Items related to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Hardcover

 
9780679446699: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
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The saga of a mysteriously disintegrating marriage, suppressed memories of the tragedies of war, and a young man's search for his personal and national identity is set against the turbulent backdrop of twentieth-century Japan. 25,000 first printing.

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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:
"Murakami writes of contemporary Japan, urban alienation and journeys of self-discovery, and in this book he combines recollections of the war with metaphysics, dreams and hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work" (Independent)

"Murakami weaves these textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty" (Independent on Sunday)

"Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original" (New York Times)

"Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down" (Daily Telegraph)

"How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration" (Independent on Sunday)

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  • PublisherAlfred a Knopf Inc
  • Publication date1997
  • ISBN 10 0679446699
  • ISBN 13 9780679446699
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages611
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780679775430: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage International)

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780679775430
Publisher: Vintage, 1998
Softcover

  • 9780099448792: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami

    Vintage, 1999
    Softcover

  • 9781784875411: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series): Haruki Murakami (Vintage Classic Japanese Series)

    Vintag..., 2019
    Softcover

  • 9780965341981: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

    Softcover

  • 9781846553875: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Limited Centenary edition

    Harvil..., 2010
    Hardcover

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