The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage International) - Softcover

Murakami, Haruki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679775439 ISBN 13: 9780679775430

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is many things: the story of a marriage that mysteriously collapses; a jeremiad against the superficiality of contemporary politics; an investigation of painfully suppressed memories of war; a bildungsroman about a compassionate young man's search for his own identity as well as that of his nation. All of Murakami's storytelling genius -- combining elements of detective fiction, deadpan humor, and metaphysical truth, and swiftly transforming commonplace realism into surreal revelation -- is on full, seamless display. And in turning his literary imagination loose on a broad social and political canvas, he bares nothing less than the soul of a country steeped in the violence of the 20th century.

About this title

Review:

Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com

Review:

"Dreamlike and compelling. . . . Murakami is a genius." --Chicago Tribune

"Mesmerizing. . . . Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice." --The Washington Post Book World

"A significant advance in Murakami's art . . . a bold and generous book." --The New York Times Book Review

"A stunning work of art . . . that bears no comparisons." --New York Observer

"With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami spreads his brilliant, fantastical wings and soars." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"Seductive. . . . A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange." --San Francisco Chronicle

"An epic . . . as sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi." --New York Magazine

"Mesmerizing, original . . . fascinating, daring, mysterious and profoundly rewarding." --Baltimore Sun

"A beguiling sense of mystery suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory. . . . Compelling [and] convincing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's past . . . brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular." --Pico Iyer, Time

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679775439
• ISBN 13: 9780679775430
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624