by Stephen Fife-Adams

Created on: December 22, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

I picked this book up after the NYT picked Murakami's Kafka on the Shore as one of the 10 best books of the year in 2005. Also, I have a co-worker who contends that Murakami is the most interesting writer in the world right now, and that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle one of the best books of the 20th century, so I figured I'd start there.

For the first 400 pages or so (out of 611), I was willing to go along with my colleague's judgement. Murakami has, to put it mildly, a very strange imagination, but in a way that makes you desperately want to find out what's going to happen next. Other people have likened his storytelling style to that of David Lynch, and I think that's an appropriate comparison. Like the hero of Blue Velvet, or Sheriff Harry Truman in Twin Peaks, Murakami's narrator, Toru Okada, is normal almost to the point of being nondescript, a 30-year-old unemployed former legal clerk who spends his days cooking spaghetti, reading books and trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. The disappearance first of his cat and then of his wife, a series of anonymous phone calls, and a chance meeting with a neighbor girl send him wandering into a typically Lynchian labyrinth where all notions of normalcy are turned upside down. Toru meets a pair of psychic sisters and begins having a series of vivid dreams that leave him with physical marks. Meanwhile, there is a story within the story of a horrific incident on the Manchurian border in 1938 that appears increasingly to have relevance to Toru's bizarre adventures. In a particularly blatant bit of Jungian imagery, Toru winds up spending several days locked up at the bottom of a dry well. There are also gangsters, corrupt politicians, occultists, dopplegangers, and a general aura of creepiness that had my heart racing even when nothing in particular was happening in the story.

If this all sounds like a little bit of a mess, well, it is. Murakami clearly had grand ambitions for the story, but when he introduced a whole new set of characters about 2/3 of the way through, I began to doubt he would pull it all together, and indeed he doesn't. The unifying theme, such as it is, has to do with the monster of fascism and the sadism on which it feeds. Murakami wants to bring to the surface the vicious cruelty that ran (and still runs) through Japanese nationalism, and to a large degree he succeeds. Indeed, it's generally true that even where the book fails to hold together at the level of the details, it succeeds in its larger effects. Even as the story began to fall apart, I couldn't put the book down; it was like a dream where nothing really makes sense but you don't want it to end.

Nevertheless, unlike the best David Lynch films, which reward repeated viewings, I'm not sure The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has much to say that isn't all there on the surface. There are too many story lines that appear to have no fundamental connection to the central theme, too many points where you can see the author struggling to figure out what's going to happen next. I've read that Murakami never maps out his plots ahead of time-he makes it up as he goes along-and both the pluses and minuses of that method are writ large here. He's written a page-turner, but by the end you're left with the feeling that the story hasn't so much concluded as it has just stopped.

Murakami probably has great books in him; he is a writer of stunning power and has an uncommon talent for spinning a story; some of his images are unforgettable. But despite the many points in its favor, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a brilliant but ultimately frustrating failure.

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