The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I’m a Murakami fan, and this is one of his strongest novels. I enjoyed the shaggy dog, or more accurately, shaggy man, quality of the story, in which one or two mundane events lead to an unpredictable series of encounters and metaphysical journeys.

The search for a lost cat morphs into the search for a lost wife, with segues into local Japanese politics, the past and future of an abandoned house, and female acquaintances invading the protagonist’s dreams. When the protagonist befriends an elderly Japanese survivor, it leads to stunning long passages on incidents during Japan’s occupation of Manchuria during… show more.

This is a novel that I suspected I was falling into as much as reading—that is, I felt utterly and, at times, uncomfortably immersed in Murakami’s story universe.

I love the blending of contemporary realism in the novel (our protagonist’s day-to-day life) with the historical and the way the Japanese military’s atrocities in Manchuria in the 30s haunt the recognizably contemporary world so that even a man sitting at the bottom of a well contemplating existence and history feels like an acceptable and dreamlike weirdness.

I’m completely taken with such a strange and affecting representation of lesser-known histories and the… show more.

This is the first novel I read by Haruki Murakami and it got me hooked on his writing.

Toru Okada is tasked with finding his lost cat but, as he searches, the past stories of other characters constantly intersect and become inescapable detours, which often foster ambiguity and a sense of becoming lost in a charmed world.

We’re left with an impression of a world slipping into the surreal, where reality becomes blurred like Okada’s memory of what his missing cat looks like, and where “Ten minutes is not ten minutes” because time can stretch and shrink. I was frequently… show more.

I first read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle at my first writing residency and it inspired me to keep writing stories that slip between worlds.

In Murakami’s story the protagonist searches for his missing cat after his wife disappears which leads him into a dark well where he slips into another world. Along the way he encounters a water diviner Malta Kano and a 14-year-old girl who surveys bald men for a living.

The story is woven with the recollection of Mr. Honda, a Japanese war veteran of atrocities in Manchuria. The otherworldliness of the worlds he encounters is described… show more.

Still my favorite Murakami.

I always appreciate how much he writes about classical music in his novels, but this is one where I especially felt the connection between the music written about and the form of the novel.

There was one beautiful moment where Mozart’s Magic Flute opera and the characters of this book collided and I experienced Mozart in a completely new way. Besides that, this book is just such a journey.

Arduous and lonely and beautiful, it moved and changed me.

A deeply engrossing story, where characters are transported back into time from contemporary Japan to zoos in Manchuria on the eve of Japan’s 1945 defeat. Although the narrative is disjointed, its characters are haunting, and the work is unforgettable. A mesmerizing tale by the greatest living novelist of Japan today.