The Reading Monk

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle opens with a mystery that rushes past you like Alice’s White Rabbit, prompting you to jump up and follow suit. Nothing makes sense and everthing is surreal. Murakami’s rabbit is a rabbit in a hurry. “Oh dear! Oh dear! I’m late, I’m late,” the Rabbit says. You instantly get up and follow, first walking and then running.

The problem with Murakami fans – and I freely admit, I am one – is that we seldom question what the master surrealist has in store for us. He says jump and we jump. And if he has a story to tell, we sit and listen … and follow. The story he spins is for the most part enjoyable but at times confusing. Chronicle, unfortunately, consists mainly of the latter.

Through the hole in the ground (and into a well) you go but what awaits is not Wonderland. Rather, it is a labyrinth, a maze that is intertwined with the protagonist’s twisted reality, his bizarre dreams and plenty of historical flashbacks to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and China during the Second World War.

Let me explain a bit without giving away too much.

The story starts much like Kafka on the Shore with a missing cat. In Kafka, it was Satoru Nakata the finder of lost cats looking for Goma. In Chronicle, it is Toru Okada’s search for his runaway cat, Noboru Wataya.

In both, the protagonists are low key Japanese everymen in their 30s with rather boring lives until their cats disappear and they’re swept up in a search that seems to take on a life of its own with successive characters coming into the picture and helping the story to move along.

Toru Okada first loses his job (voluntarily) as a paralegal, then his cat and subsequently, his wife Kumiko – who starts by coming home later and later from work until one day, she just doesn’t come home at all (having left Toru for another lover).

Strange things begin to happen. An anonymous phone call from a woman who wants phone sex. Another phone call from a female psychic who wants to help Toru find his cat. Erotic dreams and mind sex with the psychic’s clairvoyant sister. A visit from an old soldier who recalls his time fighting in Manchuria and China, witnessing a man being skinned alive (the details are excruciatingly gory) and being thrown into a well. A chance meeting with the neighbourhood lolita and afternoons spent together surveying bald men in the city for a wig company.

Wandering around the neighbourhood in search of his cat, Toru climbs into a well located in the garden of an abandoned house. At the bottom of the well, Toru transcends the boundaries of the real and surreal, seemingly passing through the wall of the well and into the corridors of a hotel leading to a Room 208. The real and unreal are one and the same. He opens the door and finds a prostitute laying in wait. He emerges days later with a blueblack mark on his face, follows a man into a house and gets into a fight with a baseball wielding man after which he takes the baseball bat. Strange?

Wait. It gets stranger. There’s the mother-son team, Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka. Nutmeg’s father was a vet in the Japanese army assigned to kill zoo animals in Manchuria during the Second World War. He too had a blueblack mark on his face. His fellow soldiers had killed Chinese prisoners using a baseball bat (in order to save bullets to use against the Soviets). Coincidence?

Trying to follow the subplots of Chronicle is like watching a drop of black ink falling into clear water and tendrils forming in different directions, each gracefully swirling and morphing until they resemble nothing but a black shapeless cloud. They look magnificent and if you stare hard enough, even hypnotic. But it does not detract from the feeling I got as if  I was reading a magazine or newspaper but mistaking it for a novel; reading, in actuality, separate, independent columns and articles but being led by Murakami into thinking that they were all related or intertwined.

In the end it is anti-climatic and disappointing. I can’t help but feel that Murakami lost control of the plot lines. Yes, I do see the common threads – the blueblack marks on Toru’s and Nutmeg’s father’s faces. The baseball bat. The well. And the wind-up bird, heard by both Toru, Nutmeg’s father and Cinnamon. But beyond the similarities, what do they mean? Or did Murakami deliberately set out to write without a plan and made things up as he went along and thus explaining the aimless and disjointed storyline?

I give this a 3 out of 5 because it was still generally an interesting read if I can try not to be annoyed by the ending. Murakami still managed to instill a sense of curiosity and suspense in the reader, making me want to turn the pages to find out about the how and why. But these two eluded me till the very end, leaving me with more questions than answers.

However, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle won’t discourage me from reading Murakami’s other books. I am a fan of his after all and one less than satisfying book shan’t be enough to change that. I am planning to get either Sputnik Sweetheart or Norwegian Wood next or as soon as I can get the lolita May Kasahara’s fast-paced ‘Japanese-cartoon-dubbed-into English‘ style of speaking out of my head!