The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

I’ve been meaning to actually read one of Murakami’s novels for years, since I read his After the Quake short stories some time ago. But it never really felt like a priority until a few weeks ago, I felt like reading something more contemporary and he seemed ideal. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his breakthrough novel, was the one I found first. I found Norwegian Wood a little later and get the impression it may be a better place to start with him, but it was too late. And I will get to Norwegian Wood next anyway – for while I can’t say I think Murakami is the genius he’s often made out to be, nor that I truly loved this book, there’s something about his writing voice that is incredibly compelling and makes him eminently readable. That’s a rare and intersting thing.

That said, the thing that struck me most about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is that it’s really not worlds away from the kind of thing you find in light novels. The kind that get adapted into anime series and get lots of fanservice-heavy merchandise. In fact, early on in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was strongly reminded of Bakemonogatari. Sound far-fetched? I don’t think it is.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle centres on a very normal everyman character named Okada. When first his cat and then his wife go missing, he begins to meet a whole lot of girls, many of whom have special powers or hidden oddities about them. There’s the mysterious and standoffish clairvoyant. There’s the clairvoyant’s little sister, a beauty with an odd story about being born in extreme pain until she tried to kill herself, whereupon she could feel nothing. Then there’s the precocious loli, who at sixteen is too young for Okada but teasingly flirtatious. Then an older woman with a lot of money and the means to advance Okada’s needs. And of course, quite passively, Okada begins to develop strange powers of his own, powers that actually seem to transcend those of the women around him and make him necessary to them. Trust me when I say that this is all very typical stuff for light novels. There’s a lot of the same set-up in To Aru as well.

But of course much happens here that is not the territory of such light entertainment. There are long and detailed passages about Japanese military actions in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which include quite brutal violence. There is a lot of sexually explicit description and erotic writing, although invariably presented rather clinically. There is much musing about metaphysical matters, the meaning of life, how events in childhood deeply affect a person’s story, and discussion about people’s place in one another’s existences. And of course, Okada being in his thirties there is a different outlook from teenaged protagonists, a far greater sense of impotence and ennui.

I resent the book a little. As seems to be the trend for Murakami books, very little happens. The ending is contrived and could have happened at any point previously, meaning there’s not really any sense of true progression. Though I’m reading in translation, there’s also the fact that we get so many voices in this book, so many storytellers, yet except for the easy imitation of teenage speech given to Kasahara Mei, they all express themselves in the same, slightly off-kilter way, a prim and matter-of-fact style given to metaphysical tangents.

Yet the fact is that Murakami definitely has the quality a writer should prize most highly, which is readability. He can have his character meander and think trite philosophical thoughts at great length, and he can have next to nothing happen for chapters on end, yet I still wanted to go back to the story. Only in the old man’s stories about his army life did I get bored, and yet they might be the part that endures most clearly in my mind. Okada is not a blank slate, nor is he incredibly ordinary, but he is extremely easy to identify with and even like. That’s a rare gift, and I suspect what makes Murakami the success that he is. Okada is not like me, his interests are not like mine and nor is his life, and he does a whole lot of things that I would never do. Yet he never seems strange or hard to understand. He is always sympathetic, even when psychotically violent or completely irrational.

Very little happens in the book, and much of what does happen defies explanation. A lot is purposely vague, and the fact is that making something random seem significant by having something that parallels it popping up in a flashback is just smoke and mirrors. I dislike open-ended meanings and bizarre supernatural events that can be explained away by saying ‘oh, this is magical realism’. And yet I still liked the book, and its writer. I think that is Murakami’s trump card, his own magic power. I don’t think he needs to write a good story to write well.

So I will at the very least read another Murakami book. I don’t think I will call myself a fan, but I certainly don’t regret the time I gave to this book, or think I should be cautious with giving my time to another. Murakami has an undeniable gift, of making his reader feel they’re very like the character narrating the book even if he is thinking or doing the strangest things, and I find that undeniably fascinating.