The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
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4.2 • 40 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.
His wife is growing more distant every day.
Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.
As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
*Murakami's new book Novelist as a Vocation is available now*
'Visionary...a bold and generous book' New York Times
'Murakami weaves textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty' Independent on Sunday
'Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down' Daily Telegraph
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After his wife disappears, unemployed 30-year-old paralegal Toru Okada gets embroiled in a surreal, sprawling drama--part detective story, part history lesson, part metaphysical speculation, part satire--that marks Japanese novelist Murakami's (Dance Dance Dance) most ambitious work to date. As Okada searches for his wife (in an abandoned lot near his home, and in a city park), he encounters characters who are dream-like projections of his own muted fears and desires--among them, a precocious, death-obsessed, 16-year-old neighbor and Okada's brother-in-law, a sinister politician. Peculiar events and strange coincidences abound. A mysterious woman calls Okada regularly, insisting on phone sex. A mystical experience at the bottom of a dry well leaves him with a blue stain on his cheek. Although Okada seems to be sleepwalking through his adventures, new acquaintances feel compelled to share their life stories with him and offer wild tales of violence and passion, tales that contrast strongly with the numbness that settles like a DeLillo-esque cloud over the novel's events (one character, witness to gruesome wartime torture, speaks of having "burned up the very core of my life"). As Okada discovers, these disparate characters are linked by the memory of the 1939 massacre of Japanese troops by Soviet tanks at Nomonhan on the Manchurian border, and this massacre comes to symbolize the senseless violence and political evils, past and present, that haunt Japan in the second half of the 20th century. Ingeniously, Murakami links history to a detective story that uses a mannered realism and metaphysical speculation to catapult the narrator into the surreal place where mysteries are solved and evil is confronted.
Customer Reviews
Disturbing, aimless narrative.
I really wish I never read this book. Having read one of his other books, which was something of a masterpiece, I bought this with high expectations. This book, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, however, was filled with extreme, disgusting violence, insipid characters and a plodding, pointess storyline. The highlight was when the whiny, lethargic main character was killed off - then the author brought him back to life in the last section of the book! Struggled to get to the end.