The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

From Strand Bookstore

This Kafkaesque novel 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 country. 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: an alternately alienating and seductive, sublimely riveting read. 607p.

From the Publisher

"Magnificent. . . .(Murakami) has taken a pre-millennial swing for the fences a la David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo" ("Newsweek"). "A surreal, sprawling drama . . . that marks . . . Murakami's most ambitious work to date".--"Publishers Weekly".

From the Publisher

Japans most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wifes missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.

Review

Jamie James - New York Times Book Review
"[A] big, ambitious book clearly intended to establish Murakami as a major figure in world literature....The new book almost self-consciously deals with a wide spectrum of heavy subjects....[It] marks a significant advance in Murakami's art....Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up."

Review

Phoebe-Lou Adams - Atlantic Monthly
"Whether his target is Japan or the world, Mr. Murakami's work sums up a bad century and envisions an uncertain future....The novel is a deliberately confusing, illogical image of a confusing, illogical world. It is not easy reading, but it is never less than absorbing."

Review

Elizabeth Ward - Washington Post Book World
"It is not just that this is Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice; it marks a genuine change of tone, a kind of mid-life deepening of purpose. His trademark weirdness remains, but where he used to be slick he is suddenly, surprisingly, serious....It is his great achievement to have given us, in this major work, a Japanese hero who refuses to act like a wind-up doll, redefines the nobility of failure, and thumbs his nose at the very idea of fate."

Review

Kirkus
"Not merely a big book from the broadly respected Murakami, but a major work....It will be hard to surpass."

Review

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
"Haruki Murakami's latest novel, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,' is a wildly ambitious book that not only recapitulates the themes, motifs and preoccupations of his earlier work, but also aspires to invest that material with weighty mythic and historical significance. But...he is only intermittently successful. 'Wind-Up Bird' has some powerful scenes of antic comedy and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a satisfying, fully fashioned novel. In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book....'Wind-Up Bird' often seems so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness, a reluctance on the part of the author to run his manuscript through the typewriter (or computer) one last time."

More about the book

When a young man's marriage breaks up, his subsequent search for identity mirrors that of his country, Japan.

First Line

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie,"which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.