The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), nothing is ever what it seems, at least not for long. This is the longest and least satisfying of the novels I have read by Haruki Murakami. By least satisfying, I do not mean to suggest that the novel was not absorbing, interesting, or stimulating. It was all of these. But after a while, after 500 pages, it began to drag. And its meandering plot turns and twists ultimately began to seem self-justifying.

The main character is Toru Okada. He is married to Kumiko, a magazine editor. Some months before the start of the narrative, he quit his job as a legal assistant ,and when the novel begins he is basically a house husband who does much of nothing. Kumiko tells him not to worry about his unemployment—eventually something may come along that interests him. Toru is strangely passive, strangely accepting of the various happenings that befall him, beginning with the disappearance of a cat that Kumiko loves because she associates it with the early days of their marriage. Kumiko spends many late nights at her job. Toru doesn't mind. One morning he notices she is wearing a scent he does not recognize, and after she leaves the house he finds a strange bottle of cologne in her bedroom—he wonders where she got it—she wouldn't buy such an expensive item for herself. He seems strangely clueless. On this day Kumiko goes to work and never comes back. Toru has no idea where she has gone. A representative of Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya—a brilliant but ruthless businessman and intellectual in the early stages of a political career—comes to tell Toru that Kumiko no longer loves him and that her family wants him to agree to a divorce. Later Toru receives a letter from Kumiko telling him that she has had a torrid affair with another man and that, although she doesn't love the man and has broken off with him by the time she writes the letter, she has shamed herself and asks Toru to forget her. She adds that she never enjoyed having sex with Toru. He seems strangely unresponsive to this revelation too, though as the novel progresses he becomes increasingly committed to finding Kumiko.

Events move strangely and mysteriously forward. Toru meets an obsessively chatty sixteen-year-old girl who lives near his house. She is fascinated with him, and they strike up a friendship. She ultimately seems to fall in love with Toru. He doesn't reciprocate, though the possibility is there. Toru spends days at the bottom of a well near his house. He has a visitation from a phantom-like woman who has sex with him and suggests they travel to Crete. He learns to move through walls. He learns to relieve the stress of women by making strange psychic "adjustments" to their bodies. He meets a former fashion designer and her son, who chooses never to speak. He communicates with someone claiming to be Kumiko through a computer. He meets and has conversations with a World War II veteran who worked in espionage activities and saw his commanding office skinned alive by Russian soldiers—this veteran also spent a significant time at the bottom of a well.

These bits and pieces from the novel do not represent the total experience of the book. The narrative itself comes to an end that suggests a resolution without really providing it in concrete terms. If events work out as Toru is told, then things will come to a satisfying end, but then nothing in this novel really works out as it is supposed to. Everything is bent and slightly askew and reality as a whole is fundamentally shifting, uncertain, unreliable. I would appreciate and understand this novel better if I knew more about the tradition of the novel in Japan, as well as the cultural and folk traditions that Murakami uses in his story.