The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami

Guest drop book review here of acclaimed contemporary post-modern Japanese fiction author extraordinare Haruki Murakami. For those who are  not familiar with Murakami’s novels here are some of his other works: Norwegian Wood, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Kafka on the Shore. In general his characters are predominately regular bland male protaganists who find their predictable worlds turned upside down and reflect on what circumstances have led them astray. Usually there is one female character keeping the male protaganist tethered to some sort of reality.

In the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Murakami delves into the seemingly ordinary world of a young well-to-do married man, Toru Okada, who recently quit his job. He and his wife Kumiko live in a quiet little world where each morning the wind-up bird comes to a stand of trees outside their veranda and “winds the world’s spring”, an omen of change. Their cat (Noboru Wantaya) runs away. They named the cat after Kumiko’s brother because it reminds them of him, the real Noboru Wantaya is a seemingly absent antagonist who Toru goes toe to toe with though not in the physical world. Shortly after the cat disappears, his wife Kumiko leaves and never returns. Toru finds himself stumbling blindly into a strange alternate reality world, which is in itself an incomprehensible metaphor. Filled with troubled characters from all walks of life, Toru launches headfirst into this underworld web of connectedness armed with only his sense of misdirected love (or loyalty) to his wife. Jobless, wifeless, and cat-less, Toru takes it in stride never feeling sorry for himself, systematically determined to retrieve his wife from this underworld and take Noboru Wantaya down. Along the way he is introduced to a young neighbor girl, May Kasahara, the typical timeless pixie classic female found in his other novels. She is odd and quirky, but keeps Toru connected to the real world and delivers fun commentary along the way.

I’m pretty big on character devlopment and I was impressed at how well Murakami introduced, built, and maintained his rich cast of characters. This particular work was a fun read.  It’s rather long, so it’s a time commitment that may be more suited for a summer beach holiday, say, in the south of France or at least a sunny day in the park. He keeps the story moving and the reader entertained while presenting the tale in a surreal dreamlike trance. It’s hard to describe, but that’s his style. I could go on praising Murakami and dissecting this novel and the character’s in it, but I’d rather offer a surface pedestrian overview and leave it up to you.