One of the hardest things about reviewing Murakami’s work after reading it is finding a way to quantify and categorize the story into something coherent.
Let me just say this - I read it, all six hundred plus pages, and I liked it quite a bit. Still, I came off with the impression that I missed some things, which isn’t all that unusual seeing as that’s how every one of my post-read reactions has gone down with him.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is about, amongst other things, a missing cat, a missing wife, a story-within-a-story about Japan’s creation of and involvement in Manchukuo, psychics, psychic prostitutes, morbid high school girls, a vaguely creepy scholar-cum-politician and a bird (species unknown) that has a call that sounds much like the winding of a spring.
There are also multiple references to Cutty Sark Scotch whisky, for really no reason I could fathom.
A fan of Murakami’s other works will find a lot to love in this giant whopper of a novel. Those put off by the sheer vagueness of his plots, though, will be driven up the wall. There’s a lot going on in this novel, but much of it feels separate from its other parts. There’s a slight feeling of interconnectedness between the characters and settings, even over large spans of chronological time, but there isn’t much in the narrative to back this up. The end result is a feeling of pieces of story floating alongside each other, nearly touching but never quite able. Which isn’t to say this is a bad book, or a book not worth reading. Really, quite the contrary. It’s a great book, a lot of fun to read, and the pages go by quickly without bogging readers down.
The trick to enjoying Murakami lies in the old adage “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” That really is the key to picking up and getting the most out of his books. There’s nothing ever concrete about them. Most of his plots can be boiled down to this short summary - A man, a completely average, somewhat slackerish man, meets some other people, goes some places, a ton of weird things happen and he comes back home. The end. Oh, and there will be references to jazz music, women’s ears (don’t ask) and brands of alcohol.
Don’t expect a plot that defines and explains everything and you should be all right. The Wind-Up Bird isn’t any different in structure than any of his other books (with the exception of South of the Border, West of the sun, which I loathed and blogged about elsewhere when I first read it last year or the year before), and isn’t about to go off giving readers concrete explanations about why things happen the way they do. They just happen. It’s all very organic and arty, I suppose, but for those who enjoy tangible stories with dramatic conclusions it’s going to be annoying.
It worked well enough for me.
3/5
And now on to a complete change of pace. I’ve managed to amass quite a pile of horror novels (focusing on zombies in particular), and I’ll be taking a run at those now that I’ve got two Must Reads out of the way. It’s been too long since I read a brand new horror novel and I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in them.
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