The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami

How do I begin to review a novel that is as bizarre as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?  Whatever I say won’t really do it justice; it truly is a strange collection of stories in the form of a novel.

The premise itself is simple, Toru Okada’s cat has gone missing and then his wife Komiko leaves him under mysterious circumstances.  In the search for his cat he meets the weirdly wonderful fifteen year old May Kasahara and the psychic sisters Malta and Creta Kano.  In the search for his wife he meets the equally strange Nutmeg Akasaka and her mute son Cinnamon.  All but May are using pseudonyms.

Toru also becomes acquainted with an old soldier called Lieutenant Mamiya, who tells him war stories from World War II.  These stories are very disturbing, and one of his experiences inspires Toru to utilise a dry well in the garden of an abandoned house to search for Komiko in an alternative reality.

It is the individual stories that each character has to tell that are so amazing in this novel.  Lieutenant Mamiya’s description of watching a man being skinned alive would work well as a stand alone piece in any unsettling fiction anthology, it truly gave me goose bumps.  Nutmeg has war stories to tell too, based on her father’s own war experiences and they link back to Lieutenant Mamiya’s.  She tells two stories of a massacre at a zoo – one involving the animals, and the other involving a group of Chinese men dressed in baseball outfits.

There are several connecting themes throughout Toru’s reality, his alternate reality and the various ‘short’ stories, and they are the dry well, a baseball bat and a blue/black mark that Toru finds on his face after spending a night in the well.  Each story has a dreamlike quality to it, they are strange, some are rambling but ultimately they are hypnotic, taking you away so that you feel you are there. Some stories are told to Toru by a character, whilst others are in letter form.

There is a kind of linear sequence to meeting each character but May Kasahara features throughout the novel.  She will rank as one of my all time favourite literary characters.  I would love to know who Murakami based her on, because she just had me laughing out loud.  She’s so dark, obsessed with death and suicide, but at the same time she is outrageously funny.  I did this novel as an audio book, and I think the narrator captured her brilliantly.  She is such a contrast to the boring Toru and when we came to each one of May’s scenes, I’d turn up the volume and just revelled in her eccentricities! 

If you enjoy the author Franz Kafka, or appreciate the work of David Lynch then you would really enjoy this.  If you like your novels to make sense then forget it!  You have to completely suspend your disbelief and just immerse yourself in the bizarre break from a mundane life that Toru experiences.  I for one cannot wait to read more of this fabulous author’s work.

So, with all this said and done you’ll probably want to know did the cat come back?  Well…….. you’ll have to read it and find out J

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Labels: 1001, Modern Lit