The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
Book Review: A guide to how held power enables & obstructs energy-flows..
Summary: 5 Stars
This outstanding book manages to take the theme of alienation so popular to Western intellectuals like Kundra and Auster, and show how it is formed and may be engaged with. Moving past the static depiction of the individual in isolation favoured by the West, Murakami shows that an individual has to engage not just with him/herself, but that the engagement takes place in a flow of energy that comes from being in an active world. Being static is viewed in relation to movement, not as an ideal of being.The novel never stops, there is no surrender to the bourgeois forces that always attempt to control the flow of energy, and direct it behind their ends. Unlike Western intellectuals, Murakami has a clear view of the political consequences of allowing someone else to control the flow of your life, its direction and force. This is examined in terms of work, government, and, most emotively, gender. Murakami is a modern person, and so is not fooled by appearance - traditional male/female gender differences are not divided by genitalia, but by protagonists' actions in controlling. The hero seeks to control his wife only so that he can help her release her energy consistantly and in a positive manner. He seeks this for himself, also; the book is his search to find the gates within himself that he needs to open, that societies preset answers have failed to keep open.
This is not just an internal struggle, though, not just a monologue - the few other characters have lives and flows of their own that strike the hero and the reader with the emotional practicality of their strength and direction. This is a book about people living their lives in the physical world, that imposes its own channels and constraints. These people's brains are as much a part of the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" as their loins are - that is, they are each physical, a fact shied from in the Western search for the ephemeral, untouched perfect soul. Murakami does not love his brain, as one feels Western intellectual writers do through their work - he uses it, to envisage the direction his and others' energy has tried to head, through the distractions pulled and pushed in its way by himself and others in the course of his moving through the physical world. By doing this, he hopes to be able to just exist in the world, though not to remain still, just as we are all searching for the perfect job, that will enable us to achieve personal expression, since its requirements exercise our personality completely and satisfyingly, and it thus brings us into contact with people with whom we connect completely - since conciousness is being used naturally, not forced to push our self-percieved image into our appearance. We would be what we seem to be.
This is the post-modern quest, and this book's hero is an honest quester. The comparison to Chandler's Marlowe is apt, and shows the drift of modern expression - while Marlowe had to exist and work in an environment designed and run by others in an effort to control and average out the human spirit, Toru Okado has to work out how to negate the channels that have been, and are being, dug for him, to get out of the rat race. Being controlled by others makes you lose control of yourself, and so be unhappy, anxious, or angry (a sliding scale depending on social position).
Post-Modern art is trying to redress that balance by naming and shaming the tactics of those that control others, so that their lives feel fulfilled. American influenced art is too interested in just mirroring the world - see for example American Psycho, a book in which words are used to communicate picture images of the self and its actions, not to communicate between selves, and show how this can and must be done. Impressiveness through presentation, control, verbosity and silence is inimicable to this, but is the easiest, least draining, most selfishly rewarding way to achieve this - it is fast-track. However, the fast track is too narrow for humanity to walk side by side, and interrelate, which is why truly contemporary art is trying to half-ignore the 'real' world that has been built to impress us with its control and order, and potential for the future if the present is consumed as fuel. This book is an amazing addition to the ranks of enlightened and enlightening art, moving us into the twenty first century.
Book Review: Tangential Stories
Summary: 4 Stars
Highly recommended by a friend, I usually read throw away boy meets girl novels. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was quite a change. I struggled through the first 100 pages, not able to cope with the seemingly lethargic pace of the book. But as I read the different stories from the characters who met Toru I started to really get into it. I started to imagine myself down the well, in total darkness (it's easy to do in a crap hotel on holiday in Turkey!) . I loved the surreal contact he had with people like the pyschic sisters, and Nutmeg and Cinnamon but it was people like Lieutenant Mamiya and May Kasahara who made the book for me. All the stories, all the letters, everything seemed to come together to create a solution to Toru's problems. I guess, in the end, I expected too much of a happy ending and felt the ending was weak. Still, I'm going to buy Norwegian Wood nextBook Review: No man is an island
Summary: 5 Stars
This book haunted me from page 1, and is still haunting me now that I've read it. I started reading this book when I was jet-lagged after returning from a trip in Japan; and reading it did not help at all. I was completely gripped. I ended up reading chunks of it in the middle of the night, and living in a state of detached sleepwalking during the day. Thank God I've finished it and managed to have some real sleep.Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about an "I" who is quite similar to the other "I"'s of Murakami's novels: the narrator, Okada, describes himself as completely normal, feels that he is somewhat a failure in life, feels detached and alienated, is well cultured especially in literature and music, knows the names of the Karamazov brothers and uses swimming and ironing as an anti-stress therapy. Not feeling very happy with his life, he quits his job for a break and to think about his next move. At around the same time his cat disappears, he meets a bored neighbour in her mid-teens, and his wife starts arriving later and later everyday from work. Okada's life becomes mundane: looking for his cat, listening to music, reading history books, shopping, cooking and eating at odd hours, chatting with his neighbour, waiting for his wife, a phonecall, or a letter, etc. Strange characters start to make their appearance in his life, telling him their life stories and slowly dragging him into a world of mysticism and occult. Mysterious events begin to take more time from his everyday mundane life giving this novel a very dark and surreal atmosphere.
This novel is very well written (thanks to both the author and the translator). It is clever, funny and also melancholic. It is full of witty remarks. It is quite a big book, made up of 70-80 `bite size' chapters that are very easy to read, and also addictive -- "I just want to read one more little chapter, just one and then I'll stop reading and go to bed, I know I can stop whenever I want to, I just need to know what happens next otherwise I would never be able to sleep, it's only 5 o'clock in the morning, that gives me 3 full hours of sleep before waking up to go to work..."
Well, it seems that I can go on talking about this book for ever. This is a story of alienation and detachment, of the feeling that others have control over your life, that your options are very limited and that happiness is unattainable. Not all puzzles can be solved, and not everyone can be understood. Highly recommended.
Book Review: A fine novel from one of the world's finest authors.
Summary: 5 Stars
Haruki Murakami deserves a world wide reputation for the strength and imagination with which he writes. The Wind Up Chronicle is simply breathtaking, and at the same time as utterly strange as you would expect from Murakami. Our hero, Toru (Mr. Wind-up Bird) is typical of Murakami's male protagonists. Disillusioned, unhappy, slightly out of step with the rest of the world and a magnet for the weird characters he meets.Effectively split into two parts, the Malta and Creta section breaks completely into the Cinnamon and Nutmeg section, and urged forward by strange conversations and water, the novel is philosophical, metaphorical, historical and wonderful. There's also a certain touch of David Lynch to the supernatural storyline which makes it even more intruiguing. Superb.
Book Review: A most extraordinary novel
Summary: 5 Stars
This was one of the most unusual, weird even, novels I have ever read but was truly enjoyable. Unlike many books as unusual as this it was very easy to read and very addictive.