First impressions review: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
Have you ever experienced a painting or piece of music and thought: “I can see the virtuosity that went into creating this, so I kind of get why other people like this. But for me, looking at/listening to this once is more than enough”? That is my feeling about this book – which is really disappointing because based on the description on the back I thought it would be right in my wheelhouse. I was expecting something like a Japanese version of ‘Neverwhere’ or ‘The Master and Margarita’: a magical realism adventure with imagery and characters that are really outside our normal experience. That is not what this book is. I’m still wrapping my head around what it is and how I feel about it. But here goes…
The story is told from the perspective of Toru Okada, a young man who recently quit his job as a legal assistant and is acting as homemaker until he figures out what he actually wants to do with his life. His wife Kumiko was initially supportive of this decision but seems to be getting quietly frustrated, and she is also distressed because their cat has gone missing. Toro helps to look for it, but doesn’t seem that moved…and he remains surprisingly little moved by all the other events of the book, however weird they get: the unsolicited phone sex calls; two sort-of-psychic women named Malta and Creta Kano who get called in to consult on the cat; Creta’s over-sharing about her personal history; Kumiko herself disappearing and then sending a letter saying that she’d been cheating on him but refusing to meet him in person or call on the phone, and so on. Toru does rouse himself somewhat when it comes to finding Kumiko, but he doesn’t do any of the normal things you would do if your spouse went missing and might be being impersonated by someone else, like calling the police or a private detective. He spends a lot of time sitting at the bottom of a dry well, which amazingly does work in the end to effect some kind of spiritual rescue of Kumiko.
Toru starts hanging out in the well due to his interactions with the two most interesting characters in the book: Lieutenant Mamiya and May Kasihara. Like many of the characters in the book, Lieutenant Mamiya’s feelings are dulled. However, he has good reason for it, having been a soldier in Manchuria during the 1940s and experiencing a lot of traumatizing things there, including seeing a man be skinned alive, having his arm run over a tank, and being sent to a Soviet gulag. He was also thrown down a well, within which he came close to an epiphany, but just missed it. May Kasihara is Toru’s neighbor, a slightly off-kilter teenage girl. She is the one who tells him about the dry well behind an abandoned, possibly cursed, house at the end of their shared alleyway; Toru climbs into the well trying to reach that truth that Lieutenant Mamiya missed. I quite like May, if only because she seems to actively make decisions in her life and has reactions to events that feel somewhat relatable. She had been hanging out at home a lot and doing surveys for a wig company after a motorcycle accident that broke her leg and killed her boyfriend. May has compassion for Toru’s situation, and might also have a little bit of a crush on him, but she recognizes that he’s got way too many weird women in his life and seems to sort of take his ennui as a warning. She leaves and takes a job at the wig factory out in the country, though she continues to send “Mr. Windup Bird” letters that never arrive. Some of the stuff she tells him is quite inappropriate…but she’s young, so being a bit edgy while figuring out her own sexuality doesn’t seem out of character. And Toru never really responds, so that is probably the least disturbing sex-related stuff in this book. Basically, if this story had been primarily about either Mamiya or May I probably would have really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it was not.
I have to admit, I have trouble with stories that feature directionless main characters – you can’t really be a protagonist if you aren’t doing stuff to try to shape your own story. And I get bored easily enough that I can’t stick to a simple routine or do nothing for any length of time, so I don’t really relate to that mindset. But it can work: The Dude in ‘The Big Lebowski’ is a lazy man who is swept along by events, but the events are wacky and fun, and he has relatable reactions to the weirdness. People frequently describe ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ as “dreamlike” and I can see where that comes from…but it is kind of a dull dream, for the most part. The first half in particular is really slow, because even though strange things happen Toru barely reacts and none of the odd events seem connected to one another. I felt crushed by the ennui of it all, and while waiting for something interesting to happen had time to start getting annoyed at the way the female characters are written.
Apart from May, who is very chatty about herself in a way that feels real even when her thoughts and feelings are a little odd1, all the other women come off as these mysterious, unknowable creatures no matter how much or how little they have to say. Malta Kano is annoyingly enigmatic. Creta Kano, on the other hand, tells her entire life story to Toru, starting with feeling way too much pain from everything as a child, then feeling nothing at all, then becoming a prostitute, then getting raped and blackmailed into working for a gang because they have a video of the crime, then meeting Toru’s brother-in-law Noboru Wataya who “defiles” her in some undefinable way that isn’t rape (as Malta initially described it)… Neither she nor Toru have any obvious feelings about this, but I was sitting there going: “Why are you telling this complete stranger all this in this deadpan way? Why are you not horrified, confused, or angry about this story, Toru? What is going on?”2 Then the Kanos disappear, and a woman who calls herself Nutmeg becomes a benefactor of Toru and tells a probably-half-made-up life story. She has a son called Cinnamon who doesn’t talk but acts as her assistant. Toru keeps going on about how handsome and well-dressed and good at everything Cinnamon is, to the extent that I began wonder if they were going to end up together by the end of the novel – he certainly gets more detailed description than Kumiko - but no. Cinnamon, like the women, is almost a ghost. His computer does play an important role in getting back in touch with Kumiko, though3.
1.“When people die, it’s so neat…the lump of death. I’m sure there must be something like that. Something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves…Maybe it’s all hard, like toothpaste dried up inside the tube.”
2. Later Toru ends up getting paid a ridiculous amount of money for a woman to lick the weird blue mark that’s appeared on his face, and he compares himself to Creta… And I get why, but at the same time: Giant middle finger to you, buddy! That is NOT the same thing, and you should know that!
3. Although there’s a bit about needing the password to a computer in order to send a message to it…which I don’t think is how that worked even in the ‘80s. But I might be wrong.
Toru and Kumiko’s relationship is at the core of the novel, but it was not particularly compelling. They have a weird argument near the beginning of the book where Kumiko claims that Toru not knowing that she despises a particular color of toilet paper (purely from the fact she never buys it; she’s never mentioned a strong dislike) means that he doesn’t really know her4. It turns out there is in fact a lot more significant things he doesn’t know because she doesn’t tell him! But I can’t tell what he likes about the Kumiko he does know, or vice versa. The main things we glean from his thoughts is that she’s pretty and she’s sad – she had a weird and tragic family life that she was trying to escape by marrying Toru. Her brother does still have an odd hold on her, as the events of the book show. While Toru claims that he and Kumiko built this deeply connected life, we never see much evidence of that. We can guess that she is fairly driven and good at her job from the fact that she makes enough money to support both of them and didn’t want to have a kid (at least yet) because she’d have to quit. But we never get a thought like “I admire my wife’s drive” or “Her job seems to make her happy” from Toru – nor even details of what, specifically, she does for the magazine company. He remembers going to an aquarium and getting weirded out by the jellyfish that she really liked, which just seems to be more evidence of them not being on the same page. Most of the memories we get told about are physical – her body, her scent – and even those are a bit vague, like she could be anyone.
4. Then she apologizes, blaming her moodiness on her period, because of course she does.
The physical focus could have added spice, but this book has some of the most unappealing sex scenes I’ve ever read. It isn’t that anything bad happens (for the ones involving Toru, anyway), they are just weirdly clinical. At first I thought it might be a translation issue, but there are some lovely lyrical descriptions of the cry of the windup bird and the look of an abandoned garden, for instance. Besides the unexplained phone sex lady, Toru has dream sex with Creta Kano twice - which they both remember, so it’s clearly more real than a normal dream - and every time I was just mentally begging for the scene to stop. The same kind of thing applies to his description of his first time with Kumiko. There is certain phrasing, such as “I knew for certain that she had intended that this happen. Her body was soft and completely unresisting” that just makes my skin crawl. That’s not exactly enthusiastic consent, after all, and this – along with Kumiko’s actions later in the book - makes me doubt everything he says about getting to understand Kumiko or what she wants from life. In her letter to him, Kumiko claims that “I was never able to have true sexual pleasure with you…I loved it when you held me in your arms, but…there was some kind of blockage inside me,” which she didn’t feel with other people. I don’t know if Toru is what Kumiko needs in some sense, but I don’t think he’s actually what she wants. Or maybe vice versa?
This book does try to confront the historical guilt of Japan’s actions in China during WWII, which was still somewhat unusual in the 1990s, and I want to give it credit for that. However, the larger-scale themes and the personal-scale ones don’t feel very well connected. One can posit, for instance, that the vague dissatisfaction many people across the world were feeling in the mid-90’s - expressed in grunge music within the US, for example - had something to do with the way that capitalism produces alienation but “there is no alternative” (as Thatcher put it). This could have been heightened in Japan by both the economic crisis of that period and unspoken historical guilt and traumas. But neither the author nor the characters really connect the disaffection and isolation the characters are feeling to any of that. Similarly, as an unemployed man with few ambitions, Toru would have been seen as something shameful, since the idea of husband as provider was (and is) still very strong in Japan. So the book could have said something about alienation arising from patriarchal expectations. But it doesn’t really tackle that either because Toru doesn’t feel any shame, nor does any character other than his loathsome brother-in-law criticize him for breaking from the masculine ideal.
This was probably never the book for me. I don’t generally like ennui-heavy stories, the kind that get gently mocked in the ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ song ‘Sexy French Depression’. But I think I picked this up at the worst possible time: The middle of a pandemic where everyone is stuck inside, and it is hard to go out and have genuine experiences and build human connections. I have been fortunate not to be quarantining alone – I have my husband and my dogs, and that has been very important. But not getting on each other’s nerves or falling into a rut when you are trapped in a smallish space is a challenge. Many of the people in my life are mentally struggling, particularly those who were already prone to anxiety or depression, and I’ve had to play cheerleader a lot to make sure they don’t lapse too far, or that work projects get done, or even that we get to talk about something fun once in a while. And that’s exhausting, because A) I’m an introvert, so I do not feel qualified to be doing this, and B) while that plus a relatively cheery personality means I’m more OK with this situation than most, that doesn’t mean I’m totally fine either. Fiction has been a kind of therapy for me because it means I get to experience adventures in different times and places and sink into someone else’s emotions for a while, without having any responsibility to do something about them. So reading 607 pages about someone who is a virtual shut-in with no direction in life and no friends, and who doesn’t have strong emotional reactions to anything, including long, weird, trauma-filled stories from other people who also struggle to feel things, was agonizing!
I had to stop half-way through this book for almost a month because it was not having a good effect on my mental state. I started trying to read something else, but the infectious ennui had set in to such an extent that I got stuck on three more books before I finally hit on ‘The House in the Cerulean Sea’. While I won’t argue that is high literature – it isn’t meant to be – it is everything ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ is not: Whimsical, optimistic, funny, and largely about the importance of human connection and self-expression. That fixed my head enough that I was able to finish two of the other books (‘Wild Seed’ and ‘Baudolino’) and then dive back into this one. The second half, and particularly the last hundred pages, were much easier to get through, as Nutmeg and Cinnamon were more interesting to me than the Kano sisters, we got more of Mamiya and May Kasihara’s stories, and the well and the dreams actually lead to a conclusion.
Overall Recommendation: I’d heard that surrealism is either the draw or the barrier when it comes to Murakami’s writing. I don’t think that’s the case, at least with this book, though if you are big fan of Kafka or Kurt Vonnegut that’s probably a good start. I think the real key might be the extent to which you can identify with a character like Toru who is isolated and drifting and who goes about trying to find meaning in an extremely languid, passive way. If that’s not the case, or if you dislike female characters who sound like a speculation about how women work by a man who doesn’t actually listen to them5, you might struggle with this narrative. Either way…perhaps wait until after the pandemic is over to read this one, as involuntary isolation from other people may heighten the second-hand alienation.
5. I’ll be generous and say this is an issue with the narrator, not necessarily the author. But still – it was a problem for me.
