Kiranjeet Kaur Gill
posted 24 October 2007

Contrary to what one might expect from a book that opens with a telephone call from a woman who will soon ask the question ‘Do you want me naked or with something on?’, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does not quickly deteriorate into an X-rated erotic novel or literary porn. Instead, it is a story about love, loss and the rest of life by one of Japan’s most celebrated contemporary authors. It is ambiguous yet perfectly obvious, fantastic and at the same time realistic, and for these reasons the novel has recently been chosen as part of Vintage Books’ selection of limited edition ‘Vintage Classic Twins’ to mark the August 2007 re-launch of the Vintage Classics imprint. Each set consists of a modern title, paired with an established classic, in this case, Murakami’s work with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story of immense complexity. The protagonist is thirty-year-old Toru Okada, a quiet, unassuming and often rather naïve former law firm assistant who lives with his wife Kumiko, a magazine editor. Jobless, but with no desire to be employed again, he wiles away his days doing ordinary, Japanese things, like cooking spaghetti and listening to Rossini. The disappearance of the family cat, however, is the catalyst for the upheaval of his otherwise peaceful and hassle-free existence and it is on his searches for the animal that he meets May Kasahara, a precocious 16-year-old who is rather more preoccupied with death than is normal for someone so young.

Meanwhile, Toru has started to receive ever more obscene and explicit telephone calls, as his wife grows increasingly distant. He is introduced to the enigmatic Kano sisters, Malta and Creta, who, because of their psychic powers, have been sought by Kumiko to help find the cat. When Toru’s wife finally leaves him, however, the sisters become far more involved in his life than he could ever have imagined. Creta, who describes herself as a ‘prostitute of the mind’, begins making her way into his dreams, and in their real-life conversations she reveals to him the secrets of her past, including the story of her rape by Noboru Wataya, Toru’s politician brother-in-law, with whom he has absolutely nothing in common, bar their mutual antipathy.

As Toru’s dreams become more and more vivid, the lines between the dream world and reality become increasingly blurred. The main story becomes intersected with stories from the past that always seem to have a remarkable likeness to Toru’s own situation. Lieutenant Mamiya, a prisoner of the Mongolians during the Second World War, recalls the hardships he suffered and the massacre he witnessed, and Nutmeg Akasaka tells the story of her father, a veteran of the same war who, despite remaining a free man, and through no choice of his own, also participated in the torture and violent killings of Chinese prisoners.

It is really quite an achievement of Murakami’s to turn such a bizarre chain of events into a plausible, though surreal, story. With such a complex storyline involving so many characters, it would be all to easy to lose focus, and whilst this may happen at times, for the most part the novel is very carefully written. He cleverly ties together all the intricate details, leaving few gaps in the text, and when he does do this it is often intentional. The storyline doesn’t falter, and it is generally easy to remember the identity and significance of all of the main characters, which is not only handy for the reader when battling with a book that’s in excess of 600 pages in length, but also a sign of Murakami’s skill in keeping organised a story that can at times seem anything but.

At the same time, however, Murakami manages to avoid the sense of Toru’s life simply being some sort of ‘organised chaos’. Although the story is obviously very well planned out, it doesn’t feel as though the author is just treading down a path he has already created for himself; he periodically meanders off it in an altogether different direction before returning to carry on where he left off. The overlapping of Toru’s dreams and reality and the other characters’ frequent forays into the past add to Murakami’s portrayal of the world as fragmented and chaotic, yet the transitions between them are seamless and it is a testament to the author’s wonderful storytelling that he pulls it off so well.

The patches of history that Murakami weaves into the text are particularly effective at making the story credible. He writes them in great detail and seems to revel in drawn-out descriptions of the acts of torture witnessed by the characters; he describes the screams of a man being skinned alive, the process of killing a man with a bayonet (stick it in, twist it, then draw upwards towards the heart), and the clubbing to death of a man with a baseball bat. At times they may make for slow (and nauseating) reading, but they also add a whole other dimension to the novel. Instead of it just being a story about Toru Okada, there are now albeit small insights into a part of Japan’s past that it often prefers to keep away from public attention, and their connections with events in the main body of the story make them all the more relevant, as well as raising age-old questions about whether history really does repeat itself. Murakami also draws in elements of psychology and philosophy, raising questions about dreams, reality and what it means to be alive, making his book much more than just a fantastic tale.

Throughout the story, Murakami takes care to emphasise just how ordinary Toru is - an entire paragraph is spent telling the reader precisely how he makes his sandwich. Murakami shows him to be the complete opposite of Noboru Wataya, who is arrogant and rude towards Toru, and hides a far shadier character behind the suave façade he presents in public – the reader is made to wonder just what is it he is hiding. At his first meeting with Malta Kano, Toru receives a business card bearing nothing but her name: ‘There is no need for me to include my address or telephone number. No one ever calls me. I am the one who makes the calls’, she says, creating the air of mystery that will follow her and her sister through the book. Through his characterisation, Murakami arouses curiosity in the reader, and also makes it clear just how we are supposed to feel about each character.

Just a few points perhaps detract from the novel overall. The detailed writing in most places makes the story vivid and believable, but in other places it seems that the main points of the story are bogged down in description, and at times it seems wholly unnecessary.

At over 39 chapters written over more than 600 pages, the novel is not a short one, and as such there are a lot of loose ends to be tied up as the story comes to a close. Unfortunately, however, it is not up until the last few pages that we begin to see any sort of resolution or redemption for the terrible events of the story, and it is in the same few pages that any attempt is made to explain what has happened. The explanations are hurried and not satisfactory: it seems as though Murakami has given himself a word limit, much of which he has spent on unnecessarily detailed description, and is desperately trying to meet it at the end of the book. Long absent characters are mentioned only briefly, earlier subplots are all but forgotten, the resolution the reader hopes to see is not quite there, and the ending is, altogether, rather unconvincing. Murakami could be redeemed, however, if Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel was right when he said in ‘World Literature Today’ that the English version has been heavily cut, suggesting that the original Japanese version may have offered a better ending than the one non-Japanese speakers have available to them.

Though the book overall has few flaws, the few it has are major ones, and it is easy for the reader to be left feeling less than satisfied with the explanations offered at the end for the events in the rest of the story. However, this is not enough to outweigh the amazing craft and skill with which Murakami has written the story. He finds truth in the unreal and makes sense of the bizarre, creating a story that is unique and unforgettable.