction this year have been the ones that challenged my entire conception of what a piece of fiction should do. And that's why this book makes the list. 

 “Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it.”

Fraser Simons

10% in twice, I gave up. I rewound and started listening again because I just completely glazed over despite the narrator actually being pretty good.

Alithea

Arun Kale

You can't fight the flow. And you shouldn't try to.

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

What in the name of all things holy even is this book? I haven't got a clue. I'd like to see what you all think of it.

Murakami, through all of his literary works, has either created his own genre or just made mainstream the "surrealist lit" niche. Some of his works are beautiful, lyrical prose--this being one of them--but, then again, prose style isn't everything. Which this book proves.

It had a steady start.

That's all I can say.

All of the characters were still bewildering even after the pages and pages of backstory we received--the only characters really clear to us at the end were Lieutenant Mamiya and May Kasahara. And that's out of an entire cast of characters whose backstories were basically shoved down our throats every through pages because of their inexplicable need to expound upon their personal background towards our POV and protagonist character, Mr. Okada. I didn't really mind him, I guess. He was sort of a passive influence throughout the book, listening to others' stories and providing his own along with them. Towards the end, though, I actually have no idea what happened. Like, seriously. What.

I guess I can appreciate what Murakami was trying to do with all of this, but honestly, the only character I really enjoyed hearing from was May Kasahara, and even she got a bit tiresome towards the end.

Love it, hate it, it's still Murakami and worth reading. Three stars. 2.5, maybe.

Yeng Tan

Volkan Yorulmaz

If you are a fan of Murakami, you should read this book as well. But I have a disclaimer, this book is really long. It took more than 1 month for me to complete the reading of this book. I read the digital version and when I see the original version in the book store, I said "wow, that is so long!". And out of this book, let's see what I highlight:

There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird.

Cats have their own way of living. They’re not stupid. If a cat stopped living where you happened to be, that meant it had decided to go somewhere else. If it got tired and hungry, it would come back.

https://myhighlightz.blogspot.com/202...

Liz Riley

Weird book but captivating once you really get into it. It centers around a man whose wife leaves him, befriends a teenager with health problems, and become strangley connected with an old, vacant house down the street. 



Once you pick it up you won't want to put it down because you want to know what the hell is going on.

Nat Welch

I just couldn't finish this. Too strange.

Nicholas Hanemann

Dropping this about a quarter of the way through. Might be the narration, but everything seems wholly uninteresting and tedious. There's some curious stuff going on, and it seems like it *might* become substantial, but I'm already five and a half hours in with nothing to show for it. Maybe I'll try to read it somewhere down the road.

Omar Fernandez

This book is not everyone's cup of tea. Instead of summarizing the plot or trying to make sense of it, I'd like to offer some reasons why you may enjoy the book. Then again, you may decide it's not something you'd enjoy, and that would make me very happy since I would have saved you 600+ pages of reading material. Then again, I enjoyed the book. 

This book is one to be treated like a dream. As you read it, you will find an unexpected and thrilling plot that will keep you turning the pages. Such events will all fit in nicely in the world Murakami has created for you. Just like in a dream, however, you will wake up and feel deeply betrayed in retrospect. You see, the book is not one to be understood by linear thinking, which you will inevitably try to do. Some things simply won't make sense. 

What makes the book a page-turner? A rich set of characters with their own unique story. 

Your main is a man trying to make sense of his life. He seems to be thinking deeply, yet doing little else than what he's asked to do. You could say he's drifting through life. He is then faced with one challenge after another as he tries to figure out why his wife vanished. Numerous seemingly unrelated events in his life somehow come together to explain the mystery. Yet the mystery is never quite fully understandable or explained. 

The story puts into words emotions often deeply buried within. It's an exploration of loneliness, love, lust, betrayal, duty, power and corruption. Murakami elicits deeply puzzling and uncomfortable feelings. Although the lack of closure can be unsatisfying, you walk away with a new perspective.

Why may you enjoy this book? It can be a very cathartic experience. 
Why may you not enjoy it? The emotions you explore while reading the book may be foreign or dark, the lack of linear thinking makes you quite uncomfortable, and some things just never quite make sense.

Luke Kanies

Shocked I finished this book.

It seemed like it was three times longer than it needed to be, and so much of it felt like just sitting around moaning.

I'm writing this review a year later, and I distinctly remember my judgement of the book, and a couple of scenes, but the overall book is just swamped by the feeling of confusion that this is so popular.

Matthew Jackson &
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

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