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.
Quotes and thoughts while reading:
'Naked is fine.'
'Well, good. You want me naked'
'Yes. Naked. Good.'
Four minutes.
'My pubic hair is still wet,' she said. 'I didn't dry myself very well. Oh, I'm so wet! Warm and moist. And soft. Wonderfully soft and black. Touch me.'
'Look, I'm sorry, but--'
'And down below too. All the way down. It's so warm down there, like butter cream. So, warm. Mmm. And my legs. What position do you think my legs are in? My right knee is up, and my left leg is open just enough. Say, ten-oh-five on the clock.'
I could tell from her voice that she was not faking it. She really did have her legs open to ten-oh-five, her sex warm and moist.
'Touch the lips,' she said. 'Slooowly. Now open them. That's it. Slowly, slowly. Let your fingers caress them. Oh so slowly. Now, with your other hand, touch my left breast. Play with it. Caress it. Upward. And give the nipple a little squeeze. Do it again. And again. And again. Until I'm just about to come'... (p 11) Whew, on page 11! What a racy scene. For those reading this; this is not an erotic novel, but man does it have some erotic elements.
"In the dark, I thought about the blue tissues and patterned toilet paper and beef and green peppers. I had lived with her all this time, unaware how much she hated these things. In themselves they were trivial. Stupid. Something to laugh off, not make a big issue of. We'd had a little tiff and would have forgotten about it in a couple of days... But this was different. It was bothering me in a strange new way, digging at me like a little fish bone caught in the throat. Maybe--just maybe--it was more crucial than it seemed. Maybe this was it: the fatal blow..." (p 30)
"...sitting on the living room couch, I opened the package that Mr. Honda had left me as a keepsake. I worked up a sweat removing the layer after layer of carefully sealed wrapping paper, until a sturdy cardboard box emerged. It was a fancy Cutty Stark gift box, but it was too light to contain a bottle of whiskey. I opened it, to find nothing inside. It was absolutely empty. All that Mr. Honda had left me was an empty box." (p 172) Here, I exclaimed "It's not just an empty box, but the impetus to an amazing story shared to you by Lieutenant Mamiya!" which is confirmed on p. 345. That tale, from Mamiya is alone worth the time it takes to read this amazing novel.
'You see, Mr. Okada, I am a prostitute. I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind... She held her cheek against my chest. And although she made no sound the whole time, she was crying. I could feel the warmth of her tears through my T-shirt. I looked down, to see her perfectly set hair trembling. I felt I was having a well-made dream. But it was not a dream... She had supposedly just been crying with some intensity, but her makeup had hardly been disturbed. The sense of reality was now strangely absent' (p 213) This is a perfect example of how we, as the reader, have no sense of what "reality" is in the book, and what is "magical". There is this feeling I get, to just let go of the ties to reality, and to fall into this world of magical realism.
'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 be able 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. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really.' (p 322) This struck a chord, and I think it merits further reflection and thought.
"...every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning" (p 341)
"I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put the rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin" (p 461) This is a wonderful little piece on the uncertainty principle, and I love it for that. All of what is written is true, the chance of closing the microwave after putting in instant rice pudding, and opening it to find macaroni gratin is not 0. There does not exist, en event in this reality that has a probability of zero, and I really appreciate how this fact is worked into the narrative.
I have to say, having a password of "Zoo" and "Sub" is just absurd. I can see, how it could be construed that the passwords were made for Toru to be able to guess and gain access to the computer system, but still, Zoo and Sub? Come on.
There is a rather gruesome scene where Japanese soldiers bayonet Chinese soldiers, and like the veterinarian I also "became simultaneously the stabber and the stabbed. [I] could feel both the impact of the bayonet as it entered his victim's body and the pain of having his internal organs slashed into bits." (p 516)
"To do that, Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots in the past that could not reach his own hands. By using those hands to make a story, he was trying to supply the missing links. From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in an attempt to re-create the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting... The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story." (p 525) Hmm, I have recently fallen into the same situation, but with a father instead of a grandfather. It is interesting how the worlds of Murakami and myself collide. It could also be argued that I pick out what I want too, which is true for anyone. Something to keep in mind.
I still can't quite understand why Lieutenant Mamiya couldn't shoot Boris. He kept missing, was it a defect in the gun, or a defect in the person that Mamiya was? I know, he references multiple times, how he left a part of himself in the well, and I wonder, if he had had that part of himself would he have been able to kill Boris?
p 606 reinforces the nature of Murakami, that of building stories with unreliable narrators, with the reader having both an omniscient perspective, and a limited one. The reader gets to read May Kasahara's letters to Toru, but Toru does not. Until this moment I had assumed we(the reader) were reading them through Toru's eyes, but it seems we were not. This is the beauty of Murakami to me. As readers, we never know what is "book reality" vs. "book fiction" and I think this is an amazingly powerful, enveloping tool. Again, this is a book that you can sink into. A world from which you can jump from the tallest diving board and never hit the bottom of the pool. And I love that about it. It didn't have as satisfying of an ending as Kafka on the Shore, but it was still a wonderful read.
© JKloor 2015 Books