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Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Let's see if I can adequately opine on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle without spoiling anything . . .

I think there are different ways to read Murakami's books. I've also read A Wild Sheep Chase and some of his short stories, so my experience is based on those as well. Some read his work as allegorical, some as surreal, some as an odd branch of the mystery genre. I think of his works as unfolding the way dreams do.

Dreams are made by experience and desire filtered and mixed through fantasy and emotion. Things and characters and events are invented to fill the gaps presented by all these elements swirling together. In your dreams you don't know where you are going or why. This is how I feel as I read a Murakami novel.

I am of the opinion that any author's intent is irrelevant; the experience of reading is between the written word and the reader, no more and no less. I only say this because I think questions of Murakami's intent are not germane.

Why discuss these issues vis a vis Murakami's work but not other authors' works? I think its because of what his books are not: they do not have conventional plots, they do not follow conventional rules about introducing useless characters, they do not have clear social commentaries, they are not 'Japanese' in the traditional sense, yet they are not unJapanese. They combine mysticism, ennui, fate, good and evil, tropes of the great heroic legends, pedestrian references to things and clothing, and a lack of explication that can be either frustrating or intriguing, depending on the reader's (my) mood.

I find myself asking, What does this mean? What does that mean? Why are there passages of painful reality interspersed with passages of supernatural heroism (in the mythological sense)? And I don't know the answers. But I'll continue to read his work, enjoy it as it takes me along in its flow, while I continue to wonder what he's up to.


I could have put this in the Haruki Murakami thread that exists, but instead I'll just provide a link to that for those interested. This link puts you at the most recent post in that thread.
http://forums.thebookforum.com/showthread.php?t=5015

Also, for anyone who goes to this thread and reads my review there of A Wild Sheep Chase (and the conversation with jay that ensued), I can say for certain that Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does not share the airless, flat emotional landscape of Sheep Chase, and that several other of my criticisms of that book are not true for Wind-Up Bird. Um, for those interested . . .
 
It's a coupe of years now since I read 'The Wind-up Bird Cronicle', and given my terrible memory I'm left more with my overall impressions of the book, without the ability to recall it's every detail. But I'd certainly agree with this:

novella said:
I think of his works as unfolding the way dreams do....
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A word oft tossed in the direction of Murokami's work is sureal, something I'd go along with. Not so much for the events than happen in books like 'The Wind-up Bird Cronicle' more in the reaction to them. In general there tends to be an exceptance of the bizarre in Murikami's world that feels more like a dream than reality. Whether he intend this or not I'm not sure.

Without giving too much away, this book works as a kind of puzzle, you try to work out what is happening, but never quite get there and it's never really explained. I'll quote myself from the link novella provded:

Kenny Shovel said:
I've got on problems with "Surreal" or "Unrealistic" or any other labels he may have been given, he just writes intriguing stories in an engaging style. As for 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle', whilst it's been a while since I read it, I seem to remember feeling it had a perfectly satisfying internal logic.
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I quite like the fact that I'm left at the end not understanding everything that's happened, how the puzzle fits together. I've got no problem in admitting that either, personally I'd be rather suspicious of someone who claimed they could.

I'd recommend 'The Wind-Up Bird Cronicle' to anyone with a taste for the left of centre, as whilst you may not understand everthing that's happening in the book it's still a compeling read. I raced through the 600+ pages, and I'm someone who normally gets a nose-bleed if a book nudges over 300.

Regards,

K-S
 
I couldn't finish The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; I found it just getting too surreal. I think I could have perservered if it were a shorter novel, but after so many pages of such wierdness I had to give myself a break. I loved it in the beginning, but it was became too much for me. :rolleyes: I couldn't cope with so much strange stuff happening. :p

However I didn't know that he wrote short stories, so I may give them a go; I think I'd enjoy his stories in smaller doses.
 
Murakami's short stories appear periodically in The New Yorker and are free and accessible online for a few weeks. When I see one, I usually post a link.
 
Like angerball, I didn't finish The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though even to say that is overstating the very brisk reading I gave it. The question is not so much 'how far did I get' as 'how near'. I may just not have been in the right frame of mind for it, but I gave up early on, increasingly frustrated by (what I saw as) the pointlessness of much of the story up to then. It is quite possible that I stymied my reading of it by the very act of stopping so early, and that if I had continued I would have begun to see patterns and appreciate the pointlessness as not quite so pointless. But I'm not convinced.

The descriptions here, particularly of events unfolding in a dreamlike sequence, put me very much in mind of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, which is a favourite of mine and which evades explication (something, like Kenny, I normally enjoy in fiction) just as much as Murakami seems to. Yet because Ishiguro is essentially a highly controlled writer, and because the setting to begin with seems highly conventional and plausible, I was much readier to buy into his particular brand of chaos and confusion than I was with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I more than anyone else hate it when people who don't understand a creative work dismiss it by lobbing phrases like 'emperor's new clothes' at it, but I must admit that my gut reaction to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was something along these lines: that it seemed the work of an immature author in its desire to chuck random elements in without cause, purely for effect (though the only effect on me was irritation). This, of course, once again reflects badly on me more than on Murakami; but I have to call it as I saw it.

novella said:
I am of the opinion that any author's intent is irrelevant; the experience of reading is between the written word and the reader, no more and no less.
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I agree entirely, and yet in this case I find myself yes-butting as I do so. What if the author had no intent, other than to fill pages in a magazine each week with mysterious chapters which would keep people reading? And then spliced in a few extra chapters for book publication to give an outward impression of some sort of overall intent? If that's what Murakami did with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, then even if I did finish it and enjoy it, it would leave some sort of bad taste, and I just wouldn't be able to accord it the same respect that I would a work which I knew had much more deliberation and care in its composition (eg The Unconsoled).

I should say that I have read other Murakami novels, A Wild Sheep Chase and The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both 10-15 years ago, and that I did finish both of them but without much enthusiasm or warmth. I tried The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle because it's so widely liked, but I found I couldn't join the chorus.
 
Shade said:
Like angerball, I didn't finish The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though even to say that is overstating the very brisk reading I gave it. The question is not so much 'how far did I get' as 'how near'. I may just not have been in the right frame of mind for it, but I gave up early on, increasingly frustrated by (what I saw as) the pointlessness of much of the story up to then.

The descriptions here, particularly of events unfolding in a dreamlike sequence, put me very much in mind of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, which is a favourite of mine and which evades explication (something, like Kenny, I normally enjoy in fiction) just as much as Murakami seems to.
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I understand this completely, Shade, particularly as I felt the same upon finishing Wild Sheep Chase--that the author had copped out by not plotting, not resolving anything in the narrative, and not investing his characters with motives or social context. What led me to read Wind-Up Bird was reading at least two, maybe three, Murakami shorter pieces in the interim and feeling that he was up to something different than anyone else I've been reading. I thought, maybe I am too conventional in my expectations? Maybe I should loosen up and enjoy this work without expectations? Maybe something else is going on here that I have not yet seen?

I'm not sure this approach is entirely successful. It was a qualified enjoyment, a sort of cottoncandy read that melts even as you eat it. And, as I am still particularly critical of any work (including Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans) that fails to deliver an ending as well crafted as the beginning and middle of a narrative, I think I will always find HM coming up short in this regard.

There's a sense with Murakami's stories that to answer the mysteries (where did so-and-so disappear to and why? What evil is embodied in Noboru Wataya? etc) is to eviscerate them, to pedestrianize (?) them. But I know that if I were Murakami's editor, I would be asking him to answer these points, at least off the page, in order to imbue the stories with a feeling of completion, if not outright exposition.
 
novella said:
And, as I am still particularly critical of any work (including Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans) that fails to deliver an ending as well crafted as the beginning and middle of a narrative, I think I will always find HM coming up short in this regard.
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I know what you mean, and I could level this accusation at many writers I love, including Paul Auster and Martin Amis. (Though the fact I continue to love them must make me a little more tolerant.) For what it's worth, one writer whose endings, for me, match if not exceed the rest of his work - you just know he had it in mind right from the start and wasn't letting the story lead him - is Patrick McGrath. I'm not sure if I've bellowed about him already on here.

if I were Murakami's editor, I would be asking him to answer these points, at least off the page, in order to imbue the stories with a feeling of completion, if not outright exposition.
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Yes, rather like giving characters lots of background notes which helps the writer give them life and vigour on the page although the reader never sees them explicitly. Of course there's the school of thought - which I would in theory subscribe to - that the writer needn't know the answers any more than the reader needs to. But I do think the writer should at least be as interested in the questions as he expects the reader to be.
 
Shade: I can understand where you are coming from too. However for me, the fact that there is no resolution, no explanations, and a feeling that it all may make no sense, even to the author, is fine. I enjoyed the ride. I enjoyed trying to work things out, whether the puzzle is answerable or even exists isn't a massive concern. The thought that I may have been duped by an elaborate joke by an author doesn’t bother me.
I can find unsolvable literary puzzles interesting, as long as the ride along the way is a pleasurable one.

In that way Murikami reminds me a little of Anna Kavan, not in style but in the way that her later work is always a maze. You have to try and penetrate her dark, at times stream of consciousness style, and work out exactly what of her life has been placed in the story, what it all means. This from a reader who normally finds stream of consciousness stuff very off putting.

K-S
 
Thanks Kenny, another writer I haven't heard of! Oddly that link provides less information about her later novels than your post above. I see though that her 'masterpiece' (according to that site) Ice is to be reissued next week, and an Amazon reviewer also likens her to Murakami. Not that that's a great recommendation to me these days... :p
 
I think I should apologise to novella for sidetracking another thread.

I won't recommend Anna Kavan as such as she's a bit of a marmite writer, you either love her or hate her. I manage to do both based on which of her books I've just read. She's been given a bit of a higher profile of late due to some of her work being reprinted by Peter Owen Modern Classics (who have the distinctive and rather marvellous gold & black covers) and who along with Rebel Inc Classics have done wonders over the last few years re-printing, and introducing me to, some forgotten gems by writers like Paul Bowles, Blaise Cendrars (Switzerlands greatest one-armed author), Cesare Pavese, Alexander Troicchi, Jim Dodge etc...
You can also still find long out of print editions of some of her work in Foyles of London, stuff that's clearly been stuck away in a storeroom for decades. That's more a comment on Foyles than Anna Kavan btw.

Anyway, back to 'The Wind-up Bird Cronicle'....

K-S
 
You look different today, Aquablue - or is it just that I not wearing my glasses?

My favorite character in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is probably the narrator. It's been a while since I've read the book, but his habit of starting to iron when he felt stressed stayed with me.

Difficult to make up my mind, though: the neighbor girl and the old soldier who tells his story are also very good candidates.

Bottom-line: I can't make up my mind.
 
yes chuephödli, thanks for replying.

i must say that what most intrigues me about the narrator is the way he gets to make a living and survive in the most unusual and yet enlightened way. and he does it in a such cool manner.
i didn't find it surreal at all, but i understand why some people find it difficult to understand.
 
chuephödli said:
You look different today, Aquablue - or is it just that I not wearing my glasses?
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Oh so you've noticed. That is a picture of Heller. The avatar represents my current author (note my sig) that I am reading. My avatar changes as each book (author) changes to currently reading. :)
 
I have read Catch-22 so long ago, I can hardly remember, except that I thought it was great.

I liked the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, incidentially. I am not sure why - I just couldn't stop reading, though, that narrator's voice seemed almost hypnotic. The atmosphere is quite strong, even if not all that much seems to happen.
 
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is truely a magical read. Note that I have only just started reading it and so far I am having a hard time putting this one down. Check it out.
 
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