Read: Sept 1 to Oct. 2
Pages:
All of Murakami's books say "author of The Windup Bird Chronicle" on their covers. My sister tells me that The Windup Bird Chronicle is on a list of "100 books to read before you die" that she downloaded from the internet. The book was highly recommended to me by a friend.
So I read it this fall, after an abortive attempt to read the e-book version.
What is the book about? Did I enjoy it? What insights did the book give me? What thoughts did it spark?
Those are the kinds of questions that I think about as I'm reading a book that I'm about to review on this blog. But as it turns out, for The Windup Bird Chronicle, those are all difficult questions.
The first question was the most difficult, oddly.
I could start by summarizing the contents of the book. It's a novel set in contemporary Japan that follows about a year in the life of an unemployed legal assistant who lives in the suburbs of Tokyo. It's told in the first person, and has fantastic and absurd elements.
But ....what is it "about"?
One of the blurbs on the cover claims that it's about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that preceded the Second World War.
There are several characters in the book whose lives were fundamentally affected by Japan's wartime occupation of mainland China: an elderly fortuneteller who appears only in flashback, an elderly retired schoolteacher who brings our protagonist a puzzling legacy and recounts his wartime experiences at some length, and Malta and Creta Kano, pivotal characters who as children fled the recapture of Nanking by the Chinese.
But if the book is about this invasion and occupation, why are only secondary characters affected by these events? Why does the story follow the life of an aimless former salaryman, and why is the plot driven by his relationship with his wife, his lost cat, his teenage neighbour, his annoying brother-in-law, and the woman he meets while sitting in a square in downtown Tokyo? And why is the book called The Windup Bird Chronicle, after the bird who briefly perches in his backyard tree and makes a noise like it is winding up the world?
Not to mention that I'm not convinced that the stories of wartime Manchuria are meant to be taken literally. The story of the dry well reeks of metaphor, and the odour only increases when the protagonist himself finds a dry well, and enters it seeking (literally?) enlightenment.
In fact, the whole book is shot through with metaphor, dreams, dream-like experiences, coincidences, and obviously meaningful items and events that somehow never cohere into meaningfulness.
In other words -- no, I don't know what the book is about. But the hints seem so numerous and so obviously planted that my failure to understand seems like a personal failing -- or conversely, beside the point? I can't decide which.
Did I like the book?
Again, this is an oddly difficult question. I read the first half in dutiful portions, more because I meant to finish it than because I couldn't put it down. But at the same time it was oddly compelling. The story is told in the first person, in straightforward prose, in a very matter-of-fact tone. Not a lot happens. His wife goes to work, returns late, and doesn't want to eat the supper he's prepared. He searches for the lost cat in the dead-end alley behind his house, and discovers instead an abandoned house with an overgrown yard that doesn't contain his cat -- though the bored teenager across the alley claims that she sees a lot of cats there. An anonymous woman caller with a very familiar voice calls mid day and initiates phone sex without warning. He meets a psychic by appointment in a downtown restaurant, who recognizes him even though he can't find and therefore doesn't wear the polka dot tie he was supposed to put on so that she will be able to identify him. He dreams about a sexual encounter with a woman wearing his wife's dress, and then later discovers that the woman he dreamt about also remembers the dream.
Eventually I realized that I was allowed to enjoy the experience, even if I didn't really understand what was going on, and my reading accelerated. Perhaps because it seemed that if I only read a bit more, things would start to come together and the whole book would make sense....
What insights did the book give me? What thoughts did it spark?
There was a great quote from the protagonist that I meant to pull out and include here, before my copy of the book vanished into the chaos of my current home reno. It went something like "I don't enjoy going to modern art movies, because as you watch them, things just happen." It seemed as if the author was making an ironic nod to his audience.
I'm not sure what else to say. I did enjoy reading it. More than a month later, the book has stuck with me, and as I write about it I continue the effort to pull everything together in my head. (Was the anonymous woman on the phone actually Kumiko, his wife? Why are all of our protagonist's emotional reactions so muted? He treats the teenaged neighbour no differently after she takes actions that could easily have lead to his death. What's the significance of that particular brand of whisky, and why does it keep reappearing throughout the book?)
I might recommend it to a friend myself. But I'm not sure. What would I say if they came back to me and asked me what I thought about it myself? Or if they asked me to explain the book to them? Or perhaps worse, what if they explained the book to me? :-)
Hm...following the ideal that excellence only follows egoless effort, I suppose I'd have to recommend the book. It was novel. It held my attention. It entertained me. It made me think. And maybe, just maybe, the person to whom I recommended it would explain it to me afterwards, and I'd learn something.
So recommended, at least to readers who are willing to work at their fiction.
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