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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel |  | Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $4.22
as of 7/31/2010 17:52 CDT details
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Seller: goodwillbooks
Rating:  315 reviews
Sales Rank: 2005
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed
Pages: 624
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0679775439
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9780679775430
ASIN: 0679775439
Publication Date: September 1, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com 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
Product Description
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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 315
 blah, blah, blah... July 24, 2010
geoana777
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I made a mistake while reading this books and that's the reason I am rating it with two stars instead of one or none. My mistake was that I was reading Faulkner's "Light in August" at the same time. Every possible comparison is possibly unfair an out of turn but I couldn't avoid doing it anyhow.
Murakami has some good ideas and bring it all together in an attempt to convince us about his hie sociological and metaphysical concerns. I don't deny them but he gives the impression that he is trying too much. Why? Does he try to sell something ? (actually he does, doesn't he?)
His prose is silly and boring, possibly good for teenagers though.
In my opinion, this book has nothing to offer unless you have plenty of time to kill.
 A World Like No Other - The Strange World of Haruki Murakami April 28, 2010
ghost of a red rose (Mesa, AZ USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
4.5 stars, rounded to 4
The stories are completely different, but in style and structure this book reminded me a lot of Kafka on the Shore. It has the same magical realism, strangeness (which is a good thing, BTW), and surrealism. It even begins with a missing cat. (In Kafka, lost cats are a major thread.) And as in Kafka there are a very few, but highly explicit, scenes of bloody violence.
I didn't like it quite as much as Kafka, because it doesn't have the passion of the love story in Kafka. But I did like it very much, and for the same reasons - the most important being its extreme originality. Murakami's is a world like no other.
As is characteristic in his novels, there are many seemingly unrelated threads that, in the end, all come together in a way that makes sense, at least according to the rules of the bizarre world of each book. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, some of the threads are: the wind-up bird (of course), the lost cat (followed by a lost wife), a teen-age neighbor girl who works for a wig company, dried-up wells, the same disfiguring mark on the cheeks of two unrelated men, people (including a prostitute) with strange powers, a house that seems to be bad luck for anyone who owns it, a zoo in Outer Mongolia, an evil brother-in-law. And most important of all, and to me the most interesting: the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (an area of China) during World War II.
I had read other books about the Japanese invasion of China and the atrocities committed there by the Japanese. It was fascinating to read about it from the Japanese point of view. Murakami doesn't flinch from showing some of those atrocities, but he also shows us that the Japanese invaders experienced their share of hardship and great suffering. We see how terrible war is for both sides, and what it is like for soldiers who are forced to do ghastly things to other human beings. And we see the inhuman monsters who actually enjoy the suffering of others and force others to do terrible things to each other. I also learned a lot about the reasons for the invasion of China - the history and politics of the area, which was strongly influenced by the proximity of the Soviet Union and Japan's relationship with it.
This isn't the easiest book to read. It is rather slow, and until the end the various story lines don't seem to have any connection with each other. It's not a book for fans of action and thrilling adventure. Although there is actually plenty of adventure in it, it is related in a surreal and dreamy manner. The book requires some commitment and thought on the part of the reader.
But for those who enjoy intellectual stimulation, a writer with a boundless imagination, and fiction that is really different, I would highly recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
(607 pages)
Quotes from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:
"A person's destiny is something you look back at after it's past, not something you see in advance."
"I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment - perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelations, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been."
fantastic, harmonious mystery that leaves you wanting more March 30, 2010
killgirl (Oakland, CA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was my first introduction to the author and it seemed suiting, once I got into the novel, that I read it while alone, away from my partner over the span of a brief vacation alone. For the right person in the right context, this could be a very life changing novel to which you could relate.
I enjoyed the level of mystery or puzzle included in the book, and the nicely balanced bits of history, and the author's voice-- my only beef is that I truly wanted to know more in the end, however, it seems like such a reality simply wouldn't exist and its ending is in balance with the kind of mystery and similarities to real human life this novel conveys.
Sometimes in life, you simply won't have all the information, and you'll never really know. Our minds do the best with what we have. If there were one message from the book overall, I believe that would be it.
 Murakami's Greatest Book March 13, 2010
Chris Custer (San Francisco, CA, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
After reading this lengthy page-turner of a book, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel," I am now a huge fan of Haruki Murakami. Easily, the best book he's ever written. I hope some day he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel March 9, 2010
Brian B. Curry
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an amazing read and by far one of my favorite books at this point.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 315
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