The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 10/18/02

Saying you have a favorite book is like saying you have a favorite rock band. There are too many genres and styles and inevitably, whatever you claim for yourself this week will change with the wind. However, to date I have re-read this book more than any other I have ever owned and it continues to have a strange and serious impact on my perception of the world around me.

Wind-Up Bird is seemingly simple on the surface. Toru Okada, currently unemployed, married, living in the Tokyo suburbs, discovers that his cat has gone missing. He goes looking for it. Then his wife goes missing, and somehow, it's implied that this is related to the missing cat. And there is this mysterious woman that keeps calling him in the middle of the afternoon wanting to have phone-sex. There are a pair of sisters, psychics of sorts, with funny hats and pink or polka-dot business suits. And there is an empty well. And there's a gift wrapped box container of single-malt scotch with no bottle inside. And a bird, never seen, in the trees, chirping away mechanically, and it sounds as if the world is winding it's spring.

Mirroring the story in the present day is second story, a flashback reflection on the Japanese/Chinese front of World War II, the Mongolian stage, the brutality and horror of war, and it's lasting consequence on the Japanese psyche. This second story also has an empty well, and a wind-up bird. The connections between past and present are too numerous to list.

So this book begins with a search for lost things. It extends so far beyond this into the realm of the symbolic and metaphysical that upon completing it the first time, I was haunted for months by the echoes of this book resonating into my everyday life. It's a hard book to talk about because it is so very subtle, and I am not really doing it justice with my synopsis or my praise. This is part of what is to be learned, this subtlety, and even this intentional confusion and disbelief.

Murakami denies categorically that any of this writing has anything to do with Taoism, divination, or the mystical. Even so, he magnifies for us here the most minute and insignificant details, demonstrating that the simplest parts of our experience can have life shattering significance and symbolism in our lives. That the seemingly mundane events of living, things like folding the laundry and cooking spaghetti are under-laid with strangeness and depth bubbling up into our heads, old wells that we have filled with longings and fears. This book works on the idea that underlying our reality are great and terrible secrets, the idea that the interconnectedness of all things extends beyond places we are comfortable imagining into realms where synchronicity is almost horrifying and causality is twisted and indecipherable. We all progress through personal spiritual quests of sort, maybe even unaware of the significance and seriousness of the events we encounter.