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Book reviews: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

in this story but I could answer most of them, and as for the ones I can't, I have this to say: Murakami makes it clear through Boris the Manskinner that his job is to "make other people use their imaginations." That's right. You have to use your own brains to solve this riddle, an unconventional twist in novel writing that I find very appealing.

Now as for the questions "left unanswered" I can answer them one by one:

The seductive woman who kept calling Toru from the hotel room 208 was Kumiko. She wasn't the real Kumiko, but the part of Kumiko that her brother, Noboru Wataya, was keeping imprisoned. She was calling to reach Toru, to get his help, and it worked because Toru wound up traveling through the well into the "other world" where this part of Kumiko was being held prisoner.

Are you with me so far? This is partly my theory and partly Toru's theory in the novel. And here's some more of it: Kumiko "suddenly" felt the urge to up and cheat on Toru with several men because of a dark and perhaps "mind-controlling" power her brother could exert over her. It was the same vile practice that her brother had also done to Kumiko's sister, who it is later revealed did not die of food poisoning but committed suicide due to her brother's cruelties.

This "vile power" seemed to run in the family, so when Kumiko became pregnant, she was terrified that her child might end up like her brother. She had an abortion. I think she wanted the baby, though, and having to abort it because of this "dark thing" running in her family really messed her up for a long time.

The little boy in the chapter saga "What Happened in the Night" is Cinnamon. These chapters explain that Cinnamon lost his voice because of what he witnessed one night: two strange men buried a human heart in his front yard and then vanished without a trace.

It is also later revealed that Cinnamon's father died brutally in a hotel room: he was cut open and his organs were stolen while his head was chopped to "mincemeat" and left on the toilet. We also know that Cinnamon's father had many relations outside of his marriage and he was last seen with a small woman the night he was murdered.

It is my theory that Cinnamon's father finally slept with the wrong man's wife and was "assassinated" brutally by someone the scorned man hired. Or perhaps Cinnamon's father had murdered someone (more theorizing) and another someone as getting revenge. Cinnamon remembers that one of the men he saw burying the heart looked a lot like his


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