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- Oe no Chisato- The Full Moon
- Alaalang Dilim
- A Dream Within A Dream(Edgar Allan Poe)
- Kafka on the Shore(Haruki Murakami)
- South of the Border,West of the Sun(Haruki Murakami)
- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle(Haruki Murakami)
- Norwegian Wood(Haruki Murakami)
- After Dark(Haruki Murakami)
- Audition Film Review
- Piercing(Ryu Murakami)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle(Haruki Murakami)
May 24th, 2009 by heimeai
The complete review’s Review:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a big, rambling book. The almost always entertaining and imaginative Murakami here weaves a complex tale in a simple setting, covering a great deal of ground and making for an enjoyable read.
Narrator Toru Okada quit his job a few months before the book begins. He worked as a legal assistant, a job he had held since graduating from college, but that held no more appeal for him. His wife Kumiko works as a magazine editor, and makes enough for them to get by. Toru is not too ambitious. He putters around the house. He cooks. He goes out to look for the family cat.
Life, of course, takes some unusual turns. He gets strange phone calls, and meets a woman called Malta Okano, who tells him that her sister, Creta, was raped by his brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, five years earlier. The sinister and unpleasant Wataya has become famous and influential after writing a big economics book. Noboru Wataya also happens to be the cat’s name, and Malta offers to help find the missing feline.
Toru makes other new acquaintances, such as neighborhood teen May Kasahara who shows him an empty well that he later takes to. Creta Kano also introduces herself, and tells her story.
Toru lives in “a narrow world, a world that was standing still”, but outside forces do push and tug at him, the strange lives of those he encounters echoing oddly in his own empty life. His wife, Kumiko, once told him: “There’s a kind of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real”, an affliction from which many of the characters seem to suffer. When Toru’s main anchor, his wife, simply disappears from his life, Toru is left bereft — but he still can’t rouse himself, drifting along with (or rather buffeted by) the lives of others.
A Lieutenant Mamiya tells long stories of Japan’s military past, horrors from the war that also have odd connexions to the present. Much of the book contrasts Japan’s military past and its present.
Life around Toru remains uncertain. He takes to the empty well, withdrawing there to ponder, his retreat of last resort. Occasionally he finds himself stuck there, without a way of getting out. Mysteries continue to unfold, including the question of what really happened to his wife who — her relatives say — wants to divorce him. Toru meets Nutmeg Akasaka and her computer savvy son Cinnamon, who helps him contact his wife on-line.
The people and mysteries swirl around Toru, coming together and falling apart. He is not a center that can hold. The novel reaches a vaguely (if not entirely) satisfying conclusion.
Murakami offers many tangential stories, some of which are very good. Horrors from World War II contrast neatly with the lost and aimless atmosphere of modern times. There is little feel of the bustle and obsessiveness of modern Japan. Toru interacts with few people, and they too live isolated or out-of-the-ordinary lives. Nevertheless, it gives a picture of a disaffected country that has lost its way — and of some underlying hope.
Rich (though occasionally too quirky) characters and much neat invention make The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a consistently entertaining read. Murakami very effectively sets a mood, and sustains it throughout. The story does not come together quite as neatly as one might hope, but it is still a good one. A fine, big, entertaining read.
Note that if Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel is correct in saying (in a review in World Literature Today) that “the English version has been subjected to extensive cutting”, this fact might help explain why there are a few loose ends in the English version. If it bothers you — and it should — contact the publishers and tell them that you don’t want them making stupid editorial decisions like this on your behalf: translations (already a crime against literature) should be as true to the original as possible — and that certainly means NO cuts under ANY circumstances.
from:http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/murakamih/windupbc.htm
Posted in Random Book Reviews | | |
