The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami

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Okada and Kumiko finally communicate, messaging each other through computers, and she tells him that he should forget about her. Okada tells her that he has been trying to find her by looking into the darkness and searching for something he calls More of everything. Kumiko says she does not understand, and they say good-bye.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has been my absolute favourite book for decades now. It’s a surreal journey that is both nightmarish and dreamlike. The language is often poetic and the characters are amazing. A lot of Murakami’s novels remind me of the films of David Lynch and like those Murakami constructs a world with stunning imagery and bizarre events. While this book is quite plot heavy, it does delight with its subtleties and interesting shifts in form and perspective so fear not literature seekers! And it does come together at the end quite well, which is reassuring when you are halfway through and wondering "how the hell is this going to wrap up?!". It may not directly give you all your answers, but there is enough to uncover with a bit of thought and the parts left unanswered, well, they are left that way for a reason. This book is for those with a creative imagination and it tests you to push that to the limits.

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Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was at a record store, which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works. Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse 'Peter Cat' which was a jazz bar in the evening in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife. Mr. Okada,” she said, “I believe that you are entering a new phase of your life in which many different things will occur. The disappearance of your cat is only the beginning.” Kumiko is revealed to be missing at the start of the second part, "Bird as Prophet". Shortly after, Toru finds out through a meeting with Noboru and Malta that Kumiko has apparently been spending time with another man and wants to end her relationship with Toru. Confused, Toru tries several things to calm himself and think through the situation: talking and taking up work with May Kasahara, hiding at the bottom of the well, and loitering around the city looking at people. Work with May involves tallying up people with some degree of baldness at a subway line for a wig company. While at the bottom of the well (of the abandoned house), Toru reminisces about earlier times with Kumiko, including their first date to an aquarium where they looked at jellyfish. He also experiences a dreamlike sequence where he enters a hotel room and speaks with a woman, and notices a strange blue mark on his cheek after he leaves the well. While loitering in the city, he spends most of the day sitting outside a donut shop and people-watching. Through this activity, Toru encounters a well-dressed woman and also a singer he recognizes from his past, whom he follows and beats with a bat after getting ambushed by him.

I enjoyed the story, having only previously read Murakami’s book “Kafka on the shore” I thought this book was good but not as good as Kafka on the shore. Paul Bryant has written an excellent parody of Murakami in his review of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Chapter 17 is not completely removed, instead the excerpt where Toru takes passport photos is removed and the very lengthy conversation Toru has with his uncle about buying real estate is condensed into one English paragraph. [9] Murakami uses these odd correspondences to build narrative tension, while at the same time manipulating his various subplots to raise a slew of other questions. What role does Kumiko's sinister brother, Noboru, have in her disappearance? Is Noboru'sOnce I figured that out, I feel like I still missed a lot. I gotta read this again, man. I feel like if I could read the beginning again now that I know everything, it would make the experience so much richer, so much sweeter. Murakami writes in a way that makes you feel like you're dreaming, moving along different scenes and stories effortlessly, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. It was a surreal experience to take all of this in. It's unlike any book I've read before, and it made me think deeper about life and pain and loss and love and all those hard realities we get to confront on this journey. It was definitely a thrilling and rewarding experience. But also because, for example, you are constantly applying the weirdest moral standards to books ever, as in the single note I wrote about this was "you're actually allowed to be sexist if you're really talented." sister, Creta, who claims that she was raped by Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya; Lieutenant Mamiya, a soldier who says he witnessed a man being skinned alive; Nutmeg Akasaka, a mysterious healer whose husband was violently murdered; This is perhaps the only Murakami novel which has a very strong element of mystery at heart and which ends with a satisfactory resolution of sorts. It’s a fascinating tale of magic and loss and cements many of his own motifs (loss, wells/holes, secret passages, music, ears…) and highlights some which are tropes of Japanese fiction as a unique genre (cats, odd sex, magical realism, trains… loss and confusion).

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?best Asian novels of all time". The Telegraph. April 22, 2014. Archived from the original on November 11, 2020 . Retrieved December 6, 2020. political career somehow connected to bloody events that occurred in Manchuria so many decades ago? And what is going on at the mysterious estate down the alley from Toru's house? The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a very breezy read, surprisingly so since it was translated from Japanese. It tells the story of Toru Okada's disintegrating life, from his quitting his job at the law firm, to the family cat, Noboru Wataya, named after his wife's brother, going missing, to his wife Kumiko disappearing one morning. From there, things get stranger by the minute. Toru gets entangled with a sort of psychic therapist, Malta Kano, and her sister Creta, as well as striking up an unusual friendship with the unusual girl next door, May Kasahara. And that's before the really weird things start happening.

and part of 17; and Book 3 Chapter 26). [9] Combining the original three-volumes (Japanese) would have been too long, and so the publisher requested that ~25,000 words be cut for the English translation, even though Rubin had presented them a complete translation along with the requested abridged version. [10] Strange coincidences connect these people. We learn that Nutmeg's father, a veterinarian in Manchuria, has the same strange mark on his cheek as Toru. We learn that Toru and Creta have had a similar experience with prostitution. And we learn that But getting to the end of the book was also like being rudely woken up from the most wonderful dream. And I didn't want this dream-like experience to be over.Okada goes with May to work, and as part of their jobs, they survey men in Tokyo and label them according to their degree of baldness. They end up discussing how balding is so frightening because it is as if life itself is being worn away. This book has left a permanent mark on me. I feel like it made me deepen my individual self-awareness and also my understanding of human society.