The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I'm not sure if I've ever been more flummoxed over how to write a post for Back-Blogged than I am here and now when it comes to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Sween and Trevor have already accomplished such a feat, five and two-and-a-half years ago respectively, and now it's my turn. There's just a whole lot to say here - and to ask, too, of Sween and Trev and anyone else out there who's read this thing. Where to begin?

Haruki Murakami

This is the second Murakami novel I've read, following Norwegian Wood last year. The difference couldn't be starker. Norwegian Wood was a straightforward but beautifully written coming-of-age tale in which a college student learns to cope with loss and sorrow. It felt like a less cynical Catcher in the Rye, and also like a more elegant Great Gatsby. I couldn't help but love it, and eventually I declared it the best book I read in 2015. So it made all the sense in the world for me to start 2016 with Murakami's most-revered novel.

Now, I'd heard that Norwegian Wood was a relatively tame Murakami novel in that it had a concrete resolution and didn't deal with any surreal elements, but oh man was I unprepared for the extent to which The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle left plot threads open, didn't explain itself, and loosely but only barely connected all kinds of disparate characters and motifs into vague and general recurrences.

Torn

When I finished this book several hours ago, I had no idea how to feel about it; snap judgment was impossible and I couldn't shake the suspicion that so much of what I'd just spent 600 pages reading was meaningless. But at the same time, I'd thoroughly enjoyed reading most of those 600 pages. The Internet was similarly divided. The book boasts a large contingent of devoted fans, many of whom consider this the greatest book of all time, but non-literary-group forum perusing has left me with the impression that more than half of the people who start this book can't bring themselves to finish it. I found it engrossing, but not necessarily addicting; I've been working on it for two and a half weeks, which means I've only managed a few dozen pages per day - but then, it also means that for two and a half weeks I've been reading a few dozen pages of this thing every day.

Most of all, I can't even directly compare this to Norwegian Wood. I didn't end up loving that book until it was nearly over; it all seemed to come together right at the end for me. Here, an almost opposite occurrence - I had all kinds of interest in five or six separate arcs in this one, and in the end I was left hanging. Frustrated is the wrong word, but I was at least overwhelmed by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, wondering what it all meant and how it all fit together. I can't deny that Norwegian Wood left me more satisfied at the end of the day, but it seems absurd to call it a superior book to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I like to come up with little ranked lists all the time - I think we all do, to an extent - but right now my only two Murakami experiences are just unavailable for such a comparison. Hell, this latest experience probably isn't even over; give me some time to let it marinate. Bottom line: I don't know how I feel about this book. But I do know that it was among the greatest books I've ever read.

One thing the book's supporters and detractors can agree on is that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle doesn't really have a thematic through-line. There are plenty of novels with plot threads that don't intertwine into a perfect braid, but generally the good ones will have some thematic consistency linking the strands together. But there really just isn't a moral or consistent tone or running theme here. The central narrative reaches its conclusion - in a surreal, dreamlike haze, no less - and the book ends shortly thereafter with plenty of other stories left unresolved. None of this makes The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a bad book, of course, but it does mean that the only reward for reading it is the experience of reading it. Does that make sense? I'm not even sure if that's what I'm trying to say. Whatever. My point is, this is no allegory for any bigger picture or issue. There's no real-world real-issue symbolism here, and certainly no satire, nor is the book's unconventional messiness somehow a winking in-joke or commentary on literature or fiction or storytelling expectations or anything like that. There are no hidden meanings. There are only the connections between different elements and characters of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Details

Alright, so what exactly was this book about, anyway? It starts off simply enough. An unemployed, passive, and apathetic man named Toru has lost his cat. While searching for the cat, he encounters a teenage girl skipping school. They become fast friends and hang out to talk about things every few days. Toru receives a few mysterious phone calls from a woman who claims to know him, but she's just trying to have phone sex. Toru's wife, Kumiko, sets him up with a psychic woman to help him find the cat. This woman, Malta, tells Toru that his brother-in-law - Kumiko's older brother - once raped her younger sister, Creta. Toru meets up with Creta one day and then begins to have wet dreams about her; Creta calls herself a "prostitute of the mind" and reveals that she's been having sex with Toru in her own dreams. Shortly thereafter, Toru is visited by an old World War II veteran who tells Toru about the time he and a few of his soldiers were caught behind enemy lines in Mongolia, and describes in horrifying detail how his commanding officer was skinned alive in front of him before he himself was dropped down a well and left for dead. One of his fellow soldiers - another apparent psychic in a book with several psychics - told him he'd make it back to Japan alive, though. And he did. Shortly after this, Kumiko leaves Toru and files for divorce, admitting that she's been cheating on Toru for months now, and advising him to stay away from her and try to move on as quickly as possible. Distraught and at a loss for what to do next, Toru climbs down into an old abandoned well on a vacant lot in his neighborhood, sits in the darkness, and thinks. And dreams. And wanders.

Lots to take in, right? Well, hang on, because that's only roughly the first third of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. What follows is much crazier and harder to describe. Hell, the whole book is hard to describe. But in a nutshell, Toru's deep mediations down in the well transport him into what can only loosely be described as a dream land of sorts. Most of the rest of the novel takes place both outside of the well and in the non-dream "reality," but the very structure of the narrative begins to come apart in the third act; Toru's first-person narration is replaced every so often by newspaper stories, letters from other people, and some sort of 1985 proto-IM conversation service. (Oh yeah, the whole story takes place from 1984-1985.) But even the events happening in the "real world" begin to take on a dreamlike quality, and plenty of different elements begin to feel connected and repeated in ways.

Connections

These connections are probably the most compelling argument in favor of The Wind-Up Bird being something truly special and not just a bunch of well-written but meaningless bullshit. Creta, for instance, looks almost exactly like Kumiko, and fits into all of her clothes and shoes perfectly. Toru's cat has the exact same name as his brother-in-law. Toru winds up at the bottom of a dry well, just like the lieutenant did in Mongolia forty or more years prior. The mysterious sex-caller sounds exactly like Kumiko. Toru ends up with a weird blue mark on his cheek identical to one on an important character's grandfather. No fewer than three separate assaults with a baseball bat are made during the course of the book. Toru's cat disappears, and then so does his wife. Early on, someone warns Toru and Kumiko to always be wary of water; Toru later nearly drowns, and another character does in a separate incident. A number of different nameless women are described as having been "violated" but not explicitly raped; Kumiko claims to have been "violated" by her own brother, while Creta explicitly says she was raped by him. A boy has a dream in which he finds a beating human heart under a tree; a man is later killed and harvested for his heart and other organs. And perhaps most importantly, what with the title of the book and everything, Toru finds great comfort in hearing the call of the wind-up bird, a bird that sounds like a spring winding up - but no other character is even aware of such a bird, and some of them eventually notice a strange-sounding bird they've never heard before.

What does it all mean? Is it all a dream? Is Kumiko even gone? Is Toru even real? Does any of it matter?

Conclusion

Plenty of people have shrugged off the strange non-resolution as a by-product of Murakami being a Japanese author. "Books in Japan don't work like Western novels," goes the argument. Except, that isn't really true in Murakami's case; he's known in Japan - and loved - for having a distinctively "American" writing style. And even more people - both lovers and haters - try to summarize the entire book by calling it "surreal" or "an acid trip" or "down the rabbit hole." They're not wrong, but they're lazy! There're so much more to this book than just how weird and bonkers it can be. Truth be told, it's not even that weird. Most of what happens is realistic and rooted firmly in the realm of the normal. And although you could pretty easily be convinced that the entire book could be one long dreamscape - hey, anything could be. At least within the context of the story, most of what happens is real.

But here I am, trying to verify that "most of what happens is real" and allowing a modifying clause on top of that. Fuck it, maybe the masses aren't being lazy - maybe they've just done all these mental gymnastics themselves and determined that there's really no way to describe or talk about the story here in any certain terms. Maybe "it was totally surreal and I really liked it" is as apt a description as any. Maybe the whole novel is comparable to abstract art, where what matters isn't so much what's been depicted, but instead how it resonates with others.

Trev led his post off with "...and my head's still spinning," which is really no less than I've managed to say in twelve paragraphs. Yeesh. Can I get back to you all on this one?

Bingo

Alright, enough poorly-written half-baked rapid reaction takes from me. Let's play some Murakami Bingo.

Since nothing comes easy to me, I'll opt out of the binary "yes or no" and allow a third option - "kind of." I figure that in a 600-page novel, and arguably the man's most famous work, I can't just go handing out a Bingo on a technicality or two. We've got to earn this Bingo, Murakami! Show me what you got.

Mysterious Woman:

Yes. Everything is mysterious in this book, but the woman on the other end of the phone calls at the beginning of the book elevates this one from a technicality to an easy square. She may even literally be described as a mysterious woman.

Ear Fetish:

Close, but no. At one point a woman's ears are described as being small and cute, but it's a far cry from a one-sentence description to "fetish." On the other hand, multiple women end up licking Toru on the cheek. We were inches away here!

Dried-Up Well:

A hundred times over, yes - this is literally the setting for close to a hundred pages of the book.

Something Vanishing:

Yeah. Toru's cat and wife aside - because hey, those are creatures, not "things" - there are a number of occasions where an object is not where Toru left it. (Rope ladder, baseball bat - probably plenty of others.)

Feeling of Being Followed:

No. Unless I'm forgetting something, I can't remember this specific emotion or fear ever popping up. Plenty of other general uneasy feelings, but not this one.

Unexpected Phone Call:

Totally. The first fifty pages alone felt like they contained a handful of unexpected phone calls.

Cats:

Yes, of course.

Old Jazz Record:

If there was one, I missed it - closest thing I can think of is Toru listening to classical music on the radio which is neither jazz nor a record.

Urban Ennui:

Yes. Toru lives in Tokyo, the largest urban metropolis in the world, and he has neither a job nor any real interests or passions - his life is textbook urban ennui.

Supernatural Powers:

Several characters are at least mildly psychic, so yes.

Running:

Murakami loves running, but Toru doesn't seem to. If he did, he'd probably go for a jog to clear his mind instead of slinking down into the bottom of a well. No, no running.

Secret Passageway:

I'm gonna go with a full-on yes, and it comes from two separate half-assed technicalities. The first is an alleyway behind Toru's house that doesn't lead to any roads - just other houses in the neighborhood. It's a weak example on its face, but it allows Toru access to the vacant lot with the dried up well without anybody seeing him. Secondly, at the bottom of the well itself, Toru is able to "slip through the wall" and into the dream world. That counts, right?

Train Station:

Here's our first "kind of;" Toru takes the train a few times over the course of the novel and at least briefly describes being at the train station. I can't recall any specific events that occur at the station though, nor does Murakami describe any train stations in loving detail.

Historical Flashback:

Several, all to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. (I really liked these, and wish I had more time, room, or effort to describe them in the bulk of my post. Oh well!)

Precocious Teenager:

Yes - May Kasahara, Toru's hookey-playing neighbor, who smokes and sunbathes all day when she isn't working at the factory. Somewhere in the middle of the novel, Toru is even taken aback when he remembers how young she is.

Cooking:

Another soft "kind of." This is so broad, and I'd challenge anyone to find a 600-page novel in which the preparation of food is entirely absent. The only cooking I can remember comes on the very first page, where Toru gets an unexpected phone call from a mysterious woman (seriously) while whipping up a pot of spaghetti. I almost want to say no, but then, it's the first page, and it's a memorable scene, and you could really tell how invested Murakami was in Toru's boiling pot of spaghetti.

Speaking to Cats:

Yet another "kind of." Toru's cat returns about halfway through the book, and at one point Toru says something to him. But, come on. It happens once. It's not really a "thing."

Parallel Worlds:

Blech, a third straight "yeah, sort of." This should probably be a straight-up yes - Toru's dream world feels a lot like an alternate reality. But it's never really described or treated as such within the novel. I'm struggling here.

Weird Sex:

Yes. In addition to dream sex, which is only "subjectively" weird, Creta describes being raped as being physically split in two and having some slimy and indescribable presence extracted from within her. And that's just straight objectively weird, even if it's only a metaphor, which, hey, it probably isn't anyway.

Chip Kidd Cover:

Another vague "yes but no." Chip Kidd designed a cover for this book, but the cover on the paperback edition I have - pictured above - was made by John Gall.

Tokyo at Night:

Virtually the entire book takes place in Tokyo, and that absolutely includes several nights, but you know what? No. Nothing about "nighttime in the city" ever comes up. I won't even give this the half-ass check mark.

Unusual Name:

This is usually tough, since all the names in Murakami books tend to be in Japanese, and it isn't clear to this ign'ant ugly American what kind of names are unusual in Japan. For instance, Creta and Malta don't seem like strange Japanese names to me, but Toru specifically considers them to be unusual to him, so I've got to yield to his thoughts on this one. Oh, and two important characters go by Nutmeg and Cinnamon - but those are code names! Do they count? Whatever - this is a solid yes.

Faceless Villain:

I'm sorry, but here's another "kind of" from me. The only true villain in the book is Toru's brother-in-law, and he's very clearly identified immediately and he also has a face. But - but! - in the climactic scene in the whole book, Toru wails on a faceless man with a baseball bat in the dream world, and it's strongly implied that this faceless man is the dream world extension of his brother-in-law in the real world.

Vanishing Cats:

We end on an easy one. Yes! Yes! Yes!

The verdict...

Goddammit. Even with 14 surefire squares, there's not a pure bingo on the board. The "sort of" squares get us to three, but two of them hinge on more empty circles than filled ones. That leaves top-left-to-bottom-right as our only real shot at a bingo, pending approval on parallel worlds. Hell, even the other two bingos hinge on parallel worlds.

Sween, Trev, please - weigh in. Did The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle feature parallel worlds? I'm done thinking about this. Good night!