Fort those readers who like quirky, vulgar, enigmatic, and yet lyrical flashes, Murakami’s long novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will be a treat. Aspiring writers will find an abundance of fiction writing tips and some example of essay.
Like all good novels that hook the reader, the opening paragraph is not only auditory (appealing to the ear), but also intriguing. That intriguing feeling Murakami accomplishes with images that are mundane yet strange, almost surreal.
In no time readers find themselves immersed in a hallucinating world: the world of unemployed and lonely Toru Okada-the narrator. Okada is a law graduate, yet he works on the fringes of the law as a paralegal, resisting joining the corporate structure. From the very beginning we see that he is an outsider-a misfit to his wife, relatives, and society. Toru Okada has quit his job as a paralegal and spends his days reading and fixing dinner for his magazine editor wife.
Immediately off-the-wall characters and odd events begin to catch our attention: an obscene phone call from Malta Kano, a weird psychic who’s searching (or so we are led to believe) for his lost cat. Kano’s sister, Creta, who dresses like Jackie Kennedy, tells a pathetic story; next, an attempted suicide, and prostitution (both of the mind and body). And then we meet the villain: Toru’s sinister brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya. In traditional narratives the villains must match the hero in prowess; in this novel, however, the villain outmatches the hero since he is a cyber villain who lives in the ether of television-elusive and difficult to grapple with.
Readers unacquainted with the postmodern world of simulacra (as expounded by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard) will have a hard time suspending the disbelief: that a cyber-villain can cross over and interact in the real world. The fictional world in the novel is a world of disorder, mutation, transformations where unity, foundations and continuities are inexistent. Although Toru -the narrator- is a post-modern antihero, he hangs on to shapes, themes, and personalities of a by-gone era: in procession we see a melancholy caravan of Western cultural icons-Rossini, Claudio Abbado, De Chirico, Bach, and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Despite the old icons mentioned in an attempt to give readers a semblance of normalcy, Toru’s world -contemporary Japan- is all but an alien desolate world where darkness gets encrusted in his soul, tormenting him to no end.
And as if vivid and feverish memories were not enough to haunt Toru’s mind, he finds himself floating in history. Lieutenant Mamiya (a WWII veteran) graphically tells Toru of the cruelties and atrocities he witnessed on the Mongolian front and Soviet prison camps during the Second World War. Of all the myriad events that happen in the novel, the graphic depiction of Japanese cruelty and atrocities, as well as the Mongolians’, is moving to the point of repulsion. Moving, because readers would have to be pathologically callous not to be assailed by the inhumanity and savagery of war; repulsive because these type of events have been cleansed from the history books, condemning newer generations to repeat them ad infinitum. This portion of the novel is a story within a story and a veritable example of essay, or even better an example of how to write a college essay, rather than fiction.
If Murakami set off to teach a moral lesson, we must agree that he did accomplish it: war makes humans inhuman, and that the inhuman make war. To avoid disgusting the reader and to prop up a wavering end, we are quickly introduced to a well-dressed mother-son duo that will keep us entertained with their antics and their personal formula to make lots of cash.
Besides being -The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle- a sprawling and at times amorphous novel, it is well-stitched together. The writing is uneven, yet peppered with passages of gorgeous, and mesmerizing prose. Of all the grammatical and syntactical tools Murakami employs, his sentence openers are dazzling.
Faced with a society -high tech and postmodern Japan- that is barren of felicity, the narrator continues to search for an elusive goal that he himself doesn’t quite know – his identity perhaps? Maybe Toru -being wifeless and friendless- simply enjoys the terrorizing feeling that is loneliness.
For most of the novel, Toru Okada is passive, as things happen to him. But in the end he will begin to act. Murakami must have realized that no one likes a useless ‘do-nothing’ hero or anti-hero. Yet one has the feeling that Toru doesn’t have a chance for salvation, that chaos, chance, and maybe even death will claim him.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, amongst many things -a missing cat, a missing wife, a story-within-a-story about Japan’s re-birth from the ashes of the Second World War, involvement in Manchuria, psychics, psychic prostitutes, morbid high school girls, a creepy scholar-cum-politician- is a satire of contemporary Japan as well as a look at bird species.
Although the novel is imperfect, it is quite entertaining and it is filled with passages of moral value and redemption. It also offers fluidity of language, rhythm, rhetorical techniques, as well as lyrical flashes. And for the serious reader, the novel is full of cogitations about existence.
Haruki Murakami’s lengthy novel is a great accomplishment for Japanese letters.