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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9780679775430
Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed
ISBN: 0679775439
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 624
Publication Date: September 01, 1998
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: September 01, 1998
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Basically, a conundrum
At once strange, fantastic, logical, philosopical, existential, historical, this novel winds you up in perplexity and understanding, confusion and awareness, and subtly forces you into the realms of being you have yet explored. Certainly, this is what the protagonist, Toru Okada, is undergoing as you read one disconnected encounter after another as he goes about, in a very uneasy and slow journey, at first in search for his lost cat, then his lost wife.
It is almost impossible to chronicle ... Read More
Rating:  - Different, Eerie, & Thought-Provoking like Murakami's Well
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle has been an interesting journey for me, filled with ups and downs - quick page turns and at times it was quite a trustworthy sleep-aid. I have to admit that it is very unlike anything that I have ever read and for this reason, it is difficult to "rate it" in the context of other contemporary works that are currently out there. I appreciate its uniqueness, as well as its existential and thought-provoking deepness, surrounding the puzzling story line. Murakami connects the past ... Read More
Rating:  - *sound of wind rushing*
Florid waste of time!!
Murakami shouldn't be allowed to write about women. He casts them all as victim-y sex objects. What a neat guy.
Lots of details, no depth to any character, no plot, no more Murakami.
Rating:  - Read this one, don't bother with the rest of Murakami's books
I've read 5 of Murakami's books now, starting with Wind-up Bird. Every other book was a major disappointment after this one. Wind-up Bird offers interesting characters, an engaging (though infuriatingly intricate) plot, and some kind of resolution by the end. All of the other books came off as pretentious and inane - nothing much seemed to happen in them, but it took a hell of a lot of words, and far too many references to Western literature and music (why??) to express the fact - that nothing much happened! ... Read More
Rating:  - Garbage
About 300 pages too long, Haruki Murakami invites you on a ride into his chilling and hallucinogenic world full of deception and avarice, and offers you absolutely nothing in return. Reading this book is like being in a shifty, sick relationship with someone who endlessly teases but never really gives you anything back; never shows you anything of who they are. Wholly unpleasant, at times just gross, and desperately boring, Murakami's imagination gets tapped out into a confusing, fragmentary reverie that hints ... Read More
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