The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

Flirting between the real world and the dream-like state of another parallel dimension existence, following the protagonist and his grasp of trying to understand his reality. The search for a missing cat has never been so filled with adventures and sexual desires. I love this author but the length of his novels conflicts me as the storyline could be created into a short story but his writing just puts you in a trance enjoying his writing style.

This is the 8th Murakami book I've read and definitely in the top three for me along with Norwegian Wood and After Dark. The short of it is that Toru Okada is having some angst after leaving his legal job (I relate to that!) when things get very magically weird and his wife leaves him in mysterious circumstances. Interwoven with that is a bunch of truly horrific World War II stories from the perspective of Japanese soldiers in Mongolia, China, and Russia.

Beyond that, it's really difficult to explain what I think the book's deeper meaning is about. It's pretty complex; to give you a rough idea, it's very long and I can't actually think of any scenes that could have been cut. I pretty much always think editors should have slashed down long books. Unlike many Murakami novels, it actually mostly made sense even though it was full of literal magic. I wasn't prepared for such an in-depth exploration of violence, and I think this fantasy book also deserves a horror classification.

I found it very interesting but also found myself slowing down near the end.

The plot, through line, and character arcs in this book amount to one giant existentialist dream. Every page is dripping with phenomenological explorations of contemporary existence and relationships. The reader is not just an observer but a layer on which some of the exploits play out. You have to resist being pulled into the drama. At every point Murakami blurs the line between dreams and reality. This duality is best captured in a line later in the book where a character states that “…truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.” Likewise in this book life is observed in its essence and not in the literal play by play experience. Add in the perspectives of many untrustworthy narratives and the oddly inserted perspectives from newspapers and other characters, and you end up with chaos swirling in the mind. I felt like I was sitting on the ground in a field, wind swirling everything around me, trying to navigate calmly through this maze of wonder. I see now why Murakami is so celebrated, even if you need a way finder to navigate the plot.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has become one of my favourite novels. This has become my 5th book read by this author and I have picked up many similarities between each book. Despite similar tropes within Murakami's novels, I enjoy the vivid descriptions of life each character leads. The novel follows a man's journey to find his cat, and he goes through this spiral of mystical experiences. This novel is a long one, yet each page is full of insight and description from the main character's point of view. It took me awhile to pick this book up again but it is completely worth it.