The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Constant Reader

Jul 11, 2007 Yulia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-to-me-by-frank, japandemonium

From my comments on Constant Reader:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was actually written while Murakami was a writer-in-residence at Harvard, where his translator also worked conveniently. According to an interview with Jay Rubin, as soon as Murakami would finish a section, he would give it to Rubin to translate and Rubin sometimes offered his own advice and critiques (he didn't care for the Kano sisters).

After finding out the book had been edited for the English edition, I went on a mini wild sheep From my comments on Constant Reader:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was actually written while Murakami was a writer-in-residence at Harvard, where his translator also worked conveniently. According to an interview with Jay Rubin, as soon as Murakami would finish a section, he would give it to Rubin to translate and Rubin sometimes offered his own advice and critiques (he didn't care for the Kano sisters).

After finding out the book had been edited for the English edition, I went on a mini wild sheep chase (short of learning Japanese and reading the original myself) to find out what passages or details had been censored. Perhaps a scene between Toru and May unfit for Americans? But after finding an interview with Jay Rubin, I learned that the answer is much less salacious: Rubin says it was merely a matter of redundant passages that he removed to tighten the text (Japanese writers rarely undergo the editing process that American publishers require), not an issue of specific content that was inappropriate.

It'll come as no surprise for those who have started this tome that Murakami writes without having laid out a plot first and just goes where his imagination takes him. This sometimes makes for frustrating passages, but it also leads his readers into literal and figurative terrains they wouldn't otherwise come across.

And ultimately, it's the quirky beauty of his details and similes that have always made him such a joy to read: for example, the utterly identifiable and senseless argument between Toru and his wife about blue tissues and patterned toilet paper, or the debate with May Kasahara about why six fingers is any less irrelevant than four breasts on a woman.

As I suggested in the regular CR thread, Murakami raises more questions than he answers in his books and often presents us with mysteries that simply can't be solved.

Another thing that struck me when I first read Wind-Up Bird was how May's parents and Toru weren't very surprised by her simply not going to school. But in a society where about 1% of students do just the same, stop attending classes; in a country that mastered the art of cram schools to prepare students for entrance exams into more challenging schools and high schoolers for entrance exams into better colleges, where admission to an elite college is meant to set you on the right track for getting a career; and where ruthless bullying is sanctioned by teachers and parents as part of the trials of coming-of-age, it becomes less surprising that some students simply opt out of the school system. It's become an increasing phenomenon, even an epidemic, in Japan, termed hikikomori, where kids and adults refuse to leave their room and are simply left food and/or an allowance by their helpless and sometimes abused parents (in Japan, domestic violence refers usually to kids beating their parents). Obviously, as she left her room and spoke easily with Toru, May wasn't a hikikomori, who are often male, but it did explain in part the seeming normalcy and comfort with her not going to school.

It occurred to me only a last week that perhaps it was Toru himself who best embodied the hikikomori mindset, not only in leaving his job, but in his long seclusion to and meditation at the bottom of the well. That made it more understandable, to me at least, why Murakami might have made his protagonist refuse to act for so long: however frustrating it was to read and endure with him, it may have been psychologically necessary for him to shut himself off from the world.

Another CR member made a good point about the cultural differences in our Western notion of being active and the Buddhist notion of flow. I do know Toru was actively processing events and listening to clues a he seems so passive. I suppose, as a wound-up East Coaster (a far East Coaster, as Palin would call me), I wanted Toru to spring to action when the wise or Zen thing to do was to wait, watch, and listen for the truth or the wave of motion to unfold. Perhaps we should regard and understand Toru as mindful above all else.
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Jan 04, 2009 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: location-japan, read2009

This is the second book by Murakami that I've read, and I am really in love with his characters and his style. This is the story of a man inside a marriage as it falls apart, but also about all the unpredictable things that happen to him and the stories surrounding those events. Unexpected and interesting.

"It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things an ...more

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Oct 18, 2007 EH-PI rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-mystery-horror, philosophy, magical-realism, history

Any writer who can spend 60 pages describing how the narrator/protagonist sits in the bottom of a well, and still have you churning pages trying to get to the bottom of things like he does, is worth reading.

I'm not going to go into the many "plots" and themes of the book -- other reviewers describe those far better than me.

But I will say this: for a 600 page epic, it has me glued pretty much throughout 550 pages of it -- the stories and the characters were so surreal yet so compelling, and try Any writer who can spend 60 pages describing how the narrator/protagonist sits in the bottom of a well, and still have you churning pages trying to get to the bottom of things like he does, is worth reading.

I'm not going to go into the many "plots" and themes of the book -- other reviewers describe those far better than me.

But I will say this: for a 600 page epic, it has me glued pretty much throughout 550 pages of it -- the stories and the characters were so surreal yet so compelling, and trying to exercise logic and sense in trying to understand the underlying threads of why the writer is weaving all these strands and stories together, it makes for great narrative tension.

The novel defies closure. I suppose because Murakami wants us to realize that reason and logic don't always serve us well in an incomprehensible world, and the people we love who desert us may not always yield tidy explanations for their abandonment despite our deepest willing mental reflections. And this brings into question a writerly concern: should a novel that is that long offer some sense of closure to its readers? Is it laziness on Murakami's part to strenuously oppose closure (as Michiko Kakutani from her review in The New York Times suggest -- what a blistering denoucement of the book, btw) or is it novelistic courage to deny readers that satisfaction of a book well-ended? If the book has delivered such great pleasure -- narrative, mystical, aesthetic -- does it matter that the last 50 pages seem to drop the bottom out of the well (no pun intended?) And that is where my last star is really a half star or a three-quarters star as I ponder this!

But there's no avoiding Murakami's storytelling muscle -- the gripping narrative of war atrocities where we get the blow by blow account of a man being skinned alive, the story of the soldiers charged with massacrering the dangerous animals at the Siberian zoo as well as the last of this trio, the young soldier instructed to kill Chinese POWs with a well-aimed strike of a baseball bat -- all these hammer home Murakami's theme about the absurdity of war, in a way that's philosophical but still all about story.

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Oct 04, 2008 Gail rated it liked it

Shelves: 2008, constant-reader

Really, really strange book. Some marvelously-crafted, very enjoyable writing. The thick, multi-layered plot, if such it can be called, is difficult to follow and seems to be full of hidden meanings that this reader can't quite discern. I enjoyed it, but I didn't understand it. ...more

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