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!
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Although it sounds like you struggle to write the review, but you actually write it beautifully!! especially this para:
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.
You write poetic reviews. I think you should published. really. I just finished Q&A – aka Slumdog Millionaire yesterday night. and I thought if you could come up with a really great idea, it will fly!
Jo – if I can get a few more of you to talk like that to me on a regular basis, I might just be able to fool myself into self-publishing my own writings. If I can get a couple of hundred of you, then I'd be erecting a Shrine to myself
Ha ha.
But thanks for the compliments.
Is Slumdog Millionaire the book just as good as the movie?
Personally, I thought there were a lot of loose ends in the movie, and some parts that were just not real. How did these slumdogs end up speaking such good English or general knowledge? And oh, the part where the little kid was tricked into singing before being blinded… that part stayed with me for weeks. It made me think about the stories I heard about syndicates going around kidnapping children to amputate or blind them so they could be turned into dependent beggars in Thailand.
i think the movie is better than the book. for your info, the movie storyline is totally different than the book. The director had re-write the entire scripts and stories, so not sure how much credit the writer receive for the movie…
I believe the slumdogs might not speak good English, but I believe most of them are very intelligent. You have to be. When you are thinking of ways to eat day by day, you have to be super-intelligent to fight for scarce resources. but I think why the movie win people over was because the idea of the connection between winning a game show and a portrayal of life as a slumdog is very refreshing.
There are so many horrible things happening to people around world, perhaps it's best we don't know too much about these things, because it is such a huge burden to bear.
have to split the comments….
Don't fool yourself, believe in yourself. I have read enough books to tell you that even bad writings and mediocre books garner enough readership to make good money. it's down to your luck if you are lucky enough to get someone sign you up to publish globally. Have you read Tash Aw's books? I tried the Silk Harmony factory, can't get into it. now at April 09, he published "Map of the invisible world" (hope I get this right!). We need to see more of our countrymen publishing. it doesn't matter if it's good or bad writing! :p
I need to start writing something. (Easier said than done)
hi again, i just posted on your older site on your review of Kafka on the Shore, you are an excellent reviewer!
I haven't read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I can truly tell you that his older books seem to be the best for me!
read "A Wild Sheep Chase" is part of a very early trilogy he wrote at the beginning of his career, unfortunately the other 2 books only exist in Japanese, also his collections of short stories are amazing, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and After the Quake
Murakami might not be the best writer around but indeed his portraits the surreal and confusing world, that not only Japan, but we all live in.
Dear Berenice,
Thanks for the words of encouragement. Sometimes I feel like I am reading and talking to myself inside a cave. So it's nice to hear from visitors what they think once in a while.
I've discussed Murakami's works with a few friends and they all seem to agree the earlier works were better. Though always surreal, the later works seem to meander aimlessly more than necessary. It's one thing to be surreal. Quite another (as in the case of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) where the reader feels like he's hallucinating!
Come back and visit when you're free.
I’m pleased you enjoy murikami’s work. Wind-up bird is one of my favourite books. However, I’m surprised that you did not grasp the core of the plot(s). Kumiko, creta Kano and even may kasahara are one and the same (think of the ‘defilement’of both creta and kumiko by noboru). Even the telephone woman is kumiko. Not in the conentional sense of course. These women represent kumiko’s struggle to reach out to toru to share with him her tragic past (Malta represents kumiko (creta) sister). It’s quite a simple story once you read a bit deeper. Even the ww2 stuff is just symbolic of how the past effects the future, how people are just the product of history.