The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Books I Want To Talk About

Oct 04, 2008 Julie rated it it was amazing

Uh, Wow.

This book is...
Well it is really hard to explain what this book is like.
I have compared it to a David Lynch movie, but it's not exactly like that really-- it's just that there is a sense of strangeness like you are being told a story out of order and you have to put the puzzle pieces together to understand it.
He is an incredible writer, and the imagery alone is just awesome.

This is certainly a book that grabs you and takes you along for the ride. It did take a little while to get totally ...more

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Mar 12, 2014 Sera rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own, 1001-books, favorites, literary-fiction, kindle

My first Murakami, and I thought that it was great. The book was easy to read, complex and very gripping. I became caught up in the various characters and trying to figure out what was going on.

I am looking forward to reading more Murakami in the future.

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Feb 12, 2009 Meghan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, own, japanese, fantasy, war, asian, bookish, magical-realism

I did it. I finally finished this book. Before my deadline (of tomorrow). Like my good friend Jennifer said, "I read the sh*t out that book." Which isn't completely true since it took me like 4 months to read because I was unfocused (it was all me and not the book). But I read the last 300 pages in the last 3 days so I feel like I redeemed my slacker self.

A real review will be forthcoming. As for now, I would just like to say having read 3 novels of his now, this is by far the greatest book he w ...more

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May 23, 2021 Dini rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

A thirty-year-old man, Toru Okada, gets an existential crisis about his dull and aimless life in 1980s Japan. He feels his wife Kumiko is growing distant from him, and then she goes missing from their Tokyo home. Throughout this 600-page novel we learn very little about Toru's own background and early life and instead hear more about those of other characters such as Kumiko and her brother. Like in Norwegian Wood which I read a few years back, Toru also meets various side characters who immedia A thirty-year-old man, Toru Okada, gets an existential crisis about his dull and aimless life in 1980s Japan. He feels his wife Kumiko is growing distant from him, and then she goes missing from their Tokyo home. Throughout this 600-page novel we learn very little about Toru's own background and early life and instead hear more about those of other characters such as Kumiko and her brother. Like in Norwegian Wood which I read a few years back, Toru also meets various side characters who immediately tell him the story of their lives. This includes lengthy chapters detailing very graphic violence during World War II, which seem to belong in a different novel altogether.

Add to that a hefty dose of surrealism through bizarre occurences, psychic characters, and dreams that are separated by a thin wall to reality. Don't forget a generous helping of male sexual fantasy, as Toru seems to be surrounded by other women who inexplicably have a thing for him (this is also reminiscent of Norwegian Wood). One of them is an underage teen, May Kasahara, who always seems to want to engage him in vaguely suggestive conversations, and who tells him in a letter that she fantasizes about what would happen if he tried to rape her (seriously???). Another is a woman who shares explicit details of her life to him on the day they first meet, and then one night she suddenly appears naked beside him in his bed because she'd lost all her clothes without her knowledge. Of course.

I get that juxtaposing the real with the surreal is probably meant to make us see everyday life in a new light. There are also little nuggets of wisdom on things like human relationships, life and death, fate and free will. But the book could have been half the length that it is without meandering into various directions, and it also includes too much pointless sex and violence and objectifying of women.

The story becomes more engaging for me in the third and final part of the novel. The supernatural/paranormal theme is more pronounced during this part and even veers intriguingly into horror, in a good way. Too bad it takes the book too long to get to the point (I almost gave up several times before that), and when it does I wasn't even sure what the whole point is. Sometimes I like when books let me draw my own conclusions, but in the end this one is just too out there and makes little sense.
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