The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

Murakami is a household name. I was aware of him as a writer not only before I read him, but before ever even wanting to read him. This is mostly because despite how ubiquitous his books are in most bookstores, most people I have encountered have not read him. I initially became curious about his work after reading a glowing review of IQ84 sometime around the time of that novel’s publication. But the list of things I am curious to pick up is unending, and as life gets busy such notions get put aside.

Until a friend spends a few months first going through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and then lending it out to people in her friend group. I think I was the third person to be handed her broken-spined and dogeared copy of the book, but I was the first one to finish the damn thing.

That was the confusing part. This book is great. But I guess the breadth of it intimidated people.

The story in its simplest form is about a person who is trying to find his wife after she disappears one day without an explanation. In the mean time, some very strange things begin to happen to him, and a whole host of strange and interesting characters begin to enter his life. Each one has a story to tell, and a a pretty rich patchwork of a narrative begins to form as the protagonist tries to understand exactly what has happened. All things considered it is a rather lovely story.

As I read this, I could not help but remember the works of Thomas Pynchon. Between the anecdotal nature of this novel, and the wacky and strangely named characters, Pynchon came to mind. But this was much easier to read than anything written by Pynchon, and in the end it came together a lot better than any of his novels did. I think it lacked postmodern zeitgeist that flavors Pynchon (and makes him so off-putting to so many readers). But it might be a warning to readers who like their narratives to be a little bit more straightforward (by which I mean action-orientated), or who have a problem with strange characters behaving strangely. The book does seem to have a lot of that.

This is of course a work in translation, which always gives me a bit of pause. I did find it strange that whenever the protagonist talked about something involving pop culture, it was somehow something I always recognized and never some artifact of Japan’s own culture. But this only happened perhaps twice, and nothing else in the book gave me the impression that I was reading a work by translator Jay Rubin and not Haruki Murakammi.

Reading begets more reading. I have somewhere in my house a copy of Norwegian Wood which I got from a book exchange in my hometown. After bringing them kilos of books neither me nor my mother had an interest in reading of keeping, I picked that one up at the insistence of the guy running the book exchange solely because I did recognize the work, and despite the fact that it shares a title with a Beatles song that I loathe. By the time I was half-way through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle I found myself pretty enthusiastic about the idea of reading it. And the same friend who lent me Wind-Up insists that I must read Kafka on the Shore…