The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami, 1995)

Toru Okada, an unambitious thirty-year-old in mid-1980s Tokyo, quits his dead-end law-office job. At home and on the dole, he settles into a routine of cooking, picking up the dry cleaning and searching for his lost cat. On the feline's trail, he meets a school-skipping, death-obsessed sixteen-year-old girl who works for a toupee manufacturer. A series of eccentric characters contact him thereafter: a red-hatted clairvoyant working pro bono, said clairvoyant's pastel-suit-wearing ex-prostitute sister, a former military man who fought in Manchuria with the late other psychic Toru and wife Kumiko used to visit and a fashion designer with a mute son and unclear magical abilities.

When all of a sudden Kumiko up and disappears, Toru quits the cat hunt and assumes the wife hunt. To help himself think, he climbs to the bottom of the dry well behind a local abandoned house — and, some say, a cursed one — and, stuck there, discovers a portal to what may or may not be another reality. He emerges with a bruise-like mark on his face which might possess exploitable powers itself. An old comrade-in-arms of a psychic he used to visit sends lengthy missives describing the horrors of Manchuria; the fashion designer recalls her childhood experiencing same. Kumiko's vile older brother rises to celebrity and political power. Also, a little kid somewhere wakes up to find that he has a doppelgänger, and it's overtaken his bed. This is all well and good, Toru thinks, but where's my lady?

* * *

As the premise, such as I could describe it, might indicate, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is jam-packed with stuff. I've even left a lot out in the interest of avoiding the dreaded tl;dr. (Me, I'm more inclined to drop a ts;dr, but each to their own.) You've got your lost cats (a theme to return in Kafka on the Shore) your weird sex, your baseball bat fights, your waking dreams, your dreaming wakes, your military history, your wordy correspondence — anything you need.

Good old Michiko Kakutani described the book thusly: "the impression it gives [is] of being jerry-built out of an arbitrary accretion of episodes and digressions." I agree. The cause, I think, is fourfold:

1. The novel is built out of an earlier short story
2. The novel was originally published in a serial form and collected into three separate ~200-page books
3. Murakami admits that he makes up his stories as he goes along (which isn't... necessarily bad)
4. Things get lost in translation

But none of this is to say that the book sucks! Sure, it's not exactly a well-oiled machine, but it's well-executed enough to remain a page turner even when I didn't have clue one as to how everything fits together. (In retrospect, clue one should've been that not everything does fit together.) That's kind of Murakami's way, to throw stuff in front of the reader and maybe explain it later, or maybe not. And since this is my third Murakami book in as many weeks, I've begun to notice other pet themes of his as well: the not-particularly-driven male loner almost unwillingly forced into the protagonist's role, for instance, or the out-of-nowhere appearance of an exquisitely well-dressed woman. Murakami loves him some well-dressed women. (He also loves him some women who are so far withdrawn into themselves that they're well nigh unreachable to their protagonists, who happen to be desperate to get through to them. Sometimes they're also well-dressed women, is the case with Kumiko.)

And I suppose this would be the place to reiterate my now-usual "realism good, magic bad... magic realism kind of good?" point about Murakami stories. The guy's incredible at depicting the stuff of quotidian life — I got excited when I found that the novel opens with Toru boiling pasta and listening to Rossini — and he can crank out a fine character sketch, especially if that character is something of an isolated autodidact. For instance, here's how he writes the life of Cinnamon, son of the fashion designer Nutmeg (they don't want to give Toru their real names, to answer your question):

During lulls between jobs, Nutmeg would teach Cinnamon how to read and write and do arithmetic. But in fact, there was not that much that she had to teach him. He liked books, and he would use them to teach himself what he needed to know. She was less a teacher for him than the one who chose the books he needed. He liked music and wanted to play the piano, but after learning the basic finger movements in a few months with a professional piano teacher, he used only manuals and recorded tapes to bring himself to a high level of technical accomplishment for one so young. He loved to play Bach and Mozart, and aside from Poulenc and Bartók, he showed little inclination to play anything beyond the Romantics. During his first six years of study, his interests were concentrated on music and reading, but from the time he reached middle school age, he turned to the acquisition of languages, beginning with English and then French. In both cases, he taught himself enough to read simple books after six months of study. He had no intention of learning to converse in either language, of course; he wanted only to be able to read books. Another activity he loved was tinkering with complicated machinery. He bought a complete collection of professional tools, with which he was able to build radios and tube amplifiers, and he enjoyed taking clocks apart and fixing them.

[ ... ]

At eighteen, Cinnamon got his driver's license. Nutmeg found a kindly driving instructor to give him private lessons, but Cinnamon himself had already been through every available instruction book and absorbed the details. All he needed was the practical know-how that couldn't be obtained from books, and this he mastered in a few days at the wheel. Once he had his license, he pored over the used-car books and bought himself a Porsche Carrera, using as a down payment all the money he had saved working with his mother (none of which he ever had to use for living expenses). He made the engine shine, bought all new parts through mail order, put new tires on, and generally brought the car's condition to racing level. All he ever did with it, though, was drive it over the same short, jam-packed route every day from his home in Hiroo to the office in Akasaka, rarely exceeding forty miles an hour. This made it one of the rarer Porsche 911s in the world.

In his newest compilation, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Murakami takes this skill of putting a life succinctly on paper for its best spin yet — or at least it's the best in his work that I've read so far — in the short story "Tony Takitani", which is pretty much 100% in the same tone as the above passage. Also like the above passage, it's 100% realism; everything Murakami says happened conceivably could have. That's not so much the case in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. After Toru makes his trip down the well, the question of what's real and what isn't hangs in the air, as does the question of what's perceived by the mind, what's happened only in the mind, and just whose mind is what happening in.

Unfortunately, I find those questions to be a pain in the ass, just as I found my eyes shifting automatically into skimming mode upon encountering any passage that didn't have a high probability of being "real". And if a passage is introduced as a dream, forget it; I don't have any patience for hearing a real human's dreams, let alone a fictitious one's. And boy, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle dwells on these questions, unanswerable as they are. Characters do attempt to explain a few of the story's more outlandish phenomena now and again, but the explanations are incomplete and don't make much sense. I'll leave it to readers more patient than I to figure out how, say, "prostitution of the mind" works.

If I can measure the goodness of a writer by how much crap like this I let them get away with, then Murakami must be writerly goodness incarnate. Much has been written about how this book shines a light on Japan's struggle for an identity — for What it Means to Be Japanese^TM — but if that's what it's doing, it's doing it pretty obliquely. The sections about Japanese misadventure in Manchuria are fairly condemning, but I doubt that stuff was in the front of the Japanese everyman's mind in 1995, when the novel came out, or even in 1984, when it takes place. Mostly it's just a bunch of individual threads, each of which connect with the others, or don't. But most of these threads are, taken by themselves, page-turners, full of precise, spot-on descriptions: I wanted to know where Kumiko went, or why the boy found his doppelgänger, or what exactly Toru's celebrity brother-in-law's secret was. It's no big deal that these questions aren't quite directly tied to one another; as for the fact that the answers never really come, your mileage may vary. (I've been reading a lot of Murakami lately — I stopped demanding answers a while ago.)

Three-quarters into the novel, Toru finds a way to communicate with Kumiko, whatever dimension she's in, via Cinnamon's computer terminal. It's equipped with a mouse, which anachronistically bothers my inner vintage computer weenie, but it otherwise correctly operates with a bare-bones ASCII interface. Kumiko types the following to her increasingly desperate husband:

> The reason I am here, like it or not, is because this is the proper place for me. This is where I have to be. I have no right to choose otherwise. Even if I wanted to see you, I couldn't do it. Do you think I DON'T want to see you? So please, don't torture me about this any longer. If there is any one thing that you can do for me, it would be to forget about my existence as quickly as possible. Take those years that we lived together and push them outside your memory as if they never existed. That, finally, is the best thing you can do for both of us. This is what I truly believe.

Some critics bitch and moan about Murakami's thin characterizations, but I'll say this for him: he has absolutely mastered "flaky 15-year-old girlfriend on AOL Instant Messenger".