Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : Review – Society — Culture
If you like quirky, vulgar, enigmatic, yet lyrical and philosophical flashes-you’ll like this fresh. Listen to the sounds, for that sounds and mundane symbolism of the very beginning of the novel will be give the reader a sample with the strange and surreal:
“When the product rang I was in the kitchen, cooking a potful of spaghetti and also whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, that has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta”?
The voice is that of the narrator Toru Okada, a good unemployed law graduate, who simply by resisting the call of the corporate and business structure becomes an outsider-a misfit in order to his wife, relatives, and society. Toru Okada has quit his / her job as a paralegal and usually spends his days reading and fixing dinner for his / her magazine editor wife.
A constellation of enigmatic characters
In no time we are introduced to odd-ball characters and odd events: a good obscene phone call; Malta Kano, a strange psychic who’s searching (approximately we are led to believe) for his or her lost cat; her sister, Creta, who dresses like Jackie Kennedy and tells a painful story; up coming, attempted suicide, and prostitution (both the mind and body).
A formidable simulacrum cyber-villain
And only then do we meet the villain: Toru’s sinister brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya. Regarding readers unschooled in the postmodern world of simulacra (while expounded by Jean Baudrillard) will have a hard time suspending your disbelief: that a cyber-villain can overlap and interact in the real world. Nonetheless, the real world in the novel is often a world of disorder, mutation, transformations exactly where unity, foundations and continuities are barely existent. While Toru is a post-modern antihero, he or she latches on to figures, themes, and personalities of a by-gone era: in procession we see a sad caravan of American cultural icons-Rossini, Claudio Abbado, De Chirico, Bach, along with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Despite the particular cultural icons mentioned, Toru’s entire world is an alien world where darkness gets encrusted in his soul, tormenting him to a vast selection, driving him to come down to the depths of total darkness. When the goes into your well -that symbolizes death together with consciousness- he sees that life’s better lived in light. This particular poignant passage is similar to Martin Luther King Jr.’s words and phrases: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do in which. Hate cannot drive out and about hate; only love are capable of doing that.”
A recount of dolorous Japanese history
And as though current memories were not ample to haunt Toru’s mind, he finds himself immersed of all time. Lieutenant Mamiya (a WWII veteran) graphically informs Toru of the cruelties and atrocities he observed on the Mongolian front and Soviet penitentiary camps. Of all the constellation of situations that happen in the novel, the actual graphic depiction of Japoneses cruelty in the Second World War is actually moving and honest. Relocating, because one would have to be pathologically questionable not to feel the inhumanity and savagery regarding war; honest, for normally events of that nature are generally left out the history books.
If mcdougal set off to teach a meaning lesson, we must agree which he did accomplish it: warfare makes humans inhuman, and that the inhuman make war.
Towards the end as readers have their fill with the strange, we are quickly introduced to a well-dressed mother-son duo, characters that supply comic relief in a strange way.
Resonant themes: Darkness as death, physical pain, being lonely, existence
Not only is The Wind-Up Bird Share a sprawling novel, nevertheless a deliberately chaotic a single. Faced with a society -high technical and postmodern- that is devoid of joy, the narrator goes on searching for one thing he doesn’t quite recognize what- his identity perhaps?
“This individual, this self, this myself, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, also it would all go somewhere else. I was just a pathway for the individual known as me.”
Or maybe Toru -being wifeless and friendless- simply enjoys the terrorizing experience that is loneliness:
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air flow I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. All pages of a book in my hands would take on the intimidating metallic gleam of shaver blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness coming through me when the planet was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.”
For most of the book, Toru is passive, as he let us things happen to him. Nevertheless eventually he will begin to act. Yet one has the feeling that Toru doesn’t have a chance, that chaos, or maybe even destiny will claim your pet.
Although The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a problematic novel, it is quite entertaining plus it contains passages of meaningful value and redemption. ?Additionally, it offers -in translation- fluidity of language, groove, rhetorical techniques, as well as lyrical whizzes. But for the serious reader, the particular novel is replete with cogitations about existence:
“Here’s what I feel, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” stated May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some distinct thing at the core of their lifestyle. And that thing, whatever it is, turns into like a heat source that works each person from the inside. I have 1 too, of course. Like all the others. But sometimes it gets out of control. It swells or reduces inside me, and it shakes me up. What I might really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to a new person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the situation could be that I’m not detailing it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. Therefore i get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”
Without a doubt Haruki Murakami’s lengthy novel is a great achievement for Japanese letters. Whether it can compete with the great American classics such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the Brontes’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, or even Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a various matter.
All in all a great wonderful read.
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