the wind up bird chronicle new york times book review

Supported by

East Meets West

Share full article

By Jamie James

Nov. 2, 1997

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

By Haruki Murakami.

Translated by Jay Rubin.

613 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

One of the preoccupying themes of Japanese literature in this century has been the question of what it means to be Japanese, especially in an era that has seen the rise and fall of militarism and the decline of traditional culture. But from reading the books of Haruki Murakami, one of the country's most celebrated novelists, you'd never know he was Japanese at all: his characters read Turgenev and Jack London, listen to Rossini and Bob Dylan, eat pate de foie gras and spaghetti, and know how to make a proper salty dog. In Murakami's early books, the references to Western pop culture were sometimes so obscure that they even flew over the heads of many Americans. Murakami's protagonists are soft, irresolute men, often homebodies with dynamic girlfriends or wives, who go through long, inert periods of ennui -- a blatant renunciation of the frenetic, male-dominated ethos of modern Japan. Perhaps for that reason, his books are huge successes there: a two-volume novel called ''Norwegian Wood'' (taking its title from the Beatles song) has sold more than four million copies, making him Japan's best-selling novelist.

But he has yet to find a wide following abroad. The novels that have been published in English -- ''A Wild Sheep Chase,'' its sequel, ''Dance Dance Dance,'' and ''Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World'' -- occupy a shadowland between cyberpunk sci-fi, gumshoe detective fiction and hip social satire. Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon -- a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original.

''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' which came out in Japan two years ago, is a big, ambitious book clearly intended to establish Murakami as a major figure in world literature. Although his earlier books bristle with philosophical asides and literary allusions (always Western, of course), Japanese critics treated him as a lightweight, a wise guy who never took anything seriously. The new book almost self-consciously deals with a wide spectrum of heavy subjects: the transitory nature of romantic love, the evil vacuity of contemporary politics and, most provocative of all, the legacy of Japan's violent aggression in World War II.

The story of ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' (the title refers to a weird, unseen bird, whose cry is a recurring harbinger of evil) is a hallucinatory vortex revolving around several loosely connected searches carried out in suburban Tokyo by the protagonist-narrator, Toru Okada, a lost man-boy in his early 30's who has no job, no ambition and a failing marriage. When his cat disappears, he consults a whimsical pair of psychics, sisters named Malta and Creta Kano, who visit him in his dreams as often as in reality. Then his wife leaves him, suddenly and with no explanation, and he spends his days hanging out with an adolescent girl named May Kasahara, a high-school dropout obsessed with death, who works for a wig factory. At one point, seeking solitude, Toru descends to the bottom of a dry well in the neighborhood, and while he's down there, he has a bizarre experience, which might or might not be another dream: he passes through the subterranean stone wall into a dark hotel room, where a woman seduces him. This experience leaves a blue-black mark on his cheek that gives him miraculous healing powers. Eventually, he's rescued by Creta Kano, who reveals to him that she has been defiled in some hideous, unnatural way by Toru's brother-in-law, a politician whose rising career appears to be propelled by demonic powers.

As the plot proceeds, with Toru spending more and more time in the well or else in the mysterious hotel room, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Toru's story is also interrupted at several points by characters who wander in to tell stories of their own, and these Boccaccio-like interpolations contain some of the best writing in the book. One, for example, is an account of a Japanese soldier's experiences in Outer Mongolia during the war. While on a spy mission in enemy territory, his outfit is captured by Mongolian and Russian soldiers. He is forced to watch one of his comrades being skinned alive, and then is left to die at the bottom of a well -- an experience that echoes or foreshadows Toru's. This story is balanced by another, in the second half of the book, about a soldier posted in Hsin-ching, the capital of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. With Chinese soldiers closing in, he is ordered to kill the animals in the zoo to prevent them from escaping. It's a terrible tale, told with icy coolness: ''The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas rained down like a sudden shower.''

Parts of ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' have the bluntness of Hemingway, and the characters frequently speak to each other in noirish riddles. Yet the novel's biggest debt is to Kafka, whose influence may have filtered down to Murakami by way of Kobo Abe, Murakami's great category-smashing predecessor. The pervasive atmosphere of alienation in Murakami's work bears a much closer affinity to the waking dreams of the German Jew in Prague than it does to the belligerent angst of the American Gen-Xers. And a resonant Kafkaesque chord is struck by another interpolated story, about a young boy whose identity is snatched by a doppelganger who steals into his bed at night. The next morning, ''the room seemed unchanged. It had the same desk, the same bureau, the same closet, the same floor lamp. The hands of the clock pointed to 6:20. But the boy knew something was strange. It might all look the same, but this was not the same place where he had gone to sleep the previous night. The air, the light, the sounds, the smells, were all just a little bit different from before. Other people might not notice, but the boy knew.''

''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' in Jay Rubin's polished translation, marks a significant advance in Murakami's art. He has stripped away much of the fussy pop ornamentation that in his earlier novels veered perilously near to product placement. The difference is immediately apparent if you compare the first chapter with an earlier version, published as a short story called ''The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women'' (later included in the collection ''The Elephant Vanishes''). In the short story, Toru reads a Len Deighton novel, listens to Robert Plant on the radio and has a McDonald's cheeseburger for lunch. (How many readers of serious fiction today can identify Robert Plant, the lead singer for Led Zeppelin?) All these references are eliminated in the novel, along with ones to Cartier, Adidas, Allen Ginsberg and Penthouse magazine.

''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' does have its flaws, principally in its uneven design. Murakami has said that he does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal itself to him as he writes: it shows, especially in the way that neither Toru nor the novelist seems to know or care whether Toru's adventures are real or illusory. And the juxtaposition of the harrowing, all-too-real war stories with the marvelous, supernatural events in Toru's quest feels contrived. The war narratives were almost certainly composed separately and then inserted into the novel to support its grand aspirations.

Yet what Murakami lacks in finesse is more than compensated by the brilliance of his invention. As it floats to its conclusion, ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' includes an almost Joycean range of literary forms: flashbacks, dreams, letters, newspaper stories and transcripts of Internet chats. And no matter how fantastical the events it describes may be, the straight-ahead storytelling never loses its propulsive force. By the book's midway point, the novelist-juggler has tossed so many balls into the air that he inevitably misses a few on the way down. Visionary artists aren't always neat: who reads Kafka for his tight construction? In ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

2024 Booker Prize: Most bets were on Percival Everett’s “James,” but the judges chose Samantha Harvey’s “beautiful, miraculous” novel, ‘Orbital , ’ which is set aboard a space station.

‘The Wild Robot ’: Peter Brown’s obsession with the abandoned railway that became the High Line led to two best sellers — including “The Wild Robot,” which is now a blockbuster movie.

Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries : In the Russian opposition leader’s posthumous memoir , compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him.

The Book Review Podcast: Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami Haruki

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

A- : big, entertaining, off-beat book

See our review for fuller assessment.

Please note that The Economist 's review refers to the original Japanese edition, not the translation under review here. Review Consensus : All find points to praise, but there is no consensus on the book as a whole. Some believe it is a successful, well-rounded piece, others that it has too many loose end. Note that if Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel is correct in saying that "the English version has been subjected to extensive cutting", this fact might help explain why there are a few loose ends in the English version. From the Reviews : "The novel is a deliberately confusing, illogical image of a confusing, illogical world. It is not easy reading, but it is never less than absorbing." - Phoebe-Lou Adams, Atlantic Monthly "The writing is weirdly effective. (...) Read the book." - The Economist "(A)s the journey progresses, Murakami pulls a thread at the centre of his web that draws this odd collection of characters and evidence closer together. His intimately woven world is meditative and violent, psychic and sexy, funny and cute." - J. Douglas Johnson, Far Eastern Economic Review " The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does not quite find the precise and yet capacious form for which it is searching, and sometimes, I think, Murakami seems to be miming disarray rather than exploring it or unfolding it. Still, very few recent novels have so accurately or inventively caught the killing power, or the silencing power, of other lives and the stories of other lives, especially when they are imperfectly buried." - Michael Wood, The New Republic " Wind-Up Bird has some powerful scenes of antic comedy and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a satisfying, fully fashioned novel. In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Yet what Murakami lacks in finesse is more than compensated by the brilliance of his invention. (...) Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up." - Jamie James, The New York Times Book Review "The first 600 pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle offer much unadulterated reading pleasure, and it's only as the remaining pages grow ominously sparse that the proverbial sinking feeling sets in. Even if he does provide for Toru, Murakami can't, in the end, gather all his novel's intriguing subplots and mysterious minor characters together convincingly, and he summarily drops whole handfuls of loose ends." - Laura Miller, Salon "Themes abound in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , but the work is mainly fueled by chance and destiny. Throughout the novel, scenarios present themselves to Okada, situations that shift the path of his tale. As characters enter his life, they pull him into their world -- literally. He becomes a tourist within shifting interior landscapes, and through multiple eyes, Okada's dreamlike search for identity in the midst of chaos is revealed." - Kevin Hunsanger, San Francisco Bay Guardian "With the exception of the fascinating war chapters, there are some weak moments in this novel: at times it reads like a bad Thomas Pynchon rip-off. It is occasionally heartfelt, lyrical and even dazzling, but there is a major problem that keeps recurring, as far as holding the reader's attention." - Tom Hiney, The Spectator "Murakami's storytelling ease and the pellucid, uncluttered backdrop he lays down allow moments to flare up memorably. Yet the overall effect of his grand but somewhat abstract novel is to give us X ray after X ray into the benumbed soul of a wannabe Prozac Nation." - Pico Iyer, Time "(Murakami) is a serial mysticist, which can be trying; but he usually leavens his work with a sufficiently batty humour to maintain this reader's sympathies. Did this one have to be so damned depressing ?" - Joanna Pitman, The Times "(I)t is testament to the power and skill of Murakami's storytelling that such a bizarre chain of events unfolds with a plausible, if surreal, logic that leaves the reader accepting each new twist as reasonable. This is achieved in part by combining the depiction of the surreal and supernatural with a careful delineation of the more banal excesses of modern life." - Julian Ferraro, Times Literary Supplement "Those with a predilection for sitting alone at the bottom of an abandoned well will likely take to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , the latest novel by the intermittently engaging Haruki Murakami. Three characters, including our everyman narrator (ex-law-firm dogsbody Toru Okada), do their share of well sitting, with attendant transformations and nightmares. There follows a great deal of mystical gobbledygook that neither the narrator nor the reader can fathom." - Ed Park, The Village Voice "Haruki Murakamis Mister Aufziehvogel ist ein verzweifelt esoterischer Roman. Nicht seine Geheimnisse machen ihn groß, sondern eine Einsicht, gegen die der Text selbst sich 700 Seiten lang wehrt, und die er am Ende doch transportiert: Die Geheimnisse sind bereits zerstört worden." - Wieland Freund, Die Welt "A delightful story, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle demonstrates the enormity of Murakami's literary imagination and his thoughtful insight into the meaning of postmodern reality. The translation, capturing the style and aura of the original, is equally enjoyable. It is regrettable, however, that the English version has been subjected to extensive cutting, undoubtedly under pressure from the publisher." - Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel, World Literature Today "A third of the way through, I began to think of adorning the jacket with a bumper sticker saying, "I'd rather be reading Kobo Abe." Halfway through, I decided the sticker should say, "I'd rather be reading almost anyone," and by the time I was done with this monster of a novel, I concluded that the hours I had devoted to it would have been better spent watching all twenty-two Godzilla movies." - Lindsley Cameron, Yale Review Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a big, rambling book. The almost always entertaining and imaginative Murakami here weaves a complex tale in a simple setting, covering a great deal of ground and making for an enjoyable read. Narrator Toru Okada quit his job a few months before the book begins. He worked as a legal assistant, a job he had held since graduating from college, but that held no more appeal for him. His wife Kumiko works as a magazine editor, and makes enough for them to get by. Toru is not too ambitious. He putters around the house. He cooks. He goes out to look for the family cat. Life, of course, takes some unusual turns. He gets strange phone calls, and meets a woman called Malta Okano, who tells him that her sister, Creta, was raped by his brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, five years earlier. The sinister and unpleasant Wataya has become famous and influential after writing a big economics book. Noboru Wataya also happens to be the cat's name, and Malta offers to help find the missing feline. Toru makes other new acquaintances, such as neighborhood teen May Kasahara who shows him an empty well that he later takes to. Creta Kano also introduces herself, and tells her story. Toru lives in "a narrow world, a world that was standing still", but outside forces do push and tug at him, the strange lives of those he encounters echoing oddly in his own empty life. His wife, Kumiko, once told him: "There's a kind of gap between what I think is real and what's really real", an affliction from which many of the characters seem to suffer. When Toru's main anchor, his wife, simply disappears from his life, Toru is left bereft -- but he still can't rouse himself, drifting along with (or rather buffeted by) the lives of others. A Lieutenant Mamiya tells long stories of Japan's military past, horrors from the war that also have odd connexions to the present. Much of the book contrasts Japan's military past and its present. Life around Toru remains uncertain. He takes to the empty well, withdrawing there to ponder, his retreat of last resort. Occasionally he finds himself stuck there, without a way of getting out. Mysteries continue to unfold, including the question of what really happened to his wife who -- her relatives say -- wants to divorce him. Toru meets Nutmeg Akasaka and her computer savvy son Cinnamon, who helps him contact his wife on-line. The people and mysteries swirl around Toru, coming together and falling apart. He is not a center that can hold. The novel reaches a vaguely (if not entirely) satisfying conclusion. Murakami offers many tangential stories, some of which are very good. Horrors from World War II contrast neatly with the lost and aimless atmosphere of modern times. There is little feel of the bustle and obsessiveness of modern Japan. Toru interacts with few people, and they too live isolated or out-of-the-ordinary lives. Nevertheless, it gives a picture of a disaffected country that has lost its way -- and of some underlying hope. Rich (though occasionally too quirky) characters and much neat invention make The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a consistently entertaining read. Murakami very effectively sets a mood, and sustains it throughout. The story does not come together quite as neatly as one might hope, but it is still a good one. A fine, big, entertaining read. Note that if Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel is correct in saying (in a review in World Literature Today ) that "the English version has been subjected to extensive cutting", this fact might help explain why there are a few loose ends in the English version. If it bothers you -- and it should -- contact the publishers and tell them that you don't want them making stupid editorial decisions like this on your behalf: translations (already a crime against literature) should be as true to the original as possible -- and that certainly means NO cuts under ANY circumstances.

About the Author :

Japanese author Murakami Haruki (村上春樹) was born January 12, 1949. He attended Waseda University. He has written several internationally acclaimed bestsellers and is among the best-known contemporary Japanese writers.